During childhood, a
homosexual woman has experienced sexual feeling, directed now towards
boys, now towards girls. Later in life, when the homosexuality has
developed fully, the memory of the inclination towards boys fades away,
and her homosexual sentiments only are remembered. As a result, we often
find that the homosexual woman--and the converse is equally true of the
homosexual man--declares at first, when inquiries are made, that she has
never experienced any inclination for members of the other sex; whereas,
at any rate in a large proportion of cases, a stricter examination of
her memory, or the reports of other individuals, will reveal beyond
dispute that in childhood heterosexual inclinations were not lacking.

A further defect of memory has been made manifest to me by the study of
perversions. Processes which in childhood were entirely devoid of any
sexual tinge, but which later became associated with sex-feelings, very
readily acquire false sexual associations also when they are revived in
memory. Consider, for instance, the case of a homosexual man. He
remembers that, as a small boy, he was very fond of sitting on his
uncle's knees, and he believes that the pleasure he formerly experienced
was tinged by sexual feeling. In reality this was by no means the case.
His uncle took the boy on his knee in order to tell him a story.
Possibly, also, the riding movements which the uncle imitated by jogging
his knees up and down gave the child pleasure, which, however, was
entirely devoid of any admixture of sexual feeling. But in the
consciousness of the full-grown man, in whom homosexual feeling has
later undergone full development, all this becomes distorted. The
non-sexual motives are forgotten; he believes that even in early
childhood he had homosexual inclinations, and that for _this_ reason it
gave him pleasure to ride on his uncle's knees.

Nor is observation in any way adapted to furnish us with a clear picture
of the sexual life of the child. So little can be directly observed,
that in the absence of reports much would remain entirely unknown. From
the moment when the children gain a consciousness, however obscure, of
the nature of sexual processes, they almost invariably endeavour to
conceal their knowledge as much as possible, so that we shall discover
its existence only by a rare chance. None the less, the results of
direct observation are often important; sometimes because we are able to
watch children wh