on a farm, most of the
time without playmates or companions of my own age.

As far back as I can remember I indulged in elaborate day-dreams
in which I figured as the chief character along with a few others
who were chiefly creatures of my imagination, but at times
borrowed from reality. These others were always boys until I
learned the proper function of the sexual organs, when girls
usurped the whole stage in numbers beyond the limits of a Turkish
harem. Even at school my day-dreams were scarcely interrupted,
for my shyness and timidity made me very unpopular among my
schoolmates, who tormented me after the fashion of small boys or
neglected me, as the spirit moved them. To make matters worse, I
was brought up under the "sheltered life system," kept carefully
away from the "bad boys," which category included nearly all the
youngsters of the community, and deluged with moral homilies and
tirades on things religious until I was thoroughly convinced that
goodness and discomfort, the right and the unpleasant, were
strictly synonymous; and I was kept through much of the time
facing the prospect of an early death, to be followed by the good
old orthodox hell or the equal miseries of its gorgeous
alternative. I may say in all seriousness that this is a
conservative and unexaggerated account of one phase of my early
life--the one, I think, that tended most strongly to make me
introspective and morbid. Later on, when I was trying to abandon
the habit of masturbation, this early training greatly increased
the despair I felt at each successive failure.

The first traces of sexual excitement that I can now recall
occurred when I was about 4 years old. I had erections quite
frequently and found a mild pleasure in fondling my genitals when
these occurred, especially just after waking in the morning. I
had no notion of an orgasm, and never succeeded in producing one
until I was 13 years of age. In the summer of my sixth year I
experienced pleasurable sensations in daubing my genitals with
oil and then fondling or rubbing them, but I abandoned this
amusement after getting some irritating substance into the
meatus. A year later my mother warned me that playing with my
penis would "make me very sick," but since experience had taught
me that this was not true, my conviction that what was f