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Constitution is all the characteristics and tendencies, both somatic and psychic, that an individual brings into life at the time of birth. It is those parts of the individual that are innate, inherited, or genetically determined. Classically, it stands in opposition to all that is accidental, things acquired in the course of life. Certain doctrinal trends in the field of psycho-pathology rely on the notion of constitution in order to define personality types that are predisposed to specific psychiatric affections, particularly psychosis.

The notion of a constitutional factor is Freud's, and he elaborated the theory in two distinct periods. Before 1905, he conflated it with hereditary disposition, referring to a general and universal condition in the pathogenic determinism of all affections, particularly neurotic affections. In the etiology of these affections, the hereditary disposition is associated with specific causes of a sexual nature in accordance with the rules of a complemental series. Thus, "the same specific causes acting on a healthy individual produce no manifest pathological effect, whereas in a predisposed person their action causes the neurosis to come to light, whose development will be proportionate in intensity and extent to the degree of the hereditary precondition" (1896a, p. 147).

After 1905, the Freudian conception of constitution became inseparable from the sexual doctrine resulting from his identification of infantile sexuality in all human beings. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), Freud traces the origin of infantile sexuality to component instincts that are perverse because they seek satisfaction independently of each other and thus define, for all individuals, a "polymorphously perverse disposition" (1905d, p. 191). "The conclusion now presents itself to us that there is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but that it is something innate in everyone, though as a disposition it may vary in its intensity and may be increased by the influences of actual life" (1905d, p. 171). Sexual constitution thus came to replace general hereditary disposition.

In lecture twenty-three of Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916-17a), entitled "The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms," Freud enriched the notion of sexual constitution with that of fixation of the libido. These fixations represent the individual's constitutional past toward which the libido regresses as a result of the repression imposed on it by the neurosis. According to Freud, these fixations are partly the traces of the phylogenetic heritage.

CLAUDE SMADJA

See also: Bisexuality; Character; Heredity of acquired characters; "Heredity and the Etiology of the Neuroses"; Instinct; Intergenerational; Phylogenesis; Prehistory; Primal fantasies; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.