The Sexual Life of the Child/Chapter 1

To speak of "the sexual life of the child" seems at first sight to involve a contradiction in terms. It is generally assumed that the sexual life first awakens at the on-coming of puberty (the attainment of sexual maturity of manhood or womanhood); the on-coming of puberty is regarded as the termination of childhood; in fact the term child is usually defined as the human being from the time of birth to the on-coming of puberty. But this contradiction is apparent merely, and depends on the assumption that the on-coming of puberty is indicated by certain outward signs (more especially the first menstruation and the first seminal emission), insufficient attention being paid to the long period of development which usually precedes these occurrences. And yet, during this period of preliminary development, the occurrence of certain manifestations of the sexual life is plainly demonstrable.

The period of childhood is subdivided into several sub-epochs, but the delimitation and nomenclature of these varies so much with different investigators, that to avoid misunderstanding I must first define the subdivisions which I myself propose to employ. If we regard the beginning of the fifteenth year as the termination of childhood, we may divide childhood into two equal periods, the first extending from birth to the completion of the seventh year, the second from the beginning of the eighth to the end of the fourteenth year. I shall in this work designate these two periods as the first and the second period of childhood respectively. In the first period of childhood, the first year of life may be further distinguished as the period of infancy. The first and second periods of childhood comprise childhood in the narrower sense of the term. The years that immediately follow the beginning of the fifteenth year I shall denote as the period of youth. Inasmuch as the symptoms of this latter come to differ from those of childhood proper, not abruptly, but gradually, the first years, at least, of youth will often come under our consideration, and I shall speak of this period of life as the third period of childhood. Although childhood in the narrower sense comprises the first and second periods only, childhood in the wider sense includes also the third period. It is hardly possible that any misunderstanding can arise if the reader will bear in mind that whenever I speak of childhood without qualification, I allude only to the period of life before the beginning of the fifteenth year. For all these periods of childhood, first, second, and third, I shall for practical convenience when speaking of males use the word boy, and when speaking of females, the word girl.

The use of this terminology must not be regarded as implying that the distinctions indicated correspond in any way to fixed natural lines of demarcation; on the contrary, individual variations are numerous and manifold. Not only does the rate of development differ in different races (in the Caucasian race, more especially, the age of puberty comes comparatively late, so that among the members of this race childhood is prolonged); but further, within the limits of one and the same race, notable differences occur. More than all have we to take into account the differences between the sexes, childhood earlier in the female sex than in the male--among our own people [the Germans] this difference is commonly estimated at as much as two years. In addition, in this respect, there are marked differences between different classes of the population, a matter to which we shall return in Chapter VI.

It is also necessary to point out here in what sense I employ the term puberty (nubility, sexual ripeness, or maturity), and the associated terms, nubile and sexually mature. Much confusion exists in respect of the application of these terms. Some use puberty to denote a period of time, others, a point of time, and in various other ways the word is differently used by different authors. Similarly as regards the term nubile; some consider an individual to be nubile as soon as he or she is competent for procreation, others speak of anyone as nubile only when the development of the sexual life is completed. Obviously, these two notions are very different; for instance, a girl of thirteen who has begun to menstruate may be competent for the act of procreation, and yet her sexual development may still be far from complete. The confusion as regards the use of the substantive puberty is no less perplexing. One writer uses it to denote the time at which procreative capacity begins, and believes he is right in assuming that in the male this time is indicated by the occurrence of the first involuntary sexual orgasm. I may point out in passing that there is a confusion here between procreative capacity and competence for sexual intercourse, for as a rule the first seminal emissions contain no spermatozoa. But, apart from such confusions, the term puberty is used in various senses. Thus, a second writer denotes by puberty the point of time at which the sexual development is completed; a third means by puberty the period which elapses between the occurrence of the first involuntary orgasm and the completion of sexual development; a fourth uses the word to denote the entire period of life during which procreative capacity endures; and finally, a fifth includes under the notion of puberty the whole course of life after the completion of sexual development. In this work I shall mean by puberty the period of life between the completion of sexual development and the extinction of the sexual life. The period during which the state of puberty is being attained will be spoken of as the period of puberal development, and I shall therefore speak of the beginning and the end of the puberal development. The terms nubility, sexual maturity, nubile, and sexually mature, will be used with a similar signification. As regards the puberal development, let me at the outset draw attention to the fact that it takes place very gradually; and further, as we shall see, that it begins much earlier than is commonly believed. In the young girl, from the date of the first menstruation to the time at which she has become fitted for marriage, the average lapse of time is assumed by Ribbing to be two years. This is a fair estimate, but it does not correspond to the totality of the period of the puberal development. If we estimate that period from its true beginning its duration greatly exceeds two years, for the first indications of the puberal development are manifest in the girl long before the first menstruation, and in the boy long before the first discharge of semen. The approach of puberty is indicated by numerous symptoms, some of which are psychical and some physical in character. In perfectly healthy children, as will be shown in the sequel, individual symptoms may make their appearance as early as the age of seven or eight, and further symptoms successively appear during succeeding years, until the puberal development is completed.

