Repression.—­Another issue results if in the course of development certain powerful components experience a repression—­which we must carefully note is not a suspension.  The excitations in question are produced as usual but are prevented from attaining their aim by psychic hindrances, and are driven off into many other paths until they express themselves in a symptom.  The result can be an almost normal sexual life—­usually a limited one—­but supplemented by psychoneurotic disease.  It is these cases that become so familiar to us through the psychoanalytic investigation of neurotics.  The sexual life of such persons begins like that of perverts, a considerable part of their childhood is filled up with perverse sexual activity which occasionally extends far beyond the period of maturity, but owing to inner reasons a repressive change then results—­usually before puberty, but now and then even much later—­and from this point on without any extinction of the old feelings there appears a neurosis instead of a perversion.  One may recall here the saying, “Junge Hure, alte Betschwester,”—­only here youth has turned out to be much too short.  The relieving of the perversion by the neurosis in the life of the same person, as well as the above mentioned distribution of perversion and hysteria in different persons of the same family, must be placed side by side with the fact that the neurosis is the negative of the perversion.

Sublimation.—­The third issue in abnormal constitutional dispositions is made possible by the process of “sublimation,” through which the powerful excitations from individual sources of sexuality are discharged and utilized in other spheres, so that a considerable increase of psychic capacity results from an, in itself dangerous, predisposition.  This forms one the sources of artistic activity, and, according as such sublimation is complete or incomplete, the analysis of the character of highly gifted, especially of artistically disposed persons, will show any proportionate, blending between productive ability, perversion, and neurosis.  A sub-species of sublimation is the suppression through reaction-formation, which, as we have found, begins even in the latency period of infancy, only to continue throughout life in favorable cases.  What we call the character of a person is built up to a great extent from the material of sexual excitations; it is composed of impulses fixed since infancy and won through sublimation, and of such constructions as are destined to suppress effectually those perverse feelings which are recognized as useless.  The general perverse sexual disposition of childhood can therefore be esteemed as a source of a number of our virtues, insofar as it incites their creation through the formation of reactions.[14]