The autoerotic mental attitude described in this section is a peculiarity of men who through lack of enlightenment have not yet outgrown a tendency to remain, in their psychic reactions, infantile or puerile. But there is no proof that the inevitably autoerotic attitude of the young need persist for a moment after they have grasped the idea of the difference between autoerotism and a real object love that contains the growing element of perfect mutuality. And yet many men unnecessarily get the idea fixed in their minds that autoerotic practices have weakened them physically or have produced a mental habit of mind that cannot be broken. From one point of view it is the easiest thing in the world to present the proofs of the utter harmlessness of the autoerotic practices and the utter groundlessness of the fears which make almost every man, that is human, lack the confidence which will give him the necessary control over his own, and incidentally over his wife’s, erotism. (See note, p. 14.) § 7 The recommendation to the neurotic patient to take up clandestine sex relationship is based on the same misinterpretation of psychoanalytic theory that is seen in the explanation given by shallow, self-styled psychoanalysts of Freud’s term “polymorphous perverse” as applied to the sexuality of children. _Polymorphous_ means “of many shapes or patterns,” and implies that a child gets as much pleasure and satisfaction from stimulation of any one of its “erogenous zones” as it does from any other including the genital. This is quite easily comprehensible from the point of view that the child’s sexuality, like the unassembled parts of an automobile, is synthetized at puberty under the “primacy of the genital zones” whereupon all the pleasures of stimulation of all the other zones serve only as preliminaries to that of the genital. And the word _perverse_ in its etymological significance means only “turned in all directions,” i.e., as much toward one zone as to another. But the word perverse in its ordinary sense has the connotation of moral turpitude. It would be as senseless to call a child’s interest in its skin, and pleasure in sucking its thumb or a piece of candy, perverse in this latter sense as it would be to call a ring gear of a differential _wicked_ just because it was lying on the floor of a garage, and the mechanic had not yet put it in place. Thus has Freud been misinterpreted and the good of all his fearless investigation into sexual life annulled by the shortsighted and ignorant misreading of his work on the part of so many of those who would call themselves his followers. § 8 Only marriage and only a pure and complete monogamy without anesthesia[2] on the part of either mate will satisfy both conscious and unconscious cravings of the neurotic. It is a great advantage to have these unconscious cravings introduced into consciousness if for the only reason of giving a greater self-knowledge and therefore a greater self-confidence.