I believe that the infantile amnesia which causes the individual to look upon his childhood as if it were a prehistoric time and conceals from him the beginning of his own sexual life—­that this amnesia is responsible for the fact that one does not usually attribute any value to the infantile period in the development of the sexual life.  One single observer cannot fill the gap which has been thus produced in our knowledge.  As early as 1896 I had already emphasized the significance of childhood for the origin of certain important phenomena connected with the sexual life, and since then I have not ceased to put into the foreground the importance of the infantile factor for sexuality.

THE SEXUAL LATENCY PERIOD OF CHILDHOOD AND ITS INTERRUPTIONS

The extraordinary frequent discoveries of apparently abnormal and exceptional sexual manifestations in childhood, as well as the discovery of infantile reminiscences in neurotics, which were hitherto unconscious, allow us to sketch the following picture of the sexual behavior of childhood.[5]

It seems certain that the newborn child brings with it the germs of sexual feelings which continue to develop for some time and then succumb to a progressive suppression, which is in turn broken through by the proper advances of the sexual development and which can be checked by individual idiosyncrasies.  Nothing is known concerning the laws and periodicity of this oscillating course of development.  It seems, however, that the sexual life of the child mostly manifests itself in the third or fourth year in some form accessible to observation.[6]

The Sexual Inhibition.—­It is during this period of total or at least partial latency that the psychic forces develop which later act as inhibitions on the sexual life, and narrow its direction like dams.  These psychic forces are loathing, shame, and moral and esthetic ideal demands.  We may gain the impression that the erection of these dams in the civilized child is the work of education; and surely education contributes much to it.  In reality, however, this development is organically determined and can occasionally be produced without the help of education.  Indeed education remains properly within its assigned realm only if it strictly follows the path of the organic determinant and impresses it somewhat cleaner and deeper.

Reaction Formation and Sublimation.—­What are the means that accomplish these very important constructions so significant for the later personal culture and normality?  They are probably brought about at the cost of the infantile sexuality itself, the influx of which has not stopped even in this latency period—­the energy of which indeed has been turned away either wholly or partially from sexual utilization and conducted to other aims.  The historians of civilization seem to be unanimous in the opinion that such deviation of sexual motive powers from sexual aims to new aims, a process which merits the name of sublimation, has furnished powerful components for all cultural accomplishments.  We will therefore add that the same process acts in the development of every individual, and that it begins to act in the sexual latency period.[7]