ABSTRACT
The development of the mental forms of activity in the individual consists, as S. Freud has shown, in the resolution of the originally prevailing pleasure-principle, and the repression mechanism peculiar to it, by the adjustment to reality, by the testing of reality that is based on judgment. In general the development of the reality-sense is represented by a succession of repressions, to which mankind was compelled, not through spontaneous "strivings towards development," but through necessity, through adjustment to a demanded renunciation. It is very well thinkable that with the regression of the sexual hunger to earlier stages of development the level of the reality-sense that was dominant at the time of fixation also becomes renascent in the mechanisms of the symptom-formation. Sexuality thus remains throughout life more subjected to the pleasure-principle, whereas the ego has immediately to experience the bitterest disappointment after every disregarding of reality.
