e (male) genital in all persons is the first of
the remarkable and consequential infantile sexual theories. It is of
little help to the child when biological science agrees with his
preconceptions and recognizes the feminine clitoris as the real
substitute for the penis. The little girl does not react with similar
refusals when she sees the differently formed genital of the boy. She
is immediately prepared to recognize it, and soon becomes envious of the
penis; this envy reaches its highest point in the consequentially
important wish that she also should be a boy.

*Birth Theories.*--Many people can remember distinctly how intensely
they interested themselves, in the prepubescent period, in the question
where children came from. The anatomical solutions at that time read
very differently; the children come out of the breast or are cut out of
the body, or the navel opens itself to let them out. Outside of analysis
one only seldom remembers the investigation corresponding to the early
childhood years; it had long merged into repression but its results were
thoroughly uniform. One gets children by eating something special (as in
the fairy tale) and they are born through the bowel like a passage.
These infantile theories recall the structures in the animal kingdom,
especially do they recall the cloaca of the types which stand lower than
the mammals.

*Sadistic Conception of the Sexual Act.*--If children of so delicate an
age become spectators of the sexual act between grown-ups, for which an
occasion is furnished by the conviction of the grown-ups that little
children cannot understand anything sexual, they cannot help conceiving
the sexual act as a kind of maltreating or overpowering, that is, it
impresses them in a sadistic sense. Psychoanalysis also teaches us that
such an early childhood impression contributes much to the disposition
for a later sadistic displacement of the sexual aim. Besides this
children also occupy themselves with the problem of what the sexual act
consists in or, as they grasp it, of what marriage consists, and seek
the solution of the mystery mostly in an association to which the
functions of urination and defecation give occasion.

*The Typical Failure of the Infantile Sexual Investigation.*--It can be
stated in general about the infantile sexual theories that they are
reproductions of the child's own sexual constitution, and that despite
their grotesque mistakes they evince more understanding