What methods are available for the study of the sexual life of the child? Three methods have to be considered: first, the observation of children; secondly, experiment; and thirdly, reports made by individuals regarding their own experiences. As regards the last mentioned, we must distinguish clearly between accounts reproduced from memory long after the incidents to which they relate, and accounts given by children of their state at the time of narration. But both varieties of clinical history are defective. The child is often incompetent to describe his sensations--think, for instance, of the processes of the earliest years of life. Even when the child is able to make reports, a sense of shame will often interfere with the truthfulness of his account. Whilst as regards the memory-pictures of adults, recourse to this method often fails us because the experiences are so remote as to have been largely, if not entirely, forgotten. The autobiographies of sexually perverse individuals have drawn my attention to the fallacious nature of memory. Its records are uncertain, but that especially is recorded which has aroused interest. Not only the interest felt in the experiences at the time determines what shall be recorded, but also the interest felt later when reviving these experiences in memory. Childish experiences are very readily forgotten, either if they were uninteresting at the time, or if subsequently they have become uninteresting. During childhood, a homosexual woman has experienced sexual feeling, directed now towards boys, now towards girls. Later in life, when the homosexuality has developed fully, the memory of the inclination towards boys fades away, and her homosexual sentiments only are remembered. As a result, we often find that the homosexual woman--and the converse is equally true of the homosexual man--declares at first, when inquiries are made, that she has never experienced any inclination for members of the other sex; whereas, at any rate in a large proportion of cases, a stricter examination of her memory, or the reports of other individuals, will reveal beyond dispute that in childhood heterosexual inclinations wore not lacking.

A further defect of memory has been made manifest to me by the study of perversions. Processes which in childhood were entirely devoid of any sexual tinge, but which later became associated with sex-feelings, very readily acquire false sexual associations also when they are revived in memory. Consider, for instance, the case of a homosexual man. He remembers that, as a small boy, he was very fond of sitting on his uncle's knees, and he believes that the pleasure he formerly experienced was tinged by sexual feeling. In reality this was by no means the case. His uncle took the boy on his knee in order to tell him a story. Possibly, also, the riding movements which the uncle imitated by jogging his knees up and down gave the child pleasure, which, however, was entirely devoid of any admixture of sexual feeling. But in the consciousness of the full-grown man, in whom homosexual feeling has later undergone full development, all this becomes distorted. The non-sexual motives are forgotten; he believes that even in early childhood he had homosexual inclinations, and that for this reason it gave him pleasure to ride on his uncle's knees.

Nor is observation in any way adapted to furnish us with a clear picture of the sexual life of the child. So little can be directly observed, that in the absence of reports much would remain entirely unknown. From the moment when the children gain a consciousness, however obscure, of the nature of sexual processes, they almost invariably endeavour to conceal their knowledge as much as possible, so that we shall discover its existence only by a rare chance. None the less, the results of direct observation are often important; sometimes because we are able to watch children when they are unaware of our attention, and sometimes because they do not as yet fully understand the nature of the processes under observation, and for this reason are less secretive.

