The gynecocratic stage actually survives to this day in the nursery.  Here the mother rules supreme; the father is an intruder, the brothers are dominated by their sisters, often their juniors.  Women mature at an earlier age than men; this assertion applies with equal force to individual and sex in connection with the history of civilisation.  After he has left the nursery, there follows in the life of the boy a period during which he associates only with his school-friends, shuns the society of his mother and sisters, and is ashamed of his female relatives.  This represents the revival of the men’s unions of remote antiquity in the life of the individual of the present day.

At the period of puberty the sexual instinct makes itself felt for the first time; as a rule, if its nature is not recognised, it is accompanied by restlessness and depression.  I do not believe that the instinct is, as soon as it appears, directed to the other sex, or anything else outside the individual.  This fact cannot be explained by want of opportunity, shyness or bad example; there is a positive reason for it; the longing for a member of the other sex is still unfelt.

Between his twentieth and thirtieth year a man is often dominated by an enthusiastic spiritual love quite unconnected with the sensuality which has hitherto ruled his emotions.  I will not elaborate the growth of this love and the new feelings which arise in connection with it; just as in the remote past the sense of personality was born as the centre of a new consciousness, so the individual now undergoes a period of purification and regeneration; through the love for his mistress he discovers his inmost self, of which, until now, he had been practically ignorant.  The generative, undifferentiated impulse is supplanted by the love for an individual and stigmatised as base and contemptible.  Guincelli’s words characterising the second erotic stage of the race:  Amor e cor gentil sono una cosa, to-day apply to the second stage in the life of the individual.  It also occurs that in the heart of a man whom reality has failed to satisfy an ideal woman gradually wins life and shape.  Sometimes it is the idealised counterpart of an actual woman, but not infrequently it is a vague, unsubstantial shadow.  Here we have the deification of the woman reproduced in the heart of the individual.  To illustrate my point, I will quote the very pertinent conversation between Foldal, the embittered old clerk, and John Gabriel Borkman (Ibsen).

     Borkman:  Indeed!  Can you show me one who is any good?

     Foldal:  That’s just the point.  The few women I’ve known are no
     good at all.

     Borkman:  (with a sneer) What’s the good of them if you don’t know
     them?

     Foldal (excitedly):  Don’t say that, John Gabriel!  Isn’t it a
     magnificent, an ennobling thought, to know that somewhere, far
     away, never mind where, the true woman lives?