CHAPTER 5
LECTURE XXXIII
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN The whole time that I have been preparing the lectures I am giving you, I have been struggling with an internal difficulty. I feel, as one might say, uncertain of the terms of my licence. It is quite true that in the course of fifteen years' work, psycho-analysis has altered and grown; but in spite of that, an introduction topsycho-analysis might be left unchanged and unexpanded. It is always at the back of my mind is no raison d'être for these lectures. For analysts I say too little andnothing at all that is new, while to you I say too much and relate things which you are not ina position to understand and which are not for your ears. I have looked about forexcuses, and have triedto justify each of my lectures on different grounds. The first, the one about the theory ofdreams, was intendedto put you back at once into the atmosphere of analysis, and to show you how durable ourhypotheses haveproved themselves to be. I was tempted to give the second, which traced the connectionbetween dreams and theso-called occult, by the opportunity it afforded of saying something about a field of researchin which at thepresent time prejudiced expectation is struggling against passionate opposition; and Iallowed myself to hopethat you would not refuse me your company on this expedition, but would follow me with ajudgment educatedto tolerance by example of psycho-analysis. The third lecture, which dealt with theanatomy of the personality,certainly made the severest demands upon you, so strange was its subject-matter; but itwas quite impossiblefor me to withhold from you this first contribution to ego-psychology, and, if wehad been in possessionof the material fifteen years ago, I should have had to mention it then. Finally,the last lecture, whichyou have probably followed only with the greatest difficulty, contained some necessaryemendations and newattempts at the solution of the most important problems; and my introduction would have beenpositively misleadingif I had kept silent about them. You see how it is that when one tries to excuseoneself, it comes outin the end that everything was inevitable, that everything was pre-ordained. I submit to fate;and I beg that youwill do the same.
Nor should today's lecture find a place in an introduction; but it may serve to give you an example of the detailed work of analysis, and there are two things I can add in its favour. It contains nothing but observed facts, with hardly any speculative additions and it is concerned with a theme which claims yourattention almost more than any other. Throughout the ages the problem of woman has puzzled people of every kind—Heads in hieroglyphic caps, Headsin turbans, and black bonnets, Heads bewigged and thousand other Poor and sweating heads of humans.
You too will have pondered over this question in so far as you are men; from the women among you that is not to be expected, for you are the riddle yourselves. Male or female is the first differentiation that you make when you meet another human being, and you are used to making that distinction with absolute certainty. Anatomical science shares your certainty in one point, but not much more. Male is the male sexual secretion, the spermatozoon,and its carrier; female is the egg, and the organism that contains it. In each sex,organs have been formed which exclusively subserve the sexual functions; they have probably been developed from the same basis into two different formations. In both sexes, moreover, the other organs, the shape ofthe body and the tissues are influenced by sex (the so-called secondary sexual characters), but this influence is irregular and varying in degree. And then science tells you something that runs counter to your expectations; and is probably calculated to confuse your feelings. It points out to you that parts of the male sexual apparatus are also to be found in the body of the female, although in a rudimentary condition and vice versa. Science sees in this phenomenon an indication of bi-sexuality,as though the individual were neither man nor woman, but both at the same time, only rather more the one than the other. It then expects you to make yourselves familiar with the idea that the proportions in which the masculine and the femnine mingle in an individual are subject to quite extraordinary variations. And even though,apart from very rare cases, only one kind of sexual producova or seminal cells—is present in any one individual, you will go wrong if you take this factor as being of decisive importance, and you must conclude that what constitutes masculinityor femininity is an unknown element which it is beyond