The third method, that of experiment, is available to us only in the form of castration. I need not dilate on the inadequacy of this application of the experimental method, even apart from the fact that it subserves our purposes almost exclusively in respect of the male sex--for in the case of young girls, castration (oöphorectomy) is almost entirely unknown.

Thus we see that all our methods of investigation exhibit extensive lacunae, and further, that they are all in many respects fallacious; we shall therefore endeavour to supplement each by the others, in order to arrive at results which shall be as free from error as possible. Thus guided, we learn that sexual incidents occur in childhood far more frequently than is usually supposed. So common are they, that they cannot possibly escape the notice of any practising physician or educationalist who pays attention to the question, provided, of course, that he enjoys the confidence of the parents. These latter have often been aware of such sexual manifestations in their children for a long time, but a false shame has prevented them from asking the advice of the physician. They have been afraid lest he should regard the child as intellectually or morally deficient, or as the offspring of a degenerate family. In addition, we have to take into account self-deception on the part of the parents, who, indeed, often deceive themselves willingly, saying to themselves that the matter is of no importance, and that the symptoms will disappear spontaneously.

Having given this brief account of the terminology to be employed and of the methods of investigation, I propose to sketch no less briefly the history of the subject.

Casual references to the sexual life of the child are to be found even in the older scientific literature. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, and at the beginning of the nineteenth, interest in the subject became more general. Two works, in especial, published almost simultaneously, attracted the attention of physicians and educationalists. One of these, Rousseau's Émile, discusses the proper conduct of parents and elders in relation to the awakening sexual life, and what they should do in order to delay that awakening as much as possible. The other, the celebrated work of Tissot, depicts the dangers of masturbation, but deals chiefly with persons who have attained sexual maturity. None the less, in consequence of this book, much attention was directed to the sexual life of the child. Earlier works on masturbation, such as that of Sarganeck, for instance, had not succeeded in arousing any enduring interest in this question. But Rousseau's and Tissot's books induced a large number of physicians and educationalists to occupy themselves in this province of study. Thus at this early day many authorities were led to advocate the sexual enlightenment of children, in order to guide them in the avoidance of the dangers of the sexual life. An excellent historical and critical study of this movement, written by Thalhofer, has recently been published. Among the educationalists who took part in it may be mentioned Basedow, Salzmann, Campe, and Niemeyer. The modern movement in favour of sexual enlightenment originated chiefly in the endeavour to prevent the diffusion of venereal diseases; but the earlier movement, occurring at a time when much less was known about venereal diseases, had a different aim. This was rather to prevent masturbation and other sexual excesses, on account of their direct effect upon the organism; an aim not neglected by the modern movement for sexual enlightenment, though subsidiary to the object of the prevention of the venereal diseases. Teachers of that day touched, of course, upon the subject of the sexual life of the child. But this was done cursorily, for when instruction was given on the sexual life, not the actual experience of children, but the sexual life of mature persons, was the subject of discourse. This must be said also of the works of those physicians who, like Hufeland in his Makrobiotik (written as a sequel to the work of Tissot), spoke of the dangers of masturbation.

A few of the numerous medical books dealing with the puberal development deserve mention in this place; for instance, Marro, La Pubertà (first edition, published in 1897), and Bacqué, La Puberté (Argenteuil, 1876). A number of recent works on masturbation have also touched on the topic of the sexual life of the child.

Apart from these recent special investigations, the older and the more recent medical and anthropological literature contains numerous observations which concern the subject of this book. More especially do we find reports of cases in which the external manifestations of sexual maturity appeared in very early childhood. Now we find an account of a girl menstruating at four years of age, now an account of a three-year-old boy who exhibited many of the external signs of sexual maturity. Even in the older, purely psychological works we find occasional references to the sexual life of the child--a fact that will surprise no one who is acquainted with the high development of the empirical psychology (Erfahrungspsychologie) of that day (1800). The Venus Urania of Ramdohr, for instance, a work on the psychology of love, emphasises the frequency of amatory sentiments in children.

