But, finally, interest is aroused in the opposite sex, and with the awakening of genuine sexual desire in puberty, the child is prepared to step over to normal sexuality. According to this, every child who develops steadily will finally come to normal sexuality. Yet it is obvious that the world is full of people who have sexual trouble. There are men suffering from partial or complete impotence; there are women with whom desire centers upon the lips; there are others terrified at the sexual act; there are homosexuals, and those who cannot break the auto-erotic habit. Finally, there are those whose only pleasure consists in cruelty to others, or having cruelty practiced upon themselves--the sadists and the masochists. These troubles, according to Freud, can be traced back to the child’s original love-attachment to the mother or father. It is the Oedipus complex, named after the Greek king who innocently and unknowingly married his own mother, had children by her, and when the truth was revealed to him, put out his own eyes and wandered homeless about the land. This is the crime of incest, tabooed almost universally by every race. In other words, Freud thinks it natural that the child’s first love should have a sexual coloring; that the boy desires the mother, and the girl the father; but that the deep taboo, felt by the child though not understood by him, produces a fear that drives him finally to take some substitute for the mother, another woman (how often men seek women who are like their mothers!), or may make it impossible for him ever to have normal sexuality. In other words, the child, in fear of going any further toward the goal of his love, the mother, may become fixed at some point of childish expression: one boy may never go further than auto-erotism; another may remain all his life at the homosexual phase. In this way the perversions are accounted for; they are infantile expressions, due to fear. The cure, according to Freud, is two-fold: the patient must come to understand that the cause of the trouble is his love for the parent, and that this love must be sacrificed, and the attachment broken, in order that the desire for normal sexuality may be cultivated. The other solution is _sublimation_. That is to say, express your abnormal desire, but on a higher level and in a different form. In fact, Freud traces many of the glories of our civilization to this technic, employed unconsciously as a rule. For instance, a man may be a sadist; his desire is to cut other people with a knife. Let him, then, become a surgeon, and cut people creatively instead of destructively. Another man is an exhibitionist. He wants to display himself publicly. Let him become an actor. A third has intense curiosity; he would, if he expressed this desire unsublimated, become a Peeping Tom. Let him become a scientist, intent on looking into the unknown.