Adler’s most serious deviations from the reality of observation and his deepest confusion of ideas have arisen in his attempt to correlate the basic principle of his theory with the psychic life of the child, an attempt which has become inevitable in psychoanalysis. The biological, social, and physiological meaning of “masculine” and “feminine” have here become mixed into a hopeless composition. It is quite impossible, and it can easily be disproved by observation, that the masculine or feminine child builds its plan of life on any original undervaluation of the feminine sex; nor is it conceivable that a child can take as the guiding line the wish: “I will be a real man.” In the beginning no child has even an inkling of the significance of the difference in sex, more likely it starts with the assumption that both sexes possess the same (male) genital. It does not begin its sexual investigation with the problem of sex differentiation and is far from entertaining the social undervaluation of the woman. There are women in whose neurosis the wish to be a man never played any part. So far as the “masculine protest” is concerned, it can easily be traced back to a disturbance of the original narcissism caused by the threat of castration; that is, to the first hindrance of sexual activity. All dispute as to the psychogenesis of the neuroses must ultimately be decided in the sphere of the childhood neuroses. The careful analysis of a neurosis of the early years of childhood puts an end to all mistakes in regard to the etiology of the neuroses, and all doubts as to the part played by the sexual impulses. That is why Adler in his criticism of Jung’s “Conflicts of the Child’s Mind” was obliged to resort to the imputation that the material of the case surely must have followed a uniform new tendency “from the father.”[19]