In works dealing with the history of civilisation, we also encounter occasional references to our subject. Take, for instance, the knightly Code of Love (Liebeskodex), a work highly esteemed in the days of chivalry, and legendarily supposed to have originated in King Arthur's Court. Paragraph 6 of this Code runs: "A man shall not practise love until he is fully grown." According to Rudeck, from whom I quote this instance, the aim of the admonition was to protect the youth of the nobility from unwholesome consequences. Obviously, the love affairs of immature persons must have been the determining cause of any allusion to the matter. We may also draw attention in this connexion to many marriage laws, which show that the subject has come under consideration, either because they expressly sanction the marriages of children, or, conversely, because they forbid such unions. At the present day, among many peoples (as, for instance, the Hindus), child-marriages are frequent; and in many countries in which such marriages are now illegal, they were sanctioned in former ages. Many works on prostitution also touch on our chosen subject. Parent-Duchâtelet, in his great book, refers to girls who had become prostitutes at the ages of twelve or even ten years. I shall show later that in individual instances such early prostitution is directly dependent upon the sexuality of the children concerned. Many ethnological works also contribute to our knowledge of the sexual life of the child, describing, as they do, in certain races, the early awakening of sexual activity.

Remarkably little material do we find, however, in many works in which we might have expected to find a great deal. I refer to works on education and on the psychology of the child. In exceptional instances, indeed, as I have already indicated, the educationalists have taken part in the movement in favour of sexual enlightenment. But when we consider the enormous importance and great frequency of the sexual processes of the child, we are positively astounded at the manner in which this department of knowledge has been ignored by those who have written on the science and art of education, and by those psychologists who have occupied themselves in the study of the mind of the child. Has it been a false notion of morality by which these investigators have been withhold from the elucidation of the sexual life of the child? Or has the reason merely been their defective powers of observation? As a matter of fact, I suppose that both these causes have operated in producing this remarkable gap in our knowledge.

A certain amount of material is to be found in a number of books on zoology, and also in a few quite recent works on comparative psychology. Among works of the former class I mention especially that of Brehm, who has reported a considerable number of individual details; of books on comparative psychology, one of the most useful for our purposes is that of Groos, who gives us much valuable information regarding love-games of young animals.

I may also point out that in the autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, &c., of celebrated persons, we find much information regarding premature amatory sentiments. Goethe, in his Wahrheit und Dichtung, relates that as a boy of ten or so he fell in love with a young Frenchwoman, the sister of his friend Derones. Of Alfred de Musset, his brother and biographer, Paul Musset, records that at the early age of four he was passionately in love with a girl cousin. It is on record that Dante fell in love at the age of nine, Canova at five, and Alfieri at ten. Well known also is the story of Byron's love, at eight years of age, for Mary Duff. Möbius tells us of himself that when a boy of ten he was desperately enamoured of a young married woman. We are told of Napoleon I. that when a boy of nine he fell in love with his father's cousin, a handsome woman of thirty, then on a visit to his home, and that he caressed her in the most passionate manner. Belonging to an earlier day was Felix Platter, the celebrated Swiss physician of the sixteenth century, who tells us in his autobiography that when be was a child he loved to be kissed by a certain young married woman. In Un Coeur Simple, Flaubert describes the development of the love-sentiments. "For mankind there is so much love in life. At the age of four we love horses, the sun, flowers, shining weapons, uniforms; at ten we love a little girl, our playmate; at thirteen we love a buxom, full-necked woman. The first time I saw the two breasts of a woman, entirely unclothed, I almost fainted. Finally, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, we love a young girl, who is a little more to us than a sister and a little less than a mistress; and then, at sixteen, we love a woman once more, and marry her."

