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

PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXsame tendency when directed against adults. The so-called"perversions" of childhood persistin some form or otherand in some varying degree when the child isgrown up,for, as Jelliffe remarks, "very few people are really grownup." The difference is that there is now super-added theadult act of intercourse adequate to insure, if necessary,the consummating union of sperm-cell and germ-cell. Butthe "perversions"of childhood and adolescence may remainin due subordination as part of the play-function ofsex, a legitimateand even desirable part of the art of loveare within theand the technique of impregnation. Theylegitimate range of variations. It is only, if ever, allowableto call them perversionswhen so magnified as to replacethe desire for the central act of sex union and when theyhave diminished or abolished the ability to effect it.It thus comes about that we have speciallyto avoidspeaking about "perversions" in early life. The child'smind does not work in quite the same way as the adultmind; what is "natural" in one phaseis not necessarily soat an earlier phase of development. So that it is not alwayseasy either for the child to understand the operations ofthe adult's mind, or the adult the child's. It is unfortunatethat adults do not more vividly realize what theywere themselves as children. Many of us, however, canrecall how misunderstood we sometimes were, and howtreated. That is liable tounjustly we were in consequencehappen even in matters where children and adults havemuch in common and is, therefore, still more likely tohappen in the field of sex where they have so little incommon.Yet we must not conclude that sexual anomalies do notoccur in early life. It is, however, much more a questiona question of degree ratherof quantity than of quality,than of kind. Whether of kind or of degree we can rarely