59

VI

ON THE SEXUAL THEORIES OF CHILDREN ¹

(1908)

THE material on which the following synthesis is
built up is derived from many sources. First,
from the direct observation of what children say
and do; secondly, from what adult neurotics consciously
remember of their childhood and retail during psycho-
analytic treatment; and thirdly, from the conclusions,
reconstructions and unconscious memories translated
into consciousness which result from the psycho-
analysis of neurotics.

That the first of these three sources has not alone
supplied all that is worth knowing on the subject is
due to the attitude of adults towards childish sexual
life. Children are not credited with any sexual
activities, therefore no pains are taken to observe
anything of the kind, while on the other hand any
expressions of such a thing which would be worthy of
attention are suppressed. Consequently the oppor-
tunity of gaining information from this most genuine
and fertile source is greatly restricted. Whatever we
derive from the uninfluenced communications of adults
concerning their conscious childhood is at best subject
to the objection that it is perhaps falsified in looking
back and, further, has to be estimated in the light of the
fact that the persons in question have later become
neurotic. The material from the third source is
subject to all the attacks that are in general directed
against the trustworthiness of psycho-analysis and the
reliability of the conclusions drawn from it, so that

¹First published in Sexualprobleme, new issue of the periodical
Mutterschutz, Bd. IV., 1908; reprinted in Sammlung, Zweite Folge.
[Translated by Douglas Bryan.]

60

VI

no justification of it can be attempted here; I will
only assert that those who know and make use of the
psycho-analytic technique acquire extensive confidence
in its results.

I cannot guarantee the completeness of my collec-
tion, but I can answer for the care taken in gathering
the material.

There remains a difficult question to decide. How
far ought one to take for granted what is here reported
about children in general as being true of all children,
i.e. of every individual child? Pressure of education
and the varying intensity of the sexual instinct
certainly render possible great individual variations in
the sexual behaviour of children, and, above all, these
things influence the date at which the childish interest
in sexuality appears. Therefore I have not arranged
my material according to the successive epochs of
childhood, but have included in one recital what
applies to various children, in one early, and in another
late. It is my conviction that no child—none, at least,
who is mentally sound, still less one who is mentally
gifted—can avoid being occupied with sexual problems
in the years before puberty.

I do not think much of the objection that neurotics
are a special class of people marked by a degenerative
disposition, whose child-life must not be regarded as
evidence of the childhood of others. Neurotics are
human beings like every one else, and cannot be
sharply differentiated from normal people; in their
childhood they are not easily distinguishable from
those who later remain healthy. It is one of the most
valuable results of our psycho-analytic investigations
to have found that their neuroses have no special
mental content peculiar to them, but that, as C. G.
Jung has expressed it, they fall ill of the same complexes
with which we who are healthy also have to contend.
The difference is only that the healthy know how to
overcome these complexes without great and practi-
cally demonstrable harm; while the suppression of

61

these complexes in nervous people only succeeds at the
price of costly substitute-
formations, thus in practice
proving unsuccessful. In childhood nervous and normal
people naturally approximate much more closely than
in later life, so that I cannot recognize it as an error
in method to make use of the communications of
neurotics concerning their childhood as analogies for
normal child-
life. Since those who later become
neurotics very frequently include in their constitution
an especially strong sexual instinct and a disposition
to precocity and to premature expression of this
impulse, they enable us in this way to recognize much
of the infantile sexual activities more plainly and more
correctly than, with our blunted talent for observation
of ordinary children, would otherwise be possible.
The true value of these communications by adult
neurotics can only be estimated, to be sure, when a
collection of the childhood-
memories of adult healthy
people, made after the manner of Havelock Ellis, has
also been taken into account.

In consequence of both external and internal
unfavourable circumstances, the following remarks
apply chiefly to the sexual development of one sex
only, namely, the male. The value of a compilation
such as I attempt here, however, need not be merely
descriptive. The knowledge of the infantile sexual
theories in the form in which they appear in childish
thoughts can be of interest in various directions-
for
instance, surprisingly so for an understanding of myths
and fairy-
tales. They are indispensable for the under-
standing of the neuroses, where these childish theories
are still in operation and have acquired a determining
influence upon the form taken by the symptoms.

