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

THE SEXUAL IMPULSE IN YOUTHchildhood; they are not (as is sometimes imagined) repressed;what is repressed, and usually indeed not experienced,is the impulse to mention them to grown-up persons,and they are commonly not mentioned to any one.But they tend to persist in memory because they standout of relation to ordinary experience and in striking contrastto it.Definite sexual self-excitement has long been known tooccur at an early age. Early in the nineteenth centuryvarious authors in France and elsewhere Marc, Fonssagrives,Perez, etc. gave cases of children of both sexeswho masturbated from the age of three or four. Robiefound that in boys the first sex feelings occur between theages of 5 and 14, in girls between 8 and 19; in both boysand girls these first manifestations more frequently appearduring the later than the earlier years. Hamilton, in hismore carefully detailed inquiry, has found that 20 percent, males and 14 per cent, females find pleasure in theirsex organs before the age of six. Katharine Davis, comparinggroups of men and women, found that 20.9 per cent,boys began to masturbate up to and including the age of11, and 49.1 per cent, girls, though during the next threeyears the percentage of boys was much in excess of thegirls. It is a mistake to suppose that all children experience,or are capable of experiencing, genital excitementor pleasurable sexual sensations. Crucial cases occur inwhich the child, innocently led away by another childwho gives assurance that friction will favor the developmentof the penis in size, will in this innocence sedulouslytry to procure the supposed benefit but without attainingin any degree either genital reaction or sensory pleasure,although in due course at puberty, if not before, the organbecomes fully excitable. There is thus a wide range ofgenital and sexual aptitude in childhood. How far the[83]