There still may be timid persons who try to deny that there is such a thing as the sexual life of the child, but those individuals pay themselves no compliment when they show a revulsion to that idea. Such an attitude signifies a negation of biological fact; a denial of orderly organic processes; an attempted disavowal of an inexorable cosmic law. Such an attitude is obviously stupid.
Sexuality implies a fundamental instinct of the emotional life, which for many years is governed entirely by unconscious, automatic impulses.
So careful a student and conservative an authority as the late Dr. G. Stanley Hall stated that "We now know that sex life begins in infancy long before it has any localization in the erogenic zones; that its erethism may be stimulated by the pacifier or stoppered rubber nipple as early as the sucking stage; that half a dozen other forms of what Moll calls 'the detumescence[1] instinct' may be cultivated unawares before it is directed toward or dependent upon other persons—that is, before the contrectation stage unfolds—and this in boys and girls alike before anything formally called sex makes its appearance. . . ."
The Autoerotic Stage. The child's sexuality is at first autoerotic—a term coined by Havelock Ellis. This means that the child's erotic impulses are turned upon itself, primitive state which many adults never entirely outgrow—to their misfortune.
In the course of normal development, the erotic attachment becomes transferred to another, or others, nearest to
- ↑ In this sense, detumescence represents the release or discharge of either tension or energy, and may be either physical or psychological. All pleasure may be considered a release of tension of some kind. When the tension is strong, we have pain; hence pleasure or a feeling of well-being always follows relief from pain, because the tension has been released.
