VII. The Sexual Activities of Children

ONE of the important achievements of psycho-analysis is the discovery that children possess a sexual life which finds utterance both in direct sexual activities and in sexual phantasies.

We know that masturbation occurs in general in the sucking stage and that it is very commonly prolonged, in a greater or less measure, right up to the latency period. (I need hardly say that we do not expect to find children, even small ones, masturbating openly.) In the period before puberty and particularly during puberty itself, masturbation becomes very frequent again. The period in which the child's sexual activities are least pronounced is the latency period. This is because the decline of the Oedipus complex is accompanied by a diminution in the force of instinctual trends. On the other hand, there is the still unexplained fact that it is at that very period that the child's struggle against masturbation is at its height. In his Hemmung, Symptom und Angst (1926), Freud says (S. 55) that during the latency period the energies of the child seem to be mainly taken up with the task of resisting the temptation to masturbate. His statement seems to support the view that even during the latency period the pressure of the id has not diminished to the extent commonly supposed, or else that the force exerted by the child's sense of guilt against its id-tendencies has increased.

In my opinion, the excessive sense of guilt which masturbatory activities arouse in children is really aimed at