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PAGE 96
JONES
one of the most necessary, but also one of the most painful,
achievements of development. It is absolutely necessary for
it to be carried out, and we may assume that every normal
human has to a certain extent managed to achieve it. Indeed,
the progress of society depends in general on this opposition
of the two generations." That the conflict in question rests in
the last resort on sexual grounds was first demonstrated by
Freud,1 when dealing with the subject of the earliest manifes-
tations of the sexual instinct in children. He has shewn2 that
this instinct does not, as is generally supposed, differ from other
biological functions by suddenly leaping into being at the age
of puberty in all its full and developed activity, but that like
other functions it undergoes a gradual evolution and only slowly
attains the form in which we know it in the adult. In other
words a child has to learn how to love just as it has to learn
how to run, although the former function is so much in-
tricate and delicate in its adjustment than the latter that the
development of it is a correspondingly slower and more involved
process. The earliest sexual manifestations are so palpably
non-adapted to what is generally considered the ultimate aim
and object of the function, and are so general and tentative
in contrast to the relative precision of the later manifestations,
that the sexual nature of them is commonly not recognised at
all. This theme, important as it is, cannot be further pursued
here, but it must mentioned how frequently these earliest
dim awakenings are evoked by the intimate physical relations
existing between the child and the persons of his immediate en-
vironment, above all, therefore, his parents. As Freud has put
it, "The mother is the first seductress of her boy." There is
a great variability in both the date and the intensity of the early
sexual manifestations, a fact that depends partly on the boy's
constitution and partly on the mother's. When the attraction
exercised by the mother is excessive it may exert a controlling
influence over the boy's later destiny. Of the various results
that may be caused by the complicated interaction between this
and other influences only one or two need be mentioned. If
the awakened passion undergoes but little "repression"--an
event most fequent when the mother is a widow--then the
boy may remain throughout life abnormally attached to his
mother and unable to love any other woman, a not uncommon
cause of bachelorhood. He may be gradually weaned from
this attachment, if it less strong, though it often happens
1Freud: Traumdeutung, 1900, S. 176-180. He has strikingly illus-
trated the subject in a recent detailed study, "Analyse der Phobie
eines fünfjährigen Knabes." Jahrbuch f. psychoanalytische u. psy-
chopathologische Forschungen, 1909, Bd. I, Ie Hälfte.
2Frued: Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, 1905.
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