ciousness the forgotten material, and thereby
to remove a compulsion which emanates from the unconscious psychic
material.

*The Return of the Infantile Masturbation.*--The sexual excitation of
the nursing period returns during the designated years of childhood as a
centrally determined tickling sensation demanding onanistic
gratification, or as a pollution-like process which, analogous to the
pollution of maturity, may attain gratification without the aid of any
action. The latter case is more frequent in girls and in the second half
of childhood; its determinants are not well understood, but it often,
though not regularly, seems to have as a basis a period of early active
onanism. The symptomatology of this sexual manifestation is poor; the
genital apparatus is still undeveloped and all signs are therefore
displayed by the urinary apparatus which is, so to say, the guardian of
the genital apparatus. Most of the so-called bladder disturbances of
this period are of a sexual nature; whenever the enuresis nocturna does
not represent an epileptic attack it corresponds to a pollution.

The return of the sexual activity is determined by inner and outer
causes which can be conjectured from the formation of the symptoms of
neurotic diseases and definitely revealed by psychoanalytic
investigations. The internal causes will be discussed later, the
accidental outer causes attain at this time a great and permanent
significance. As the first outer cause we have the influence of
seduction which prematurely treats the child as a sexual object; under
conditions favoring impressions this teaches the child the gratification
of the genital zones, and thus usually forces it to repeat this
gratification in onanism. Such influences can come from adults or other
children. I cannot admit that I overestimated its frequency or its
significance in my contributions to the etiology of hysteria,[17] though
I did not know then that normal individuals may have the same
experiences in their childhood, and hence placed a higher value on
seductions than on the factors found in the sexual constitution and
development.[18] It is quite obvious that no seduction is necessary to
awaken the sexual life of the child, that such an awakening may come on
spontaneously from inner sources.

*Polymorphous-perverse Disposition.*--It is instructive to know that
under the influence of seduction the child may become
polymorphous-perverse and may be misled into all so