him the beginning of his own sexual life--that this amnesia is
responsible for the fact that one does not usually attribute any value
to the infantile period in the development of the sexual life. One
single observer cannot fill the gap which has been thus produced in our
knowledge. As early as 1896 I had already emphasized the significance of
childhood for the origin of certain important phenomena connected with
the sexual life, and since then I have not ceased to put into the
foreground the importance of the infantile factor for sexuality.


THE SEXUAL LATENCY PERIOD OF CHILDHOOD AND ITS INTERRUPTIONS

The extraordinary frequent discoveries of apparently abnormal and
exceptional sexual manifestations in childhood, as well as the
discovery of infantile reminiscences in neurotics, which were hitherto
unconscious, allow us to sketch the following picture of the sexual
behavior of childhood.[5]

It seems certain that the newborn child brings with it the germs of
sexual feelings which continue to develop for some time and then succumb
to a progressive suppression, which is in turn broken through by the
proper advances of the sexual development and which can be checked by
individual idiosyncrasies. Nothing is known concerning the laws and
periodicity of this oscillating course of development. It seems,
however, that the sexual life of the child mostly manifests itself in
the third or fourth year in some form accessible to observation.[6]

*The Sexual Inhibition.*--It is during this period of total or at least
partial latency that the psychic forces develop which later act as
inhibitions on the sexual life, and narrow its direction like dams.