forward by Freud need not be dismissed offhand.  Freud has often manifested the insight of genius, and he refrains from molding his conceptions in those inflexible shapes which have sometimes been adopted by the more dogmatic psychoanalysts who have followed him.  Nor need we be unduly shocked by the “incestuous” air of the “Oedipus Complex,"[226] as it is commonly called, which figures as a component of the process.  The word “incest,” though it has been used by Freud himself, seems scarcely a proper word to apply to the vague and elementary feelings of children, especially when those feelings scarcely pass beyond a stage of non-localized and therefore really presexual feelings (in the ordinary use of the term “sexual”) which may be regarded as natural and normal.  The Freudian conception is misrepresented and prejudiced by the statement that it involves “incest."[227] When a child loves its mother with an entire love, that love necessarily involves the germs which in later life become separated and developed into sexual love, but it is inaccurate to term this love of the child “incestuous.”  It is quite easily conceivable that the psychic mechanism of the establishment of homosexuality has in some cases corresponded to the course described by Freud.  It may also be admitted that, as psychoanalysts claim, the pronounced horror feminae occasionally found in male inverts may plausibly be regarded as the reversal of an early and disappointed feminine attraction.  But it is impossible to regard this mechanism as invariable or even frequent.  It is quite true, and I have found ample evidence of the fact, that inverts are often very closely attached to their mothers, even to a greater degree, indeed, than is the rule among normal children, and often like to be in constant association with their mothers.  But this attraction is quite misunderstood if it is regarded as a peculiarly sexual attraction.  Indeed, the whole point of the attraction is that the inverted boy vaguely feels his own feminine disposition and so shuns the uncongenial amusements and society of his own sex for the sympathy and community of tastes which he finds concentrated in his mother.  So far from such association being evidence of sexual attraction it might more reasonably be regarded as evidence of its absence; just as the association of boys among themselves, and of girls among themselves, even in co-educational schools, is proof of the prevalence of heterosexual rather than of homosexual feeling.  Confirmation of this point of view may be found in the fact—­overlooked and sometimes even denied by psychoanalysts—­that frequently, even in early childhood and simultaneously with this community of feeling with his mother, the homosexual boy is already experiencing the predominant fascination of the male.  He feels it long before the age at which Narcissism is apt to occur, or at which self-consciousness has become sufficiently developed to allow the internal censure on unpermitted emotions to operate, or any