Now, it is necessary for humans to love and to have erotic feelings centered on others. But clearly, if this early love situation did not change at some point, the little girl would grow up to have women as her erotic centers of interest. Nature intends no such end result. She intends these erotic feelings to become ultimately very much man-centered. Thus she makes the role of the father in the child’s development all-important. He becomes the first bridge from the infantile erotic and dependent relationship with the mother to mature relationships with members of the opposite sex. There are, of course, several other bridges that the growing girl will have to traverse on her journey to maturity, but this first one is of central importance. Ultimately, of course, she will have to give up her father, too, as the center of erotic interest, but he will remain in her unconscious life as the model of all that she wants from the male in her life. We see, then, at the end of this early phase of development the first big step in the preparation of the little girl for her ultimate destiny as wife and mother. But since we know that she is nowhere near ready for such functions we might wonder how nature ends this early period and enters the second important period of growth. The end of the first stage and the beginning of the second (which, you will recall, will last to about ten years of age) begins with a remarkable psychological event: the early infantile sexuality goes completely underground. The little girl “forgets” that she ever went through such sensual experiences, that there was anything the least bit erotic in her former attachments. Her masturbation stops, under normal circumstances, and she enters into approximately a five-year period of total non-sexuality. However, you must understand that when I use the word “forget” I do not mean it literally. In psychiatry we use the word “repression” to describe this kind of forgetting. It means the ability of the human mind to push anything it does not wish to recall out of awareness, into a part of the mind called the unconscious. When we repress something, a memory or experience, we do not remember that it ever happened with our conscious mind. However, it remains quite intact in our unconscious mind and can and does exert an influence upon us that we are not aware of. Too, it can be revived in the conscious mind by later experiences, or, even if it does not revive, later experiences can be very much influenced by the “forgotten” memory. The new stage into which the young girl now enters is called the “latency period,” because the sexual feelings of the earlier period have become repressed, or latent.