heir lives, want to
become conductors and drivers. They are wont to ascribe to railroad
activities an extraordinary and mysterious interest, and during the age
of phantastic activity (shortly before puberty) they utilize these as a
nucleus for exquisite sexual symbolisms. The desire to connect railroad
travelling with sexuality apparently originates from the pleasurable
character of the sensation of motion. When the repression later sets in
and changes so many of the childish likes into their opposites, these
same persons as adolescents and adults then react to the rocking and
rolling with nausea and become terribly exhausted by a railroad journey,
or they show a tendency to attacks of anxiety during the journey, and by
becoming obsessed with railroad phobia they protect themselves against a
repetition of the painful experiences.

This also fits in with the not as yet understood fact that the
concurrence of fear with mechanical shaking produces the severest
hysterical forms of traumatic neurosis. It may at least be assumed that
inasmuch as even a slight intensity of these influences becomes a source
of sexual excitement, the action of an excessive amount of the same will
produce a profound disorder in the sexual mechanism.

*Muscular Activity.*--It is well known that the child has need for
strong muscular activity, from the gratification of which it draws
extraordinary pleasure. Whether this pleasure has anything to do with
sexuality, whether it includes in itself sexual satisfaction? or can be
the occasion of sexual excitement; all this may be refuted by critical
consideration, which will probably be directed also to the position
taken above that the pleasure in the sensations of passive movement are
of sexual character or that they are sexually exciting. The fact
remains, however, that a number of persons report that they experienced
the first signs of excitement in their genitals during fighting or
wrestling with playmates, in which situation, besides the general
muscular exertion, there is an intensive contact with the opponent's
skin which also becomes effective. The desire for muscular contest with
a definite person, like the desire for word contest in later years, is a
good sign that the object selection has been directed toward this
person. "Was sich liebt, das neckt sich."[21] In the promotion of sexual
excitement through muscular activity we might recognize one of the
sources of the sadistic impulse. The infa