body in
which the baby does grow. What could be wrong with the simple truth
that the father plants a tiny seed in the mother's body and that this
seed joins with another little seed already there and grows until it
is a real baby ready to come into the world? The question as to how
the father plants the seed need cause no alarm. If brothers and
sisters are brought up together with no artificial sense of false
modesty, they very early learn the difference between the male and the
female body. It is simple enough to tell the little child the function
of the male structure. And it is easy to explain that the seeds do not
grow until the little boy and girl have grown to be man and woman and
that the way to be well and to have fine strong children is to leave
the generative organs alone until that time. A sense of the dignity
and high purpose of these organs is far more likely to prevent
perversions--to say nothing of nervousness--than is an attitude of
taboo and silence.]

A certain amount of repression is inevitable and useful, but a
neurotic is merely an exaggerated represser. He represses so much of
himself that it will not stay down.[37] He builds up a permanent
resistance which automatically acts as a dam to his normal sex
instinct and forces it into undesirable outlets.

[Footnote 37: "A neurosis is a partial failure of repression." Frink:
_Morbid Fears and Compulsions_.]

A resistance is a chronic repression, repression that has become fixed
and subconscious, a habit that has lost its flexibility and outlives
its usefulness. It is a fixation of repression, and is built out of an
over-strong complex or emotional thought habit, acquired during
childhood, incorporated into the conscience and carried over into
maturity, where it warps judgment and interferes with normal
development because it is fundamentally untrue and at variance with
the laws of nature.

=Too Much Day-Dreaming.= The fourth habit which holds back the adult
from maturity and predisposes toward "nerves" is the habit of
imagination. It need hardly be said that a certain kind of imagination
is a good thing and one of man's greatest assets. But the essence of
day-dreaming is the exact opposite; it is the desire to see things as
they are not, but as we should like them to be,--not in order that we
may bring them to pass, but for the mere pleasure of dreaming. Instead
of turning a microscope or a telescope on the world of reality, as
positive imaginati