ABSTRACT
I have received several thoughtful questions since the last lecture, and if you don't begrudge the time, I think I should answer at least five or six of them. This time the questions remained very close to the problems which have been under discussion. In answering them, on the other hand, I become more aware of the shortcomings of my presentations than you probably have while listening to me. In presenting this rather difficult material to you, and in attempting to create an overall picture in your mind, I have, when I move from one step to the next, to make my choice between various possible approaches. In particular we can approach the presentation of the psychoanalytic theory from three sides. We can do what I have been trying to do till now—that is, to give you a structural picture to begin with. Or I could really have chosen a dynamic presentation from the very beginning—namely, I could have confined myself more to an evaluation of the forces which act against each other or with each other. I could even have presented this to you from an economic point of view, quantitatively, so that the personality and behaviour can be regarded as an out52come of the relative strengths of forces which fight It out on the battleground of the ego of the personality. I do vary my approach between these possibilities, but the shortness of time does not give me sufficient opportunity to do so. In presenting to you the picture of sexual development in the human being last time, for instance, I have had to leave the economic point of view for the next lecture. By the economic point of view I mean the idea that what is active in this development of human sexual life is a force, the energy hidden in the sexual instinct, the energy for which we have a particular name in psychoanalysis—libido—and we mean also that whatever happens in the sequence of development, we can view as the fate of the libido. I will try to consider a little of that for you next time.
