m his father the desire for
moral cleanliness, the knowledge of good and of evil, and a cordial
dislike for everything that is sensual, self-indulgent, or nasty.
Talks on such subjects should be very infrequent, but I believe that,
if "depolarisation" is to be achieved, they must be repeated every now
and then during later childhood and in adolescence. To attempt to
impart all this interesting information in a single constrained and
awkward interview is to court failure, or at least to run the risk
that the explanation is not fully understood, so that the child is
mystified, or even offended in his sense of propriety.

I have dwelt at some length upon this question of sex education,
because it is one of especial difficulty when we have to deal with a
child of nervous inheritance, or with a child in whom symptoms of
neurosis have developed in a faulty home environment. Misconduct in
sexual matters is a sign of deficient nervous and moral control, and
when the conduct in other respects is ill-regulated, the development
of sexual processes must be watched with some anxiety. There are those
who see a still more intimate relationship between errors of conduct
or symptoms of neurosis in childhood and the sexual instincts.

It is perhaps necessary here briefly to refer to the teaching of
Sigmund Freud of Vienna, because his views have attracted a great deal
of attention in this country and have become familiar to a great part
of the reading public. Freud believes that the origin of many abnormal
mental states and of the disturbances of conduct which are dependent
upon them is to be traced back to forgotten experiences, the
recollection of which has faded from the conscious mind, but which are
still capable of exerting an indirect influence. He regards the
process of forgetting, not as merely a passive fading of mental
impressions, but as an active process of repression, by which the
experience, and especially the unpleasant experience, is thrust and
kept out of consciousness. There thus arises a mental conflict between
the forces of repression and the forces which tend to obtrude the
recollection into consciousness, and at times the energy engendered in
this conflict escapes from the censorship of the repressing forces and
finds vent in the production of abnormal mental states or disorders of
conduct. Thus to take a simple example, a business man who has had a
trying day at the office, on returning home in the evening may suc