demand that physical punishment, which usually concerns
this part of the body, should be withheld from all children in whom the
libido might be forced into collateral roads by the later demands of
cultural education.[19]

THE INFANTILE SEXUAL INVESTIGATION

*Inquisitiveness.*--At the same time when the sexual life of the child
reaches its first bloom, from the age of three to the age of five, it
also evinces the beginning of that activity which is ascribed to the
impulse for knowledge and investigation. The desire for knowledge can
neither be added to the elementary components of the impulses nor can it
be altogether subordinated under sexuality. Its activity corresponds on
the one hand to a sublimating mode of acquisition and on the other hand
it labors with the energy of the desire for looking. Its relations to
the sexual life, however, are of particular importance, for we have
learned from psychoanalysis that the inquisitiveness of children is
attracted to the sexual problems unusually early and in an unexpectedly
intensive manner, indeed it perhaps may first be awakened by the sexual
problems.

*The Riddle of the Sphinx.*--It is not theoretical but practical
interests which start the work of the investigation activity in the
child. The threat to the conditions of his existence through the actual
or expected arrival of a new child, the fear of the loss in care and
love which is connected with this event, cause the child to become
thoughtful and sagacious. Corresponding with the history of this
awakening, the first problem with which it occupies itself is not the
question as to the difference between the sexes, but the riddle: from
where do children come? In a distorted form, which can easily be
unraveled, this is the same riddle which was given by the Theban Sphinx.
The fact of the two sexes is usually first accepted by the child without
struggle and hesitation. It is quite natural for the male child to
presuppose in all persons it knows a genital like his own, and to find
it impossible to harmonize the lack of it with his conception of others.

*The Castration Complex.*--This conviction is energetically adhered to
by the boy and tenaciously defended against the contradictions which
soon result, and are only given up after severe internal struggles
(castration complex). The substitutive formations of this lost penis of
the woman play a great part in the formation of many perversions.

The assumption of the sam