for biscuits, followed by keen remorse, to lapses into the habit of masturbation.  Her fits of struggling and rolling on the ground are precisely like the outbursts of futile desire which occasionally occur to young abstinent men and women in health and strength.  The absorption in thoughts about meals and in literary descriptions of meals is clearly analogous to the abstinent man’s absorption in wanton thoughts and erotic books.  Finally, Nadia’s conviction that she is a heroine corresponds exactly to the attitude of self-righteousness which often marks the sexually abstinent.

If we turn to Freud’s penetrating and suggestive study of the problem of sexual abstinence in relation to “civilized” sexual morality, we find that, though he makes no reference to the analogy with abstinence from food, his words would for the most part have an equal application to both cases.  “The task of subduing so powerful an instinct as the sexual impulse, otherwise than by giving it satisfaction,” he writes, “is one which may employ the whole strength of a man.  Subjugation through sublimation, by guiding the sexual forces into higher civilizational paths, may succeed with a minority, and even with these only for a time, least easily during the years of ardent youthful energy.  Most others become neurotic or otherwise come to grief.  Experience shows that the majority of people constituting our society are constitutionally unequal to the task of abstinence.  We say, indeed, that the struggle with this powerful impulse and the emphasis the struggle involves on the ethical and aesthetic forces in the soul’s life ‘steels’ the character, and for a few favorably organized natures this is true; it must also be acknowledged that the differentiation of individual character so marked in our time only becomes possible through sexual limitations.  But in by far the majority of cases the struggle with sensuality uses up the available energy of character, and this at the very time when the young man needs all his strength in order to win his place in the world."[97]

When we have put the problem on this negative basis of abstinence it is difficult to see how we can dispute the justice of Freud’s conclusions.  They hold good equally for abstinence from food and abstinence from sexual love.  When we have placed the problem on a more positive basis, and are able to invoke the more active and fruitful motives of asceticism and chastity this unfortunate fight against a natural impulse is abolished.  If chastity is an ideal of the harmonious play of all the organic impulses of the soul and body, if asceticism, properly understood, is the athletic striving for a worthy object which causes, for the time, an indifference to the gratification of sexual impulses, we are on wholesome and natural ground, and there is no waste of energy in fruitless striving for a negative end, whether imposed artificially from without, as it usually is, or voluntarily chosen by the individual himself.