perhaps endeavours to draw her towards him so that her body presses
against his genital organs, or even has an ejaculation with a voluptuous
sensation, we may assume the influence of a contrectation impulse, which
has existed for some time, but only now has for the first time been
localised in the peripheral genital organs. On the other hand, if in the
same boy when he hugs his mother no peripheral sexual manifestations
occur, either now or subsequently, we must assume that in the earlier
embraces of his mother there was no sexual element. But no such simple
solution of the difficulty is really possible. It may happen that in the
case of feelings originally sexual their further development is
inhibited. A boy might experience sexual sentiments towards his mother;
but it is very probable that in such a case convention, education, and
perhaps also the very frequent association with his mother, would
repress the growth of these sentiments. This criticism is a sound one,
and in my opinion the materials are lacking to enable us to overcome its
force. For why should certain processes occurring in childhood--for
example, a boy's impulse to caress his mother--be regarded as
non-sexual; and yet the same processes subsequently be regarded as
sexual, merely because they ultimately become associated with the
phenomena of detumescence? Take the case of a boy seven years of age; he
loves and cuddles his mother; he is drawn also to a girl friend of the
same age as himself, and kisses her with equal pleasure. The boy grows
older, and after some years begins to have definite erections when he
embraces and kisses his friend; but nothing of the kind occurs when he
embraces and kisses his mother. Now, have we any right to assert, simply
owing to the subsequent appearance of these peripheral manifestations in
the one case and not in the other, that originally, when between the
boy's inclination towards his girl friend and his inclination towards
his mother no clear distinction could be drawn, the former was sexual,
the latter non-sexual in nature?

The dilemma is unanswerable, unless we admit that, in the child,
sympathetic feelings, which we shall subsequently be able to classify
without difficulty, are, when they first appear, not always susceptible
of any such differentiation; and that for this reason we are just as
little able to distinguish a boy's love for his mother from has
non-sexual friendship for a little girl, as we are able to