1914

I do not know how the case could be better stated, but perhaps I may add a few remarks. It is undoubtedly nothing else but the customary prudishness and their own bad conscience over sexual matters that causes adults to adopt this attitude of ‘mystery-making’ in front of children; but possibly a part is also played by a piece of theoretical ignorance on their part, which we can counteract by giving the adults some enlightenment. It is commonly believed that the sexual instinct is absent in children and only begins to emerge in them at puberty when the sexual organs mature. This is a gross error, equally serious in its effects both on knowledge and on practice; and it is so easily corrected by observation that one wonders how it could ever have been made. As a matter of fact, the new-born baby brings sexuality with it into the world, certain sexual sensations accompany its development as a suckling and during early childhood, and only very few children would seem to escape sexual activities and sensations before puberty. Anyone who would like to find a detailed exposition of these statements can do so in my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, to which I have referred above. There he will learn that the organs of reproduction proper are not the only parts of the body which provide sexual sensations of pleasure, and that nature has even so ordered matters that actual stimulations of the genitals are unavoidable during early childhood. This period of life, during which a certain quota of what is undoubtedly sexual pleasure is produced by the excitation of various parts of the skin (erotogenic zones), by the activity of certain biological instincts and as an accompanying excitation in many affective states, is called the period of auto-erotism, to use a term introduced by Havelock Ellis. All that puberty does is to give the genitals primacy among all the other zones and sources which produce pleasure, and thus to force erotism into the service of the function of reproduction. This process can naturally undergo certain inhibitions, and in many people (those who later become perverts and neurotics) it is only incompletely accomplished. On the other hand, the child is capable long before puberty of most of the psychical manifestations of love-tenderness, for example, devotion and jealousy. Often enough, too, an irruption of these mental states is associated with the physical sensations of sexual excitation, so that the child cannot remain in doubt as to the connection between the two. In short, except for his reproductive power, a child has a fully-developed capacity for love long before puberty; and it may be asserted that the ‘mystery-making’ merely prevents him from being able to gain an intellectual grasp of activities for which he is psychically prepared and physically adjusted.