oo many caresses are just as bad.
Sentimental self-indulgence on the part of the parents has been
repeatedly proved to be the cause of many a later illness for the
child. As the right kind of family love and comradeship, the kind that
leads to freedom and self-dependence, is among the highest forces in
life, so the wrong kind is among the worst. Parents and their
substitutes--nurses, sisters, and brothers--are but temporary
stopping-places for the growing love, stepping-stones to later
attachments which are biologically more necessary. The small boy who
lets himself be coddled and petted too long by his adoring relatives,
who does not shake off their caresses and run away to the other boys,
is doomed to failure, and, as we shall later see, probably to
illness.[12]

[Footnote 12: One of the best discussions of this theme is found in
the chapter "The Only or Favorite Child," by A.A. Brill, in
_Psychoanalysis_.]

In the later infantile period, the child, besides wanting to exhibit
his own body, shows marked interest in looking at the bodies of
others, and marked curiosity on sex-questions in general. He
particularly wants to know "where babies come from." If his questions
are unfortunately met by embarrassment or laughing evasion, or by
obvious lying about the stork or the doctor or the angels, his
curiosity is only whetted, and he comes to the very natural conclusion
that all matters of sex are sinful, disgusting, and indecent, and to
be investigated only on the sly. This conception cannot be brought
into harmony with the unconscious mental processes arising from his
race-instincts nor with his instinctive sense that "whatever is is
right." The resulting conflict in some four-year-old children is
surprisingly intense. Astonished indeed would many parents be if they
knew what was going on inside the heads of their "innocent" little
children; not "bad" things, but pathetic things which a little candor
would have avoided.

Alongside the rudimentary impulses of showing and looking, there is
developed another set of trends which Nature needs to use later on,
the so-called sadistic and masochistic impulses, the desire to
dominate and master and even to inflict pain, and its opposite impulse
which takes pleasure in yielding and submitting to mastery. These
traits, harking back to the time when the male needed to capture by
force, are of course much more evident in adolescence and especially
in love-making, but have their be