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INTRODUCTION TO TRANSLATION

The somewhat famous “Three Essays” which Dr. Brill is
here bringing to the attention of an English-reading public,
occupy—brief as they are—an important position among the
achievements of their author, a great investigator and pioneer in
an important line. It is not claimed that the facts here gathered
are altogether new. The subject of the sexual instinct and its
aberrations has long been before the scientific world and the
names of many effective toilers in this vast field are known to
every student. When one passes beyond the strict domains of
science and considers what is reported of the sexual life in folk-
lore and art-lore and the history of primitive culture and in
romance, the sources of information are immense. Freud has
made considerable additions to this stock of knowledge, but he
has done also something of far greater consequence than this.
He has worked out, with incredible penetration, the part which
this instinct plays in every phase of human life and in the devel-
opment of human character, and has been able to establish on a
firm footing the remarkable thesis that psychoneurotic illnesses
never occur with a perfectly normal sexual life. Other sorts of
emotions contribute to the result, but some abnormality of the
sexual life is always present, as the cause of especially insistent
emotions and repressions.

The instincts with which every child is born furnish desires or
cravings which must be dealt with in some fashion. They may
be refined (“sublimated”), so far as is necessary and desirable,
into energies of other sorts—as happens readily with the play-
instinct—or they may remain as the source of perversions and
inversions, and of cravings of new sorts substituted for those
of the more primitive kinds under the pressure of a conventional

viii

civilization. The symptoms of the functional psychoneuroses
represent, after a fashion, one of these inadequate attempts to
find a substitute for the imperative cravings born of the sexual
instincts, and their form often depends, in part at least, on the
peculiarities of the sexual life in infancy and early childhood.
It is Freud’s service to have investigated this inadequately chron-
icled period of existence with extraordinary acumen. In so doing
he made it plain that the “perversions” and “inversions” which
reappear later under such striking shapes, belong to the normal
sexual life of the young child and are seen, in veiled forms, in
almost every case of nervous illness.

It cannot too often be repeated that these discoveries represent
no fanciful deductions, but are the outcome of rigidly careful
observations which any one who will sufficiently prepare himself
can verify. Critics fret over the amount of “sexuality” that
Freud finds evidence of in the histories of his patients, and assume
that he puts it there. But such criticisms are evidences of mis-
understandings and proofs of ignorance.

Freud had learned that the amnesias of hypnosis and of hysteria
were not absolute but relative and that in covering the lost memo-
ries, much more, of unexpected sort, was often found. Others,
too, had gone as far as this, and stopped. But this investigator
determined that nothing but the absolute impossibility of going
further should make him cease from urging his patients into an
inexorable scrutiny of the unconscious regions of their memories
and thoughts, such as never had been made before. Every species
of forgetfulness, even the forgetfulness of childhood’s years, was
made to yield its hidden stores of knowledge; dreams, even though
apparently absurd, were found to be interpreters of a varied class
of thoughts, active, although repressed as out of harmony with
the selected life of consciousness; layer after layer, new sets of
motives underlying motives were laid bare, and each patient’s
interest was strongly enlisted in the task of learning to know
himself in order more truly and wisely to “sublimate” himself.

ix

Gradually other workers joined patiently in this laborious under-
taking, which now stands, for those who have taken pains to com-
prehend it, as by far the most important movement in psycho-
pathology.

It must, however, be recognized that these essays, of which Dr.
Brill has given a translation that cannot but be timely, concerns
a subject which is not only important but unpopular. Few physi-
cians read the works of v. Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld,
Moll, and others of like sort. The remarkable volumes of Have-
lock Ellis were refused publication in his native England. The
sentiments which inspired this hostile attitude towards the study
of the sexual life are still active, though growing steadily less
common. One may easily believe that if the facts which Freud’s
truth-seeking researches forced him to recognize and to publish
had not been of an unpopular sort, his rich and abundant contri-
butions to observational psychology, to the significance of dreams,
to the etiology and therapeutics of the psychoneuroses, to the
interpretation of mythology, would have won for him, by uni-
versal acclaim, the same recognition among all physicians that
he has received from a rapidly increasing band of followers and
colleagues.

May Dr. Brill’s translation help toward this end.
There are two further points on which some comments should
be made. The first is this, that those who conscientiously desire
to learn all that they can from Freud’s remarkable contributions
should not be content to read any one of them alone. His various
publications, such as “The Selected Papers on Hysteria and
Other Psychoneuroses,”¹⁾ “The Interpretation of Dreams,” “The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” “Wit and its Relation to
the Unconscious,”²⁾ the analysis of the case of the little boy

¹⁾Translated by A. A. Brill, Nervous and Mental Disease, Monograph
Series, No. 4.

²⁾Translations of these books in preparation.

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INTRODUCTION TO TRANSLATION

called Hans, the study of Leonardo da Vinci, and the various
short essays in the two Sammlungen kleiner Schriften, not only
all hang together, but supplement each other to a remarkable
extent. Unless a course of study such as this is undertaken many
critics may think various statements and inferences in this volume
to be far fetched or find them too obscure for comprehension.

The other point is the following: One frequently hears the
psychoanalytic method referred to as if it was customary for
those practicing it to exploit the sexual experiences of their
patients and nothing more, and the insistence on the details of
the sexual life, presented in this book, is likely to emphasize that
notion. But the fact is, as every thoughtful inquirer is aware,
that the whole progress of civilization, whether in the individual
or the race, consists largely in a “sublimation” of infantile in-
stincts, and especially certain portions of the sexual instinct, to
other ends than those which they seemed designed to serve. Art
and poetry are fed on this fuel and the evolution of character
and mental force is largely of the same origin. All the forms
which this sublimation, or the abortive attempts at sublimation,
may take in any given case, should come out in the course of a
thorough psychoanalysis. It is not the sexual life alone, but every
interest and every motive, that must be inquired into by the physi-
cian who is seeking to obtain all the data about the patient, neces-
sary for his reëducation and his cure. But all the thoughts and
emotions and desires and motives which appear in the man or
woman of adult years were once crudely represented in the
obscure instincts of the infant, and among these instincts those
which were concerned directly or indirectly with the sexual emo-
tions, in a wide sense, are certain to be found in every case to
have been the most important for the end-result.

JAMES J. PUTNAM.

BOSTON, August 23, 1910.