The Psychology of Love by Sigmund Freud

Author:Sigmund Freud [Freud, Sigmund]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781101641477
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2007-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

II

Infantile Sexuality

(Neglect of the Infantile)

Concerning the sexual drive, popular opinion is that it is absent in childhood and awakens during the period of life known as puberty. But this is not only a simple error, it is one that has severe consequences, since it is chiefly to this mistake that we owe our current ignorance of the basic relations of the sexual life. A thorough study of manifestations of sexuality in childhood would probably uncover the significant traits of the sexual drive for us, reveal its development and show its composition from various different sources.

It is remarkable that those authors who seek to explain the qualities and reactions of adult individuals should have paid so much more attention to the history supplied by the lives of the individual’s ancestors, thus imputing so much more influence to heredity than to the other primeval history that lies within the life of the individual: childhood itself. One would have thought that the influence of this period of life would be easier to understand and would have a right to be considered before the influence of heredity.1 Occasional notes are indeed found in the literature concerning early sexual activity among small children, erections, masturbation and even attempts at something like coitus, but only ever as exceptional events, as curiosities or alarming examples of precocious depravity. No author has, to my knowledge, clearly recognized the regular incidence of a sexual drive in childhood, and in writings about childhood development, so numerous these days, the chapter on ‘sexual development’ is usually passed over.2

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