When it comes to the exact words in which to explain the phenomena of generation and birth each parent must naturally find his own way.  The main point is that we must tell the truth and not try to improve on nature.  If we say that the baby grows under the mother’s heart and later the child learns that this is not true, he inevitably gets the idea that there is something not nice about the part of the body in which the baby does grow.  What could be wrong with the simple truth that the father plants a tiny seed in the mother’s body and that this seed joins with another little seed already there and grows until it is a real baby ready to come into the world?  The question as to how the father plants the seed need cause no alarm.  If brothers and sisters are brought up together with no artificial sense of false modesty, they very early learn the difference between the male and the female body.  It is simple enough to tell the little child the function of the male structure.  And it is easy to explain that the seeds do not grow until the little boy and girl have grown to be man and woman and that the way to be well and to have fine strong children is to leave the generative organs alone until that time.  A sense of the dignity and high purpose of these organs is far more likely to prevent perversions—­to say nothing of nervousness—­than is an attitude of taboo and silence.]

A certain amount of repression is inevitable and useful, but a neurotic is merely an exaggerated represser.  He represses so much of himself that it will not stay down.[37] He builds up a permanent resistance which automatically acts as a dam to his normal sex instinct and forces it into undesirable outlets.

[Footnote 37:  “A neurosis is a partial failure of repression.”  Frink:  Morbid Fears and Compulsions.]

A resistance is a chronic repression, repression that has become fixed and subconscious, a habit that has lost its flexibility and outlives its usefulness.  It is a fixation of repression, and is built out of an over-strong complex or emotional thought habit, acquired during childhood, incorporated into the conscience and carried over into maturity, where it warps judgment and interferes with normal development because it is fundamentally untrue and at variance with the laws of nature.

=Too Much Day-Dreaming.= The fourth habit which holds back the adult from maturity and predisposes toward “nerves” is the habit of imagination.  It need hardly be said that a certain kind of imagination is a good thing and one of man’s greatest assets.  But the essence of day-dreaming is the exact opposite; it is the desire to see things as they are not, but as we should like them to be,—­not in order that we may bring them to pass, but for the mere pleasure of dreaming.  Instead of turning a microscope or a telescope on the world of reality, as positive imagination does, this negative variety refuses even to look with the naked eye.  To dream is easier than to do; to build up phantasies is easier than to build up a reputation or a fortune; to think a forbidden pleasure is easier than to sublimate.  “Pleasure-thinking” is not only easier than “reality-thinking,”—­it is the older way.