* * *

If, forgetting our mortality and imagining ourselves
to be merely thinking beings, gazing, for instance,
from another planet, we could apprehend the things
of this earth afresh, perhaps nothing would arrest our

62

attention more forcibly than the existence of two
sexes among human beings, who otherwise resemble
each other so closely and yet emphasize their difference
even in the most superficial indications. Now it does
not seem that children also choose this fundamental
fact as the starting-
point of their investigations con-
cerning sexual problems. Since they have known a
father and a mother as far back as they can remember
in life, they accept their existence as a reality which
needs no further inquiry, and in just the same way
does a boy behave towards a little sister from whom
he is only separated by a slight difference of age, by
one or two years. The child’s desire for knowledge
does not awaken spontaneously on this point at all,
as it would if prompted perhaps by an inborn need to
seek for causes, but arises under the goad of a self-
seeking impulse which dominates him when he is
confronted by the arrival of a new child–perchance
at the end of the second year. Those children whose
own nursery at home does not become divided up in
this way are nevertheless able as a result of their
own observations to put themselves in the place of
others who are in this situation in other homes. The
loss of the parents’ care and concern, which they
actually experience or with justice fear, the presenti-
ment that they must from now and for ever share all
possessions with the newcomer, has the effect of
awakening the emotions of the child and sharpening its
thinking capacities. The elder child expresses un-
concealed hostility against the newcomer, which finds
vent in unfriendly criticisms of it, in wishes that ‘the
stork should take it back again’, and occasionally
even in attempts at little outrages upon the helpless
creature lying in the cradle. A greater difference of
age as a rule modifies the expression of this primary
hostility; just as in somewhat later years, if brothers
and sisters fail to appear, the wish for a playmate like
those observed elsewhere obtains the upper hand.
Under the stimulus of these feelings and anxieties

63

the child thus comes to consider the first of the great
problems of life, and asks itself the question where
children come from, which at first runs, ‘Where did
this particular tiresome child come from?’ The after-
echo of this first riddle seems to be observable in the
innumerable riddles of myths and sagas. The question
itself, like all inquiry, is a product of dire necessity,
as if to thought were entrusted the task of preventing
the repetition of an event so greatly feared. At the
same time, we may assume, the child’s thinking
becomes independent of the stimulus, and continues
its activity as a separate impulse towards investigation.
Where a child is not already too much intimidated, it
takes sooner or later the shortest way by demanding
answers from its parents or attendants, who signify
for it the source of all knowledge. This way, however,
fails. The child receives either evasive answers or a
rebuke for its curiosity, or is dismissed with that
mythologically significant information which in German
runs: ‘The stork brings the children’; it fetches them
out of the water’. I have grounds for supposing that
far more children than parents suspect are dissatisfied
with this solution, and respond to it with pronounced
doubt, which, however, is not always outspoken. I
know of a three-year-old boy who, to the terror of his
nurse, was missed after receiving this enlightenment,
and found at the edge of the big lake of the castle, where
he had run, in order to see the children in the water!
I know of another who could allow his disbelief only
hesitating expression by saying he knew better, it was
not storks who bring the children, but herons. It
appears to me from much of the evidence conclusive
that children refuse to believe the stork theory, and
that from the time of this first deception and rebuff
they nourish a mistrust against adults, have the
presentiment of something forbidden which is being
withheld from them by the ‘grown-ups’, and con-
sequently conceal their further investigations by
secrecy. With this, however, it comes about that they

64

experience the first occasion of a ‘psychical conflict’,
in that ideas for which they ‘by instinct’ feel a
preference, but which adults consider ‘naughty’, come
into opposition with others which are maintained by
the authority of the adults without being acceptable
to them themselves. Out of these mental conflicts
there may soon arise a ‘mental dissociation’; the
one idea which is bound up with ‘being good’, but
also with a cessation of thinking, becomes the prevail-
ing conscious one; the other, for which meanwhile the
inquiries prosecuted have brought new evidence, which
is not supposed to count, becomes suppressed and
unconscious. The nuclear complex of neurosis is
formed in this way.

Lately, by the analysis of a five-year-old boy ¹
which his father undertook and permitted me to publish,
I have received an irrefutable proof of a piece of
knowledge towards which the psycho-analysis of adults
had for long led me. I now know that the changes in
the mother during pregnancy do not escape the sharp
eyes of a child, and that the latter is very well able
subsequently to establish the correct connection between
the increase in size of the mother’s body and the
appearance of a baby. In the case mentioned, the
boy was three and a half when his sister was born,
and four and three-quarters when he showed his better
knowledge by the most unmistakable allusions. This
precocious knowledge is, however, always kept secret,
and later, in connection with the future fate of childish
sexual inquiry, is repressed and forgotten.

