Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/106

96 ern ist eine der notwendigsten, aber auch schmerzlichsten Leistungen der Entwicklung. Es is durchaus notwendig, dass sie sich vollziehe, und man darf annehmen, jeder normal gewordene Mensch habe sie in einem gewissen Mass zu Stande gebracht. Ja, der Fortschritt der Gesellschaft beruht überhaupt auf dieser Gegensätzlichkeit der beiden Generationen." That it rests at bottom on sexual grounds was first demonstrated by Freud, when dealing with the subject of the earliest manifestations of the sexual instinct in children. He has shewn that this instinct does not, as is generally supposed, differ from other biological functions by suddenly leaping into being at the age of puberty in all its full and developed activity, but that like other functions it undergoes a gradual evolution and only slowly attains the form in which we know it in the adult. In other words a child has to learn how to love just as it has to learn how to run, although the former function is so much more intricate and delicate in its adjustment than the latter that the development of it is a correspondingly slower and more involved process. The earliest sexual manifestations are so palpably non-adapted to what is generally considered the ultimate aim and object of the function, and are so general and tentative in contrast to the relative precision of the later manifestations, that the sexual nature of them is commonly not recognised at all. This theme, important as it is, cannot be further pursued here, but it must be mentioned how frequently these earliest dim awakenings are evoked by the intimate physical relations existing between the child and the persons of his immediate environment, above all, therefore, his parents. As Freud has put it, "The mother is the first seductress of her boy." There is a great variability in both the date and the intensity of the early sexual manifestations, a fact that depends partly on the boy's constitution and partly on the mother's. When the attraction exercised by the mother is excessive it may exert a controlling influence over the boy's later destiny. Of the various results that may be caused by the complicated interaction between this and other influences only one or two need be mentioned. If the awakened passion undergoes but little "repression"–an event most frequent when the mother is a widow–then the boy may remain throughout life abnormally attached to his mother and unable to love any other woman, a not uncommon cause of bachelorhood. He may be gradually weaned from this attachment, if it is less strong, though it often happens