An Infantile Sexual Theory not Hitherto Noted

A patient in whose childhood there had been an unusually severe struggle between repression and sexual curiosity recounted to me during psycho-analysis two childish theories of procreation. The first was that the man embraces the woman and kisses her, and when this happens some of his spittle passes into her mouth and produces a child in her. Besides this theory, with which the psycho-analyst is familiar, the patient had constructed a second, according to which the man's breast, when he embraces the woman, excretes milk which passes into her breast.

I had never heard of this childish theory before. It certainly does not belong to the primary theories of sexuality which are formed by all children with a great degree of uniformity. Moreover, it was proved that the theory was constructed when the patient had already passed the age at which the primary theories are formed. Now since the views of children in later years vary greatly, according to the different external influences to which they are subjected, there would be little reason to spend time over this secondary sexual theory about which the patient told me. But the analysis of it helped me to understand better one of the common primary theories of reproduction, and this seems to justify me in making the present communication.

The capacity of loving the opposite sex was in this patient impaired owing to a vivid phantasy-life of a homosexual character. In part it was a question of passive homosexual phantasies, having reference to older men. These latter were father-substitutes; in relation to his father the patient identified himself with his mother in a manner which we know from other observations to be quite common. A second group of phantasies was active in character and concerned boys or, later, young men some years younger than the patient. He remembered that in early childhood he had a strong impulse to put his penis into the mouths of smaller boys, though he never did any such thing. Analysis show