erversion may attain great importance for the
sexual life of the child. Still, from my investigations of the childhood
years of normal and neurotic patients, I must conclude that the impulse
for looking can appear in the child as a spontaneous sexual
manifestation. Small children, whose attention has once been directed to
their own genitals--usually by masturbation--are wont to progress in
this direction without outside interference, and to develop a vivid
interest in the genitals of their playmates. As the occasion for the
gratification of such curiosity is generally afforded during the
gratification of both excrementitious needs, such children become
_voyeurs_ and are zealous spectators at the voiding of urine and feces
of others, After this tendency has been repressed, the curiosity to see
the genitals of others (one's own or those of the other sex) remains as
a tormenting desire which in some neurotic cases furnishes the strongest
motive power for the formation of symptoms.

The cruelty component of the sexual impulse develops in the child with
still greater independence of those sexual activities which are
connected with erogenous zones. Cruelty is especially near the childish
character, since the inhibition which restrains the impulse to mastery
before it causes pain to others--that is, the capacity for
sympathy--develops comparatively late. As we know, a thorough
psychological analysis of this impulse has not as yet been successfully
accomplished; we may assume that the cruel feelings emanate from the
impulse to mastery and appear at a period in the sexual life before the
genitals have taken on their later role. It then dominates a phase of
the sexual life, which we shall later describe as the pregenital
organization. Children who are distinguished for evincing especial
cruelty to animals and playmates may be justly suspected of intensive
and premature sexual activity in the erogenous zones; and in a
simultaneous prematurity of all sexual impulses, the erogenous sexual
activity surely seems to be primary. The absence of the barrier of
sympathy carries with it the danger that the connections between cruelty
and the erogenous impulses formed in childhood cannot be broken in later
life.

An erogenous source of the passive impulse for cruelty (masochism) is
found in the painful irritation of the gluteal region which is familiar
to all educators since the confessions of J.J. Rousseau. This has justly
caused them to