e sexual impulse may undergo a complete transformation in this
direction. "I believe there is really a tendency in women," a lady writes
in a letter, "to allow maternal feeling to take the place of sexual
feeling. Very often a woman's feeling for her husband becomes this (though
he may be twenty years older than herself); sometimes it does not,
remaining purely sex feeling. Sometimes it is for some other man she has
this curious self-obliterating maternal feeling. It is not necessarily
connected with sex intercourse. A prostitute, who has relations with
dozens of men, may have it for some feeble drunken fool, who perhaps goes
after other women. I once saw the change from sex feeling to mother
feeling, as I call it, come almost suddenly over a woman after she had
lived about four years with a man who was unfaithful to her. Then, when
all real sex feeling, the hatred of the woman he followed, the desire he
should give her love and tenderness, had all gone, came the other feeling,
and she said to me, 'You don't understand at all; he's only my little
baby; nothing he does can make any difference to me now.' As I grow older
and understand women's natures better, I can see almost at once which
relation it is a woman has to her husband, or any given man. It is this
feeling, and not sex passion, that keeps woman from being free." Not only
is there a sexual association in the impulse to foster and protect, there
would appear to be a similar element also in the response to that impulse.
Freud has especially insisted on the partly sexual character of the
child's feelings for those who care for it and tend it and satisfy its
needs. It is begun in earliest infancy; "whoever has seen the sated infant
sink back from the breast, to fall asleep with flushed cheeks and happy
smile, must say that the picture is adequate to the expression of the
sexual satisfaction of later life." The lips, moreover, are the earliest
erogenous zone. "There will, perhaps, be some opposition," Freud remarks
(_Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie_, pp. 36, 64), "to the
identification of the child's feelings of tenderness and appreciation for
those who tend it with sexual love, but I believe that exact psychological
analysis will place the identity beyond doubt. The relationship of the
child with the person who tends it is for it a continual source of sexual
excitement and satisfaction flowing from the erogenous zones, especially
since the fostering person--as a r