These love passages never led me into indelicate behavior (I was once threatened with such treatment myself by a stranger whose acquaintance I made one day at the British Museum, when a lad of 15.  He took me to his bedroom at an inn, locked the door, and showed me a collection of coins, giving me some, and, while doing so, attempted to take indecent liberties; but I pretended that I must catch a certain train, unlocked the door, and made a hasty escape), nor was any gratification sought beyond occasional kisses and other innocent endearments, though such caresses would sometimes excite an erection, which I carefully concealed.  These amours were, however, no outcome of perverted instinct, nor were they any bar to fancies for the opposite sex which affected my imagination rather than my heart.”

HISTORY XVI.—­This history is given in the subject’s own words:  A.N., 34 years of age, a university graduate, devoted to learning and interested in philosophy and theology.  He is happily married and the father of an only daughter.  Since puberty he has enjoyed excellent health.

“Looking back he finds the beginnings of sexual feeling obscure.  This feeling is by no means identical in its progress with the knowledge of the phenomena of sex generally.  The latter he acquired thus:  His mother told him at a very early age the outlines of the phenomena of birth and explained to him (perhaps at that time unnecessarily) that the genital organs of little girls were different from his own.  This piece of knowledge led to his asking, when 9 years old, a little girl cousin who came to live with the family (he was an only child) and who shared his bed to let him see her genitalia.  This she readily did and also invited him to coitus, which she described as a ‘nice game.’  He complied, but without, of course, any feeling of pleasure or any understanding of the nature of what he was doing.  Shortly after this he went to a day school, where, amid the extraordinarily coarse conversation of the boys, he was initiated into all the more obvious phenomena of sex.  But still it was only a matter of intellectual curiosity.  As such it had a strange fascination for him, and to this day he remembers many of the obscene words and phrases, as, for example, a set of indecent verses beginning ‘William, the milkman, sat under a tree,’ describing coitus, though some of the details were yet misunderstood by him.  That up to his tenth or eleventh year no real sexual desire was awakened is plain from the fact that there was no desire for any repetition of attempts at coitus with his cousin, though he did indeed, again out of curiosity, finger her genitals sometimes, a thing which she, grown evidently more fastidious, reported to his mother, who gravely reprimanded him, telling him that it was the ‘beginning of all evil.’

“Desire was awakened gradually and, as I have said, obscurely.  Not only at school, but among his own cousins, especially two