Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

THE SEXUAL IMPULSE IN YOUTHmainly fall outside the sphere which for the adult is thatof sex proper, partly because on the physical side thegenital centers are stillundeveloped and partly becauseon the psychic side the opposite sex has not yet usuallyacquired the definite significance which after pubertysooner or later it possesses.An interesting and often overlooked trait of childishsexuality is algolagnia, or a pleasurable interest in pain,this including pleasure in the witnessing of pain, the inflictingof pain, or the experiencing of it. Various adultto these manifestations suchnames are commonly appliedas "cruelty," "sadism," "masochism," etc., and this isprobablyinevitable because it is only so that adults can explainto themselves these manifestations of the childish psyche.But they are misleading and unfortunate for they are faraway from the aims of childhood. The child has not, forinstance, yet formulated the humanely adult notion of"cruelty," and when we remember that even for manyadults it has no clear existence we cannot be surprisedthat it is alien to the children who amiably and pleasantlywitness the sufferings of the lower animals and oftenthemselves increase or cause them. Children are at workor, if you wish, at play in the exercise-ground of inquisitivereason and as yet undifferentiated emotion: thefossilized rules of adult morality are here misplaced. It isthe function of education, in the proper sense of that term(for the fallacy that education means putting in and notto helpbringing out is still common among the ignorant) ,the child to educe in due course the activities of later life,and to make clear to him, as soon as his comprehensionpermits, that his own early unrestrained impulses do notwork in the adult world. The fact that we are here primarilyconcerned with exercises in the field of emotion,only incidently liable to reach the threshold of pain, is[89]