ABSTRACT
I have a series of observations on neurotics with whom social advancement of the family, at a time when the patients were young children, chiefly in the latency period, proved a most significant ætiological factor. Three of the cases were men suffering from sexual impotence; another was that of a woman with tic convulsif. Two of the impotent cases happened to be cousins, whose parents became wealthy and ‘refined’—both at the same time, viz. when the children were seven to nine years old. All three impotence cases had gone through an infantile period of ‘polymorphous perverse’ sexuality of more than ordinary intensity and variety. There had in fact been nothing in the way of control or conventional restraint during this stage. At the age noted they came to live under refined conditions to which they were entirely unaccustomed, and to a large extent had to exchange a rustic environment for the social conditions of town and city life. They lost by this exchange their former composure and self-confidence; the more so that their previous lack of restraint necessitated a specially vigorous reaction-formation, if they were to conform even partly to the ego-ideal standards of the new and more refined milieu. It is in no way surprising that this wave of repression involved in a very marked degree their sexual aggressiveness and genital capacity.
