l, Moffatt, Yard & Co., New York.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Although the author is fully aware of the gaps and obscurities contained
in this small volume, he has, nevertheless, resisted a temptation to add
to it the results obtained from the investigations of the last five
years, fearing that thus its unified and documentary character would be
destroyed. He accordingly reproduces the original text with but slight
modifications, contenting himself with the addition of a few footnotes.
For the rest, it is his ardent wish that this book may speedily become
antiquated--to the end that the new material brought forward in it may
be universally accepted, while the shortcomings it displays may give
place to juster views.

VIENNA, December, 1909.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

After watching for ten years the reception accorded to this book and the
effect it has produced, I wish to provide the third edition of it with
some prefatory remarks dealing with the misunderstandings of the book
and the demands, insusceptible of fulfillment, made against it. Let me
emphasize in the first place that whatever is here presented is derived
entirely from every-day medical experience which is to be made more
profound and scientifically important through the results of
psychoanalytic investigation. The "Three Contributions to the Theory of
Sex" can contain nothing except what psychoanalysis obliges them to
accept or what it succeeds in corroborating. It is therefore excluded
that they should ever be developed into a "theory of sex," and it is
also quite intelligible that they will assume no attitude at all towards
some important problems of the sexual life. This should not however give
the impression that these omitted chapters of the great theme were
unfamiliar to the author, or that they were neglected by him as
something of secondary importance.

The dependence of this work on the psychoanalytic experiences which have
determined the writing of it, shows itself not only in the selection but
also in the arrangement of the material. A certain succession of stages
was observed, the occasional factors are rendered prominent, the
constitutional ones are left in the background, and the ontogenetic
development receives greater consideration than the phylogenetic. For
the occasional factors play the principal role in analysis, and are
almost completely worked up in it, while the constitutional factors onl