ABSTRACT
Ahuge burden of surgical responsibilities and the exhaustion of wartime made it extremely difficult for Karl Abraham to carry out his scientific work. On 30 January 1915 he wrote to S. Freud that he was working on a short piece about the relationship between hunger and libido. This was probably in preparation for the writing of his "The first pregenital stage of the libido", which was published in 1916. It described the earliest signs of childhood sexuality. Abraham's article tied in with the 1915 edition of the Three Essays, which Freud had extended with a piece about early childhood sexuality. Abraham's article was about these manifestations of early childhood sexuality, but in adults and using case histories to illustrate his points. Abraham regarded premature ejaculation as a phenomenon whose cause was mental, the male counterpart to female frigidity. Ejaculation praecox mainly resembled the emptying of the bladder in early childhood, before potty training.
