e towards coitus. Masturbation
has always been practised by him as a purely physical act,
unaccompanied, that is to say, by any imaginative ideas.

In most cases, the complete association of the processes of detumescence
and contrectation, such as occurs in the impulse towards coitus, first
takes place at a somewhat later age. This is so even when the sensory
element, which constitutes a part also of the contrectation impulse, has
been already clearly manifested. The contrectation impulse does not
consist solely in this, that the boy experiences a purely spiritual love
for the girl; it may rather happen that certain definite sexual bodily
peculiarities in a woman attract him. When such a boy one day
unexpectedly sees a girl's breasts, this may exercise on him a powerful
stimulus. Similarly, I have known instances in which, in the absence of
any evidence of definite seduction, a woman's genital organs have
excited a very young boy, without arousing any idea in his mind of
contact between _his own_ genitals and those of the woman. Conversely,
on many girls, masculine attributes, and especially the male genital
organs, sometimes exert a stimulating influence. But in these cases
also, the complete fusion of the processes of detumescence and
contrectation occurs very gradually. Sometimes the boy himself is
greatly astonished to discover that close contact with a person whom he
loves leads to erection and even ejaculation. At the outset the impulse
is much less definite than it is in adults. It is by gradual stages only
that the sense of indefinite longing develops into the impulse towards
sexual union in coitus; at first the imagination contemplates pictures
of a quite indefinite character.

Although, as we have seen, the processes both of detumescence and of
contrectation may manifest themselves primarily in childhood as
associated conscious sensations, by far the most common event is for the
processes of contrectation to appear separately, before those of
detumescence. From an inquiry relating to eighty-six heterosexual men,
who to the best of my belief were sexually normal, I ascertained that in
more than 75 per cent., the feelings of contrectation appeared first,
and not until after this had happened was the boy's consciousness
attracted by sensations in the genital organs. This appears rather
remarkable, inasmuch as we must assume that in the phylogeny of our
species the processes of detumescence appeared earlier. Orig