reasons will be obvious
from what has been said before. The principal reason is that the
enlightenment ought to be effected by someone who enjoys the child's
personal confidence. Undoubtedly there are certain school physicians who
fulfil this condition; and to such persons this task may, of course, be
entrusted. The very fact that they enjoy the children's confidence
suffices to show that they possess certain special qualifications for
such a task, and further, that they have the faculty of coming to a real
understanding with children. But the fact that a man is appointed to the
position of school physician, does not by itself prove that he possesses
to an adequate degree the fine perceptions and the tact that are needed
in effecting the sexual enlightenment; nor does it prove that he is the
person best fitted to enlighten the children with whom he has to deal.
In this difficult matter, we cannot be too careful in formulating any
general rule. The person who is to effect the sexual enlightenment must
possess, not merely a theoretical knowledge of the processes of sex, but
also the faculty of making these processes intelligible at the right
moment and in the right way. But how is the school physician or the
schoolmaster to know, in individual cases, the degree to which the
sexual life has developed? _He must have definitely abandoned the old
view that either the child's age in years or the external physical signs
of puberty can be regarded as indicating with any degree of precision
the progress of psychosexual puberty._ But since this latter, the
psychosexual development, should most often guide us in the choice of
the right moment for effecting the sexual enlightenment, we are
compelled to depend upon an individual consideration of the child, such
as will be possible only to a person who is fully in its confidence. We
learn from everyday experience that even very near relatives, if they
have failed to penetrate the child's intimate psyche, may have utterly
erroneous conceptions of its mental life. They completely ignore the
extent to which the sexual imaginative activity has already developed;
they know nothing as to whether the originally obscure sensibility of
the child has now become focussed in a particular direction, so that its
feelings are stimulated by definite individuals; they are ignorant of
the degree to which the child's genital organs have become subject to
the peripheral changes characteristic of sex. In th