a-general-introduction-to-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud

infantile sexuality, in its abandoned component-impulses, its childish objects
which have been given up. The libido again returns to them. The significance
of this period of childhood is a double one; on the one hand, the instinctive
tendencies which were congenital in the child first showed themselves at this
time; secondly, at the same time, environmental influences and chance
experiences were first awakening his other instincts. I believe our right to
establish this bipartite division cannot be questioned. The assertion that the
innate disposition plays a part is hardly open to criticism, but analytic
experience actually makes it necessary for us to assume that purely accidental
experiences of childhood are capable of leaving fixations of the libido. I do not
see any theoretical difficulties here. Congenital tendencies undoubtedly
represent the after-effects of the experiences of an earlier ancestry; they
must also have once been acquired; without such acquired characters there
could be no heredity. And is it conceivable that the inheritance of such
acquired characters comes to a standstill in the very generation that we have
under observation? The significance of infantile experience, however, should
not, as is so often done, be completely ignored as compared with ancestral
experiences or those of our adult years; on the contrary, they should meet
with an especial appreciation. They have such important results because they
occur in the period of uncompleted development, and because of this very
fact are in a position to cause a traumatic effect. The researches on the
mechanics of development by Roux and others have shown us that a needle
prick into an embryonic cell mass which is undergoing division results in most
serious developmental disturbances. The same injury to a larva or a
completed animal can be borne without injury.
The libido fixation of adults, which we have referred to as representative of
the constitutional factor in the etiological comparison of the neuroses, can be
thought of, so far as we are concerned, as divisible into two separate factors,
the inherited disposition and the tendency acquired in early childhood. We
know that a schematic representation is most acceptable to the student. Let
us combine these relations as follows:
Cause of the == Disposition as + accidental
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