of the sexual
processes than is credited to their creators. Children also perceive the
pregnancy of the mother and know how to interpret it correctly; the
stork fable is very often related before auditors who confront it with a
deep, but mostly mute suspicion. But as two elements remain unknown to
the infantile sexual investigation, namely, the role of the propagating
semen and the female genital opening--precisely the same points in which
the infantile organization is still backward--the effort of the
infantile investigator regularly remains fruitless, and ends in a
renunciation which not infrequently leaves a lasting injury to the
desire for knowledge. The sexual investigation of these early childhood
years is always conducted alone, it signifies the first step towards
independent orientation in the world, and causes a marked estrangement
between the child and the persons of his environment who formerly
enjoyed its full confidence.

*The Phases of Development of the Sexual Organization.*--As
characteristics of the infantile sexuality we have hitherto emphasized
the fact that it is essentially autoerotic (it finds its object in its
own body), and that its individual partial impulses, which on the whole
are unconnected and independent of one another, are striving for the
acquisition of pleasure. The end of this development forms the so-called
normal sexual life of the adult in which the acquisition of pleasure has
been put into the service of the function of propagation, and the
partial impulses, under the primacy of one single erogenous zone, have
formed a firm organization for the attainment of the sexual aim in a
strange sexual object.

*Pregenital Organizations.*--The study, with the help of
psychoanalysis, of the inhibitions and disturbances in this course of
development now permits us to recognize additions and primary stages of
such organization of the partial impulses which likewise furnish a sort
of sexual regime. These phases of the sexual organization normally will
pass over smoothly and will only be recognizable by slight indications.
Only in pathological cases do they become active and discernible to
coarse observation.

Organizations of the sexual life in which the genital zones have not yet
assumed the dominating role we would call the _pregenital_ phase. So far
we have become acquainted with two of them which recall reversions to
early animal states.

One of the first of such pregenital sexual organ