Most charmingly Hebbel describes his first experience of love, when but four years old. "It was in Susanna's dull schoolroom, also, that I learned the meaning of love; it was, indeed, in the very hour when I first entered it, at the age of four. First love! Who is there who will not smile as he reads these words? Who will fail to recall memories of some Anne or Margaret, who once seemed to him to wear a crown of stars, and to be clad in the blue of heaven and the gold of dawn; and now--but it would be malicious to depict the contrast! Who will fail to admit that it seemed to him then as if he passed on the wing through the garden of the earth, flitting from flower to flower, sipping from their honey-cups; passing too swiftly, indeed, to become intoxicated, but pausing long enough at each to inhale its divine perfume! ... It was some time before I ventured to raise my eyes, for I felt that I was under inspection, and this embarrassed me. But at length I looked up, and my first glance fell upon a pale and slender girl who sat opposite me: her name was Emily, and she was the daughter of the parish-clerk. A passionate trembling seized me, the blood rushed to my heart; but a sentiment of shame was also intermingled with my first sensations, and I lowered my eyes to the ground once more, as rapidly as if I had caught sight of something horrible. From that moment Emily was ever in my thoughts; and the school, so greatly dreaded in anticipation, became a joy to me, because it was there only that I could see her. The Sundays and holidays which separated me from her were as greatly detested by me as in other circumstances they would have been greatly desired; one day when she stayed away from school, I felt utterly miserable. In imagination she was always before my eyes, wherever I went; when alone, I was never weary of repeating her name; above all, her black eyebrows and intensely red lips were ever before my eyes, whereas I do not remember that at this time her voice had made any impression on me, although later this became all-important."

In belletristic literature, also, we find occasional references to the love-sentiment in childhood. Groos refers to an instance which he thinks, perhaps the most delicate known to him, and one in which the erotic element is but faintly emphasised, namely, Gottfried Keller's Romeo und Julia. "In a spot entirely covered with green undergrowth the girl stretched herself on her back, for she was tired, and began in a monotonous tone to sing a few words, repeating the same ones over and over again; the boy crouched close beside her, half inclined, he also, to stretch himself at full length on the ground, so lethargic did he feel. The sun shone into the girl's open mouth as she sang, lighting up her glistening white teeth, and gleaming on her full red lips. The boy caught sight of her teeth, and, holding the girl's head and eagerly examining her teeth, said, 'Tell me, how many teeth has one?' The girl paused for a moment, as if thinking the matter carefully over, but then answered at random, 'A hundred.' 'No!' he cried; 'thirty-two is the proper number; wait a moment, I'll count yours.' He counted them, but could not get the tale right to thirty-two, and so counted them again, and again, and again. The girl let him go on for some time, but as he did not come to an end of his eager counting, she suddenly interrupted him, and said, 'Now, let me count yours.' The boy lay down in his turn on the undergrowth; the girl leaned over him, with her arm round his head; he opened his mouth, and she began counting: 'One, two, seven, five, two, one,' for the little beauty did not yet know how to count. The boy corrected her, and explained to her how to count properly; so she, in her turn, attempted to count his teeth over and over again: and this game seemed to please them more than any they had played together that day. At last, however, the girl sank down on her youthful instructor's breast, and the two children fell asleep in the bright midday sunshine."

In erotic literature we also occasionally find descriptions belonging to our province, as, for instance, in the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter. Indeed, a certain kind of erotic literature, more especially pornographic literature, selects this subject by preference. Thus, I may allude to the Anti-Justine of Rétif de la Brétonne. In a certain section of such literature, improper practices between children and their parents and other blood relatives play a part.

Recently, in connexion with two different fields of study, attention has been directed to the sexual life of the child. The first of these is concerned with the abnormal, and especially the perverse, manifestations of the sexual life, a study of which Westphal, and above all von Krafft-Ebing, have been the founders. The other is the modern movement in favour of the sexual enlightenment of children. As regards the latter, the literature to which it has given rise has not, indeed, contributed much, beyond a few casual references, in the way of positive material concerning the sexual life of the child. But none the less, it is this movement which has made it of prime importance that our subject should be carefully investigated. As regards studies of the abnormalities of the sexual impulse, under the name of paradoxical sexual impulse cases have been published in which that impulse manifested itself at an age of life in which it is normally non-existent--old age and childhood. Recent research has brought to light a large number of cases of this nature. Among those who have reported such cases, we must mention first of all von Krafft-Ebing, and in addition, Féré, Fuchs, Pélofi, and Lombroso.

