rarely absent), so also in
the case of children a similar difference between the sexes is
conspicuous. In female children the peripheral processes of the sexual
impulse are, comparatively speaking, far less active than in the case of
males. Thus it happens that, although in the girl the phenomena of the
contrectation impulses are hardly, if at all, less conspicuous than they
are in the boy, and appear at as early an age in the former as they do
in the latter, yet in respect of detumescence there is an important
distinction between girls and boys. A girl who has fallen in love with a
boy will be greatly interested in all his doings, and will gladly
embrace and even kiss him; but she will be far less disposed to proceed
to actions in which the genital organs play a part than would a boy with
a like affection for a girl. The same rule holds good when, in the
undifferentiated stage of the sexual impulse, homosexual sentiments and
practices ensue. In such cases, when girls are concerned, caresses of
all kinds will follow, but the genital organs will in all probability
not be involved; whereas in the case of an analogous fondness between
two boys, manipulation of the genital organs is very likely to occur.
Homosexual intimacies between girls are far more often platonic than
similar intimacies between boys.

I have had occasion several times to allude to the practice of
masturbation[38] by children, and will now proceed to give a more
detailed description. I have previously alluded to masturbation as a
manifestation of the detumescence impulse. Much more frequently,
however, it occurs in those in whom the phenomena of the contrectation
impulse have also been previously manifested. Sometimes it is a purely
organic act, the individual masturbating in the entire absence of any
imaginative sexual ideas; but at other times the imagination plays a
notable part in the process, alike in children and in adults. When an
imaginative idea is concerned in the process of masturbation, it is the
idea of the object of the contrectation impulse; that is to say, the boy
when masturbating thinks now of a girl, now, again (and this especially
during the undifferentiated stage of the sexual impulse), of a boy, or
in many cases of an adult; in the cases of girls who masturbate similar
relationships obtain, Just as during youth masturbation is more commonly
practised in association with than without imaginative sexual ideas, so
also is it in the c