known to every psychiatrist in which complicated symptoms of delusions emerge with relative great suddenness, show clearly that there must be unconscious psychic development and preparation, for we cannot regard them as having been just suddenly formed when they entered consciousness.
The Sexual Terminology
I feel myself justified in making this digression concerning the unconscious. I have done it to point out that, with regard to shifting of the manifestations of the libido, we have to deal not only with the conscious, but also with another factor, the unconscious, whither the libido sometimes disappears. We have not yet followed up the discussion of the further consequences which result from the adoption of the libido-theory.
Freud has taught us, and we see it in the daily practice of psychoanalysis, that in earlier childhood, instead of the normal later sexuality, we find many tendencies which in later life are called perversions. We have to admit that Freud has the right to give to these tendencies a sexual terminology. Through the introduction of the conception of the libido, we see that in adults those elementary components which seemed to be the origin and the source of normal sexuality, lose their importance, and are reduced to mere potentialities. The effective power, their life force, is to be found in the libido. Without libido these components mean nothing. We saw that Freud gives to the conception of libido an undoubted sexual definition, somewhat in the sense of sexual desire. The general view is, that libido in this sense only comes into being at the age of puberty. How are we then to explain the fact that in Freud's view a child has a polymorphic-perverse sexuality, and that therefore, in children, the libido brings into action not only one, but several possibilities? If the libido, in Freud's sense, begins its existence at puberty, it could not be held accountable for earlier infantile perversions. In that case, we should have to regard these infantile perversions as "faculties of the mind," in the sense of the theory of components. Apart from the hopeless theoretical confusion which would thus arise, we must not multiply explanatory principles in accordance with the philosophical axiom: "principia praeter necessitatem non sunt multiplicanda."