In addition to these various works, others must be mentioned which have arisen mainly out of the recently awakened interest in the sexual life; for example, works on puberty, the psychology of love, and similar topics. In his Fisiologia del Amore (Physiology of Love), Mantegazza emphasises the love-manifestations of childhood. The same may be said of many other general works on the sexual life, and more especially, as previously mentioned, of works on prostitution. Certain works on offences against morality have also enriched our knowledge in this province.

It might at first sight appear from what has been said that the literature of the sexual life of the child was extremely voluminous, but this is not in reality the case. Almost always, this important question is handled in a casual or cursory manner. A thorough presentation of the subject has not, as far as my knowledge extends, hitherto been attempted. Freud rightly insists that even in all, or nearly all, the works on the psychology of the child, this important department is ignored. Quite recently, indeed, special works have appeared upon the sexual life of the child, among which I must first of all mention Freud's own contribution to the subject, forming part of his Drei Abhandlungen zur sexuellen Theorie (Three Essays on the Sexual Theory, Leipzig and Vienna, 1905). But what this writer describes as an indication of infantile sexuality, viz., certain sucking movements, has, in my opinion, nothing to do with the sexual life of the child--as little to do with sexuality as have the functions of the stomach or any other non-genital organ. A number of other processes occurring in childhood, which Freud and his followers have recently described as sexual in nature, and as playing a great part later in life in connexion with hysteria, neurasthenia, compulsion-neuroses, the anxiety-neurosis, and dementia praecox, have very little true relationship to the sexual life of the child. In any case, Freud has not systematically studied the individual manifestations of the sexual life of the child. I must also mention a small work by Kötscher, Das Erwachen des Geschlechtsbewusstseins und seine Anomalien (The Awakening of the Consciousness of Sex and its Anomalies, Wiesbaden, 1907). Kötscher, however, does not give any detailed account of the sexual life of the child; he starts, rather, from the sexual life of the adult, and only as a supplement to his account of this does he give a few data regarding the awakening of the consciousness of sex. In the American Journal of Psychology, July 1902, we find an elaborate study of the sexual life of the child. In this paper, A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes, the writer, Sanford Bell, devotes much attention to the love-sentiments in childhood. He discusses, indeed, only heterosexual, qualitatively normal inclinations, and his essay deals only with the psychological aspects of the question. The processes taking place in the genital organs do not come within the scope of the writer's observations, and, indeed, are outside the limits of his chosen theme. A great many other points connected with the question are also left untouched. None the less, the paper is full of matter. The same must be said of the works of the English investigator, Havelock Ellis, who is, in my opinion, the leader of all those at present engaged in the study of sexual psychology and pathology. Unfortunately his writings are not so well known in Germany as they deserve to be, the reason being that owing to their strictly scientific character they are not so noisily obtruded on the public notice as are certain other widely advertised and reputedly scientific works. In his various books, and above all in his six volumes entitled Studies in the Psychology of Sex (F. A. Davies Company, Philadelphia, Pa.), as a part of his general contributions to our knowledge of the sexual life, Havelock Ellis records numerous observations relating to the years of childhood; especially valuable in this connexion are the biographies given in the third volume of the above-mentioned Studies.

A valuable source of data for our field of inquiry exists in the form of unpublished diaries, autobiographies, and albums, which are not accessible to the general public. I have myself had the opportunity of studying a number of records of this nature, and have formed the opinion that a quantity of invaluable material lies hidden in these recesses. I may add that the records I have been able to use have not only related to living persons; in addition, I have been able to study a number of albums and diaries dating from an earlier day. These have remained unpublished, in part because they appeared to be of interest only to the families of the writers, and in part because many of them were in intention purely private memoranda, a written record for the sole use of the writer.

Speaking generally, however, this province of research has received but little scientific attention; and of comprehensive studies, intended to throw light on every aspect of the sexual life of the child, not a single one is known to me.