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An attempt to trace the origin of the desire to acquire knowledge from the child's wish to satisfy his or her sexual curiosity during early childhood. Following the theme of Rank's paper, “Perversion and Neurose” (Zeitschrfft VIII), that the query, “Where do children come from ?” covers the deeper problem, “Can he himself bear a child?” a further question is raised. If the repression of the real wish of the child to give birth to an infant is the origin of the early curiosity, the subsequent gratification of this desire, in the acquisition of knowledge (which often occupies the first place in the life of the individual), leads back to the exclusion of the mature wish to have children. We find, therefore, the repression of the childish sexual curiosity produces either of two consequences, the successful sublimation of the component instinct Curiosity in scientific research and other investigations or the unsuccessful condition of Compulsion Neurosis—Doubting Mania—where all knowledge is discounted by doubts.
Those who abandon their original aim to bear a child, replacing it with the desire for knowledge, are found to be to a great extent homosexual, which keeps them from heterosexual relationships and the bearing or begetting of children, as well as the substitution of a mental creation for physical procreation, seen in the attempts of the alchemist of the Middle Ages to produce the Homunculus, and Nietzsche's comparison of himself with a parturient woman with his thoughts as the offspring.