The stork fable, therefore, is not one of the infantile
sexual theories; indeed, the observation of animals,
who hide so little of their sexual life and to whom
children feel so closely related, strengthens their
disbelief. With the knowledge independently obtained
that babies grow in the mother’s body, a child would
be on the right path to solve the problem on which it

¹Freud, ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy,’ Collected
Papers, vol. iii.

65

first tries its thinking powers. Its further progress is
stopped, however, by a piece of ignorance which cannot
be made good, and by false theories which the condition
of its own sexuality imposes on it.

These false sexual theories, which I will now
describe, all have one very curious characteristic.
Although they go astray in a grotesque way, yet they
all, each one of them, contain a bit of the real truth,
so that they are analogous to those adult attempts at
solution, which we call flashes of genius, of the problems
of the universe that are too difficult for human com-
prehension. What is correct and hits the mark in
these theories is to be explained by their origin in those
components of the sexual instinct which are already
active in the childish organism; for it is not due to an
arbitrary mental act or to chance impressions that
these notions arise, but to the necessities of the psycho-
sexual constitution, and this is why we are able to
speak of typical sexual theories in children, this is
why we find the same false ideas in all children whose
sexual life is accessible to us.

The first of these theories begins with a neglect of
sex-differentiation, the neglect to which we called special
attention at the commencement as being characteristic
of children. It consists in attributing to everybody,
including women, a penis just like the one the boy
knows of from his own body. It is precisely in that
sexual constitution which we must recognize as a
normal one that the penis is already in childhood the
governing erotogenic zone, the most important auto-
erotic sexual object, and the estimate of its value is
logically reflected in the impossibility of imagining a
person similar to the self without this essential part.
If a little boy obtains a sight of the genitals of a little
sister, what he says will show that his prejudice is
already strong enough to influence the perception;
he does not remark on the lack of the penis but
invariably says, as if consoling and reconciling: that
her ‘widdler’ is still small, but when she is bigger it

66

will soon grow. The idea of a woman with a penis
returns still later in the dreams of adults ; in a state
of nocturnal sexual excitation he throws down a
woman, exposes her and prepares for coitus ; then on
beholding the well-formed penis at the site of the
female genitals, the dream and excitation break off.
The numerous hermaphrodites of classic antiquity
faithfully reproduce this once general infantile idea ;
one may observe that to most normal people they
cause no offence, while actual hermaphroditic forma-
tions of the genitals in nature nearly always excite the
greatest abhorrence.

If this idea of woman with a penis becomes ‘ fixated ’
in a child, it resists all the influences of later life and
makes the man incapable of dispensing with a penis
in his sexual object, so that such a person, if otherwise
he has a normal sexual life, must become homosexual,
seeking his sexual object in men who through other
physical and mental qualities remind him of women.
Real women, as they become known to him later, are
excluded from being sexual objects to him because
they lack the essential sexual attraction ; indeed, in
connection with another impression of childhood-life
they may become abhorrent to him. A child who is
chiefly dominated by penis-excitation usually produces
pleasure by stimulation of it with his hand, is detected
doing this by his parents or by the persons in charge
of him, and is terrorized by the threat that his penis
will be cut off. The effect of this ‘ castration threat ’
is in direct proportion to the value set upon this part
of the body, i.e., quite extraordinarily deep-rooted and
persistent. Sagas and myths testify to the revolt in
the childish feelings, to the horror which is then linked
to the castration complex, and this later is remembered
with corresponding reluctance by consciousness. The
woman’s genitalia, seen subsequently and regarded as
mutilated, recall this threat, and thus awaken in the
homosexual horror instead of pleasure. This reaction
is not altered by his learning through science that

67

the childish assumption is not so far wrong after all,
namely, that a woman also possesses a penis. Anatomy
has recognized the clitoris within the female pudenda
as an organ homologous to the penis, and the physiology
of sexual processes has been able to add that this little
penis which no longer grows behaves in the childhood
of the woman like a genuine and real penis, that it is
the site of excitations which leads to its being touched,
that its excitability gives the sexual activity of little
girls a male character, and that it needs an effort of
repression in the years of puberty to make the woman
develop through discarding this male sexuality. The
fact that the sexual function of many women is crippled
by their obstinately clinging to this clitoris excitability
—so that they remain anæsthetic in coitus, or that
repression succeeds so excessively that its action is
partly nullified by hysterical compensatory formations
—all this shows that the infantile sexual theory that a
woman possesses a penis like a man has some truth in it.

