Breuer dropped the work, and after an interval Freud went on alone.  He was resolved to know the truth, and to tell what he saw.  When he reported to the world that out of all his hundreds of patients, he had been unable, after the most careful analysis, to find one whose illness did not grow from some lack of adjustment of the sex-life, he was met by a storm of protest from all quarters.  No amount of evidence seemed to make any difference.  People were determined that no such libel should be heaped on human nature.  Sex-urge was not respectable and nervous people were to be respected.

Despite public disapproval, the scorn of other scientists, and the resistance of his own inner prejudices, Freud kept on.  He was forced to acknowledge the validity of the facts which invariably presented themselves to view.  Like Luther under equal duress, he cried:  “Here I stand.  I can do no other.”

=Freudian Principles.= Gradually, as he worked, he gathered together a number of outstanding facts about man’s mental life and about the psycho-neuroses.  These facts he formulated into certain principles, which may be summed up in the following way.

1 There is no chance in mental life; every mental phenomenon—­hence every nervous phenomenon—­has a cause and meaning.

2 Infantile mental life is of tremendous importance in the direction of adult processes.

3 Much of what is called forgetting is rather a repression into the subconscious, of impulses which were painful to the personality as a whole.

4 Mental processes are dynamic, insisting on discharge, either in reality or in phantasy.

5 An emotion may become detached from the idea to which it belongs and be displaced on other ideas.

6 Sex-interests dominate much of the mental life where their influence is unrecognized.  The disturbance in a psycho-neurosis is always in this domain of sex-life.  “In a normal sexual life, no neurosis.”  If a shock is the precipitating cause of the trouble, it is only because the ground was already prepared by the sex-disturbance.

Freud was perhaps unfortunate in his choice of the word “sex,” which has so many evil connotations; but as he found no other word to cover the field, he chose the old one and stretched its meaning to include all the psychic and physical phenomena which spring directly and indirectly from the great processes of reproduction and parental care, and which ultimately include all and more than our word “love."[33]

[Footnote 33:  Freud and his followers have always said that they saw no theoretical reason why any other repressed instinct should not form the basis of a neurosis, but that, as a matter of fact, they never had found this to be the case, probably because no other instinct comes into such bitter and persistent conflict with the dictates of society.  Now, however, the Great War seems to have changed conditions.  Under the strain and danger of life at the front there