Sexual differentiation arises gradually, for at first distinctions of sex are not recognized by the child. The human animal is bisexual, a concept which Freud took over with some reservations from Wilhelm Fliess. Distinctions are achieved within the world of family experience. The child is attracted sexually toward the parent of the opposite sex but is too weak to compete for the loved object. Thus the father, who is too mighty to be killed and put out of the way, is copied by the son, who seeks to absorb his power into his own personality. The repression of the father-hostility, mother-love sentiments produces the Oedipus complex. The child achieves a socialized self by playing the rôle of the father in relation to his own impulses. The “latency period” arises from four to six, according to Freud, when the early sexual struggle against the father is given up. The fear of the father (the “castration complex”) leads to the passing of the Oedipus phase of growth. Now Freud specified a variety of difficulties which arise whenever there is failure to achieve successful integration of the partial components of the sexual instinct. He connected homosexuality, psychological frigidity and impotence, exhibitionism, sadism, masochism, voyeurism, and a variety of other abnormalities with definite failures in integration. Sometimes the individual becomes obsessed by ideas which have a disguised sexual meaning, and sometimes he indulges in physical symptoms which possess a similar unconscious significance. The first is an obsessional neurosis, and the second is hysteria. The stress which Freud laid upon the sexuality of the child, and upon socialization by intimidation, broke with revolutionary violence in a culture which swaddled its infants in sentimentality. The child of the poets was like this: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory we do come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! --William Wordsworth The child of the Freudians was like this: The child, at one time or another in its life, is, in a sense, auto-erotic, narcissistic, exhibitionistic, inclined to play the rôle of “Jack the Peeper,” incestuous, patricidal, or matricidal, homosexual, fetichistic, masochistic and sadistic [G. V. Hamilton, _An Introduction to Objective Psychopathology_, p. 301].