would have avoided.

Alongside the rudimentary impulses of showing and looking, there is
developed another set of trends which Nature needs to use later on,
the so-called sadistic and masochistic impulses, the desire to
dominate and master and even to inflict pain, and its opposite impulse
which takes pleasure in yielding and submitting to mastery. These
traits, harking back to the time when the male needed to capture by
force, are of course much more evident in adolescence and especially
in love-making, but have their beginning in childhood, as many a
mother of cruel children knows to her sorrow. In adolescence, when
sex-differentiation is much more marked, the dominating impulse is
stronger in the boy and the yielding impulse in the girl; but in
little children the differentiation has not yet begun.

=Gang and Chum.= At about four or five years the child leaves the
infantile stage of development, with its self-love and its intense
devotion to parents and their substitutes. He begins to be especially
interested in playmates of his own sex, to care more for the opinions
of the gang--or if it be a little girl, of the chum--than for those of
the parents. The life-force is leading him on to the next step in his
education, freeing him little by little from a too-hampering
attachment to his family. This does not mean that he does not love
his father and mother. It means only that some of his love is being
turned toward the rest of the world, that he may be an independent,
socially useful man.

This period between infancy and puberty is known as the latency
period. All interest in sex disappears, repressed by the spontaneously
developing sense of shame and modesty and by the impact of education