16 THREE ESSAYS ON SEXUALITY I. THE SEXUAL ABERRATIONS activities are themselves accompanied by pleasure, and on the other hand they intensify the excitation, which should persist actual genitals and it helps to turn activities connected with until the final sexual aim is attained. Moreover, the kiss, one ther parts of the body into sexual aims. 1 The significance of the factor of sexual overvaluation can be of the lips of the two people concerned, is held in high sexua best studied in men, for their erotic life alone has become acces- sible to research. That of women--partly owing to the stunting ones), in spite of the fact that the parts of the body involved do effect of civilized conditions and partly owing to their conven- not form part of the sexual apparatus but constitute the tional secretiveness and insincerity--is still veiled in an im entrance to the digestive tract. Here, then, are factors which provide a point of contact between the perversions and normal sexual life and which can al so serve as a basis for their classifica tion. Perversions are sexual activities which either(a)extend, in ded as a p rsion if the lips(o an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are OF THE LIPS 2) of one person are brought i designed for sexual union, or(b)linger over the intermediate MOUTH contact with the genitals of another, but relations to the sexual object which should normally be not if the mucous membranes of the lips traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim. of both of them come together. This exception is the point of contact with what is normal. Those who condemn the other practices(which have no doubt been common among mankind (A)ANATOMICAL EXTENSIONS from primaeval times) as being perversions, are giving way to ovERVaLUATIon It is only in the rarest instances that the n unmistakable feeling of disgust, which protects them from OF THE SEXUAL psychical valuation that is set on the sexu accepting sexual aims of the kind. The limits of such disgust are, object, as being the goal of the sexual in however, often purely conventional: a man who will kiss a pretty stinct, stops short at its genitals. The apprecia- girl's lips passionately, may perhaps be disgusted at the idea of tion extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same over the editions earlier than 1920 this paragraph ended with the becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated (that is, his powers aving for stimulation".'The first two of judgement are weakened) by the mental achievements and of the footnote which follows were added in 1915, before which date it perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter's ad begun with the sentence: 'Further consideration leads me to con judgements with credulity. Thus the credulity of love becomes ude that I. Bloch has over-estimated the theoretical importance of the factor of craving for stimulation The whole footnote and the paragraph an important, if not the most fundamental, source of authority in the text above were recast in their present form in 1920: It must This sexual overvaluation is something that cannot be easily pointed out, however, that sexual overvaluation is not developed in the reconciled with a restriction of the sexual aim to union of the case of every mechanism of object-choice. We shall become acquainted and more direct explanation of the sexual ro elp recallin assumed by the other parts of the body. The factor of 'craving for of the subject's libido to the figure of the hypnotist, through the medit seem to me to deserve such an important pla The various channels along which the libido passes are related to each collateral fow into acce the hypnotist was discussed by Freud much later, in Chay Group Psychology(1921c). See also 1905b, S.E., 7, 294 ff.] lal overvaluation towards men; but they scarcely ever fail to do so towards their own children