Is the complex sexual or not? (It goes without saying that we must understand sexuality in its proper sense of psychosexuality.) To this question psychoanalysis gives the invariable answer: Resistance always springs from a peculiar sexual development. The latter leads in the well-known manner to conflict, i.e. to the complex. Every case of schizophrenia which has so far been analysed confirms this. It can therefore claim at least to be a working hypothesis, and one to be followed up. In the present state of our knowledge, it is therefore not easy to see why Bleuler only allows to sexuality a quasi-determining influence on the phenomena of negativism; for psychoanalysis demonstrates that the cause of negativism is resistance; and that with schizophrenia, as with all other neuroses, this arises from the peculiar sexual development.
It can scarcely be doubted to-day that schizophrenia, with its preponderance of the mechanisms of introversion, possesses the same mechanism as any other "psychoneurosis." In my opinion, at any rate, its peculiar symptoms (apart from the clinical and anatomical standpoints) are only to be studied by psychoanalysis, i.e. when the investigation is mainly directed to the genetic impetus. I have, therefore, endeavoured to indicate how Bleuler's hypothesis stands in the light of the theory of complexes; I feel myself bound to emphasise the complex-theory in this relation, and am not disposed to surrender this conception, which is as illuminating as it was difficult to evolve.