One can easily observe that little girls are quite in
agreement with their brothers’ estimate. They develop
a great interest in this part of a boy’s body, but this
interest is at once dominated by jealousy. They feel
themselves injured; they make attempts to urinate
in the position that is possible to the boy by his posses-
sion of the big penis, and when they express the wish,
‘I should love to be a boy’, we know what lack the
wish is to remedy.

If children could follow the hint given them by the
excitation in the penis, they would get a little nearer
to the solution of their problems. That the baby
grows in the mother’s body is obviously not a sufficient
explanation. How does it get there? What starts it
developing there? That the father has something to
do with it is probable; indeed, he declares that the
baby is also his child.¹ The penis, too, certainly also
has its share in these mysterious happenings; it testi-
fies to this by the accompanying excitation in it

¹Freud, op. cit.

68

during all this thought-
work. Along with this excita-
tion obscure impulses are roused, which the child does
not know how to account for—to do something violent,
to press in, to knock to pieces, to burst open a hole
somewhere. But when the child seems thus in a fair
way to arrive at the existence of the vagina, and to
attribute to the father’s penis an act of incursion into
the mother which should create the baby in the body
of the mother, the inquiry breaks off helplessly ; for
at this point there stands in the way the theory that
the mother possesses a penis like a man, and the
existence of the cavity which receives the penis remains
undiscovered to the child. One can readily surmise
that the lack of success of this effort of thought
facilitates a rejection and forgetting of it. These
speculations and doubts, however, become the prototype
of all later thought-
work on problems, and the first
failure has a crippling effect for ever after.

Their ignorance of the vagina again makes it possible
for children to have a conviction which constitutes the
second of their sexual theories. If the baby grows in
the body of the mother and is then detached from it,
this can only happen by the sole possible way of the
anal aperture. The child must be expelled like
excrement, like a motion. If in later childhood the
same question is the subject of solitary reflection or of
a discussion between two children, then the explana-
tions probably are that the baby comes out of the
navel, which opens, or that the belly is slit and the
child taken out, as happens to the wolf in the tale of
Little Red Riding-
Hood. These theories are expressed
aloud and later consciously remembered ; they no
longer contain anything shocking. These same children
have then completely forgotten that in earlier years
they believed another sexual theory, which since then
has undergone the subsequent repression of the anal
sexual components. At that time an evacuation was
something which could be spoken about in the nursery
without shame ; the child was still not so far distant

69

from his constitutional coprophilic inclinations ; it was
no degradation then to come into the world like a mass
of fæces, which had not yet been attained by disgust.
The cloaca theory, which is valid for so many animals,
was the most natural and the only one which could
force itself upon the child as probable.

Then, however, it was only logical that the child
should refuse to grant women the painful monopoly
of giving birth to children. If babies are born through
the anus then a man can give birth just as well as a
woman. A boy can therefore fancy that he too has
children of his own without our needing to accuse him
of feminine inclinations. It is only his still active anal
erotism at work.

If the cloaca theory of birth is preserved in con-
sciousness in later years of childhood, which occasionally
happens, it is then accompanied by another solution of
the question concerning the origin of children, one
which, it is true, is no longer the original one. It is
like that in fairy-tales. One eats some particular thing
and from this one gets a child. The insane re-animate
this infantile birth theory. A maniac, for instance,
will lead the visiting physician to a heap of fæces which
she has deposited in a corner of her cell, and say to him,
laughing, ‘That is the child I bore to-day ’.

The third of the typical sexual theories appears
in children when through some unforeseen domestic
occurrence they witness parental sexual intercourse,
concerning which they are then able to obtain only a
very incomplete idea. Whatever detail it may be that
comes under their observation, whether it is the position
of the two people, or the sounds, or certain accessory
circumstances, in all cases they arrive at the same
conclusion, that is, at what we may call the sadistic
conception of coitus, seeing in it something that the
stronger person inflicts on the weaker by force, and
comparing it, especially the boy, to a fight as they know
it from their childish play, in which, by the way, an
admixture of sexual excitation is also not wanting.

