Children can do this, as you will remember from our discussion of the latency period of childhood. It is at the onset of this period, which occurs at about six years of age, that infantile sexuality is pushed under ground, to remain dormant until puberty. Patricia, under the influence of her prematurely strong sexual response to her father, had been forced to enter her latency period, we were able to determine, at the far too early age of four. With sex out of the way, she was now able to indulge her worship of her father in complete “innocence.” He was a man who believed passionately in success, and his ebullience, love of life, and high intelligence had won him a great deal of it. His young daughter felt now that to win his love she must achieve and achieve, endlessly. From the first grade of school through her last year at college, therefore, she bent all her efforts to excelling mentally. But her father was also a perfectionist; he expected top honors from himself and jeered at anything less in himself. Thoughtlessly he made the same demands on his daughter. Since she did not have his qualifications she was not always able to come up to his standards in every field of endeavor; few _could_ have equaled his demands. When she did not achieve such top honors she felt that she was not worthy of her father’s love and indeed that he did not love her. He did nothing to correct this feeling. If you will recall our normal stages of development for the growing child, you will easily see that when marriage time came around Patricia Agnew had not touched first, second, or third base. She had appeared to be growing normally, excelling in schoolwork, playing the role of the dutiful daughter, going out on dates. But in the emotional and sexual spheres she had been arrested at a very early stage. So severe had been her repression of her childhood sexuality that when the glandular changes which usher in puberty occurred she failed to have the resurgence of sexual feeling and the development of psychological characteristics normal for that period. For that reason she omitted her adolescent phase of development, too, the period of young love’s long and lovely dream which prepares the girl for the activities of love sexually and psychologically. How could she have had such a dream? It depends on the development of a true and normal sexuality. The door had been locked on her sexuality in infancy and the key thrown away. Psychologically, too, she was an infant. The need to excel, to master one’s environment is of course normal for the latency period. Nature has arranged this period, sagely put sex out of the way for a few years so that the ego may have a chance to grow, to prepare itself for the sexual storms and stresses of puberty and adolescence. However, since in a very real sense she could not pass through puberty and adolescence, she had remained psychologically in the latency period, the non-sexual, competitive, father-worshiping childhood period.