A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the SexesBell, Sanford
Science
A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes
Bell, Sanford
Child psychology; Love
The pleasure derived from hugging and kissing, etc., in children who
have the emotion in this first stage of its development, is not
specifically sexual except in some cases which I am inclined to
consider as precocious. Normally, there appears to be no erethism of
the sexual organs during the process of love-making. But erethism, as
we shall see in another chapter upon the analysis of the sex impulse,
is not confined to the sexual organs, but is distributed throughout
the entire body, especially through the vascular and nervous systems.
In these children there is a state of exaltation, indeed as yet not
comparable in intensity to that of the adolescent or adult, which is,
nevertheless, erethistic in its nature. It is massive, vague, and
generally distributed throughout the body. In some cases there is
specific sexual excitement with erections of the penis and hyperæmia
of the female genitalia. Such phenomena are seen only in the cases
that seem to me to be precocious. This point will be more fully
treated in the chapter referred to above. Suffice it to say here that
in love between the sexes at this early period or in the next
following, the physical sensations of sexual excitement are generally
wholly wanting, or if present are entirely unlocated. Love between
children of the opposite sex bears much the same relation to that
between adults as the flower does to the fruit, and has about as
little of physical sexuality in it as an apple-blossom has of the
apple that develops from it.
The love demonstrations of children in the first stage of the
emotion's development are generally spontaneous, profuse, and
unrestrained. There is an absence of shyness, of any sense of shame,
of the feeling of self-consciousness. The children have as yet no
notion of the meaning of sex. Their naïvete in this regard has not
been destroyed by the social suggestion that such actions are wrong
and vulgar. They are natively happy and free in their ignorance. The
individual differences among children are as great in their
experiencing and manifesting this emotion as they are in any other
phase of life, so not infrequently we find children under eight years
of age who are shy, repressive and self-conscious in regard to their
love actions. The same children are shy and repressive in other
things. It is more of a general disposition than a specific attitude
toward this one emotion.
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