70

I have not been able to establish whether children
recognize this procedure which they observe between
the parents as the necessary missing link in the problem
of the birth of children; more often it appears that
this connection is overlooked by children for the very
reason that they had interpreted the love-
act as an act
of violence. But this sadistic conception itself gives
the impression of a re-
appearance of that obscure
impulse towards cruel activity which was linked up
with penis-
excitation when the child first reflected
upon the puzzle of where children come from. The
possibility cannot be excluded that that precocious
sadistic impulse, which might have led to discovery
of the mystery of coitus, itself appeared first under the
influence of very dim memories of parental intercourse
for which the child had obtained material, without at
the time making use of it, when it shared the bedroom
of its parents in the first years of its life.¹⁾

The sadistic theory of coitus, which by itself becomes
a false guide where it might have led to enlightenment,
is again the expression of one of the inborn components
of the sexual instinct, any one of which may be more
or less strongly marked in any particular child, and
thus the sadistic conception is to a certain extent true;
in part it divines the essence of the sexual act and the
‘antagonism of the sexes’ which precedes it. Often,
too, the child is in a position to support this conception
by accidental observations which it understands in
part correctly, in part falsely. In many marriages the
wife, in fact, regularly opposes the matrimonial embrace,
which to her brings no pleasure and the risk of a
fresh pregnancy, and thus to the child who is supposed
to be asleep (or pretending to be asleep) the mother
might give an impression that could only be explained
as meaning warding off an act of violence. At other
times the whole marriage presents to the observant child

¹⁾In his autobiographical book entitled Monsieur Nicolas, published
in 1794, this sadistic misconception of coitus is confirmed by Restif de
la Bretonne, who there relates an experience from his fourth year.

71

the spectacle of an unceasing quarrel, expressed by loud
words and unfriendly gestures, so that the child need
not wonder that this quarrel goes on in the night, too,
and is finally decided by the very same means which
the child himself is accustomed to make use of in its
intercourse with its brothers, sisters and companions,
that is, by a fight.

The child also regards it as a confirmation of his
idea if he discovers spots of blood in the bed or on his
mother’s linen. These are to him a proof that in the
night an attack of this kind by the father on the mother
has again taken place, while we should rather take the
fresh spots of blood to mean that sexual intercourse
for the time being had ceased. Much of the inexplic-
able ‘horror of blood’ in the nervous finds its explana-
tion in this connection. The child’s mistake again
covers a small part of the truth, for in certain well-known
circumstances a trace of blood is indeed regarded as a
sign of initiated sexual intercourse.

In less direct connection with the insoluble problem
of where children come from, the child occupies itself
with the question of what the nature and the content
is of the state called ‘being married’; and it answers
the question differently according to its accidental
observations of its parents combined with its own
impulses which are still invested with pleasurable
feeling. All that these answers appear to have in
common is that marriage promises pleasurable gratifi-
cation, and presupposes a disregard for modesty. The
idea I have most frequently met with is that ‘one
urinates before the other’; a variation of this which
sounds as if it signified better knowledge symbolically
is that ‘the man urinates into the woman’s chamber’.
On other occasions the meaning of marriage is supposed
to be that the two persons show their buttocks to
each other (without shame). In one case in which
training had succeeded in postponing sexual knowledge
especially late, a fourteen-year-old girl who had already
begun to menstruate arrived at the idea from reading

72

that being married signified ‘mixing blood’, and
since her own sister had not yet had a period the
lustful girl attempted to outrage a visitor who con-
fessed that she was just menstruating, so as to compel
her to take part in this ‘mixing blood’.

The infantile ideas about the nature of marriage,
which are not seldom retained by the conscious memory,
have great significance for the symptoms of later
neurotic illness. They come into evidence first of all
in childish games, in which one does with the other
whatever it is that constitutes being married, and then
later on the wish to be married can choose the infantile
form of expression when it appears in a phobia or some
similar symptom which at first sight seemed incom-
prehensible.¹

These are the most important of the typical sexual
theories that children produce spontaneously in early
childhood-years under the influence of the components
of the sexual instinct. I know that the material is far
from complete and that I have not established a full
connection between it and the rest of child-life. I
can here add a few supplementary remarks which
otherwise every experienced person would have missed
in my account. Thus, for instance, the significant
theory that one gets a child by a kiss, which obviously
betrays a pre-eminence of the erotogenic mouth zone.
In my experience this theory is exclusively feminine
and is sometimes met with as pathogenic in girls
whose sexual curiosity had undergone very strong
inhibition in childhood. One of my female patients
through an accidental observation happened upon the
theory of the ‘couvade’, which is well known among
many races as a general practice, and probably has the
purpose of contradicting that doubt about paternity
that is never quite to be overcome. After the birth
of his child, a rather strange uncle of hers remained
for days at home and received visitors in his night-
gown.

