st details.

[26] A psychoneurosis very often associates itself with a manifest
inversion in which the heterosexual feeling becomes subjected to
complete repression.--It is but just to state that the necessity of a
general recognition of the tendency to inversion in psychoneurotics was
first imparted to me personally by Wilh. Fliess, of Berlin, after I had
myself discovered it in some cases.

[27] It is not easy to justify here this assumption which was taken from
a definite class of neurotic diseases. On the other hand, it would be
impossible to assert anything definite concerning the impulses if one
did not take the trouble of mentioning these presuppositions.

[28] One should here think of Moll's assertion, who divides the sexual
impulse into the impulses of contrectation and detumescence.
Contrectation signifies a desire to touch the skin.

II

THE INFANTILE SEXUALITY

It is a part of popular belief about the sexual impulse that it is
absent in childhood and that it first appears in the period of life
known as puberty. This, though a common error, is serious in its
consequences and is chiefly due to our present ignorance of the
fundamental principles of the sexual life. A comprehensive study of the
sexual manifestations of childhood would probably reveal to us the
existence of the essential features of the sexual impulse, and would
make us acquainted with its development and its composition from various
sources.

*The Neglect of the Infantile.*--It is remarkable that those writers who
endeavor to explain the qualities and reactions of the adult individual
have given so much more attention to the ancestral period than to the
period of the individual's own existence--that is, they have attributed
more influence to heredity than to childhood. As a matter of fact, it
might well be supposed that the influence of the latter period would be
easier to understand, and that it would be entitled to more
consideration than heredity.[1] To be sure, one occasionally finds in
medical literature notes on the premature sexual activities of small
children, about erections and masturbation and even actions resembling
coitus, but these are referred to merely as exceptional occurrences, as
curiosities, or as deterring examples of premature perversity. No author
has to my knowledge recognized the normality of the sexual impulse in
childhood, and in the numerous writings on the development of the child
the chapter on "Sex