¹⁾The games that are significant in later neuroses are the ‘doctor’
game and the game of ‘father and mother’.

73

shirt, so she concluded that both parents had a share
in the birth and must go to bed.
About the tenth or eleventh year information about
sexual matters comes to children. A child who has
grown up unchecked in its social relations, or who in
some other way has found a good opportunity for
observation, communicates to other children what he
knows, because by doing so he can feel himself to be
grown-up and superior. What children learn in this
way is mostly correct, that is, the existence of the
vagina and its use is revealed to them, but otherwise
the enlightenment which they get from one another is
frequently mixed with false ideas, and burdened with
the remains of older infantile sexual theories. It is
scarcely ever complete and sufficient to solve the original
problems. Just as formerly with the ignorance of the
vagina, so now ignorance of the semen prevents under-
standing of the whole process. The child cannot guess
that out of the male sexual organ another substance
can be expelled besides urine, and occasionally an
‘innocent’ girl on her wedding night is still indignant
because the man has ‘urinated into her’. This infor-
mation acquired before puberty links up with a fresh
impetus in childish inquiries; the theories which the
child now produces, however, have no longer the
typical and original stamp, which was characteristic
of the early primary ones as long as the infantile sexual
components were uninhibited and untransformed and
could come to expression in these theories. The later
intellectual efforts to solve the sexual puzzle seemed
to me not worth the trouble of collecting, nor have
they much claim to a pathogenic significance. Their
multiplicity is naturally mainly dependent upon the
nature of the first information received, their signifi-
cance consists rather in that they re-awaken
unconscious vestiges of that first period of sexual
interest, so that not seldom masturbatory sexual
activities and a part of the detachment of feeling from
the parents is linked up with them. Hence the

74

condemning judgement of teachers that such information
at this age ‘corrupts’ children.

A few examples may show what elements often
enter into these later speculations by children about
sexual life. A girl had heard from her school com-
panions that the man gives the woman an egg, which she
hatches in her body. A boy who had also heard of the
egg, identified it with the testicle, which is vulgarly
called by the same name, and thereupon puzzled his head
how the content of the scrotum could always become
renewed. The information given seldom reaches as far
as to prevent important doubts on the matter of sexual
processes. Thus girls may come to expect that coitus
happens only on one single occasion but lasts very
long, for twenty-four hours, and that from this one
occasion come all the successive children. One would
suppose that this child had knowledge of the process
of propagation in certain insects; however, this con-
jecture was not confirmed and the theory appeared to
be an independent creation. Other girls ignore the
time of gestation, the life in the womb, and suppose
that the child appears immediately after the night of
the first connection. Marcel Prévost has turned this
mistake of young girls into an amusing story in one
of his Lettres de femmes. Hardly to be exhausted and
perhaps in general not uninteresting is this theme of
the later sexual inquiries of children, or of adolescents
who have been delayed at a childish stage; but it lies
further from my purpose, and I must only call special
attention to the fact that many errors are invented by
children in order to contradict older, better but now
unconscious and repressed knowledge.

The way in which the child behaves when he
receives information also has its significance. In many
children sexual repression has gone so far that they
will not hear anything, and these may also succeed in
remaining ignorant until even later (apparently, at
least) till the knowledge dating from early childhood
comes to light in the psycho-analysis of neurotics. I

75

know also of two boys between ten and thirteen years
old, who certainly listened to sexual information but
gave their informant the averting answer: ‘It is
possible that your father and other people do such
things, but I know for certain that my father would
never do it’. However this later attitude in children
towards satisfying their sexual curiosity may vary,
we can postulate a thoroughly uniform behaviour in
them in early years and believe that at that period
they were all eager to find out what it is the parents
do with each other to make the babies.