It is true that many investigators regard numerous movements on the part of children as sexual processes, even when the genital organs are in no way involved. Freud[84] above all, discovers sexuality in the life of the child in cases in which, I am convinced, sexual elements play no part whatever. Sucking movements in children are regarded by Freud as sexual phenomena. He considers that the lips and the fingers are erogenic zones. With just as much reason, every movement might be regarded as sexual--as, for instance, the clenching by a child of its little fists. As long ago as 1879, Lindner,[85] of Budapest, published an able essay about the movements made by children sucking their fingers, lips, &c., and suggested that there was some connexion between these sucking movements and sexual processes. He stated that many children, when sucking the lips, the fingers, the back of the hand or some other part, or when sucking a rubber teat, simultaneously rubbed some other region of the body--in some cases the lobule of the ear, the nipple, or the genital organs; this was sometimes done with one hand only, sometimes, if both hands were free, with both. This statement is perfectly correct. It may happen that the child stops rubbing the genital organs as soon as the sucking is interfered with; or, conversely, the sucking may cease as soon as we withdraw the child's hands from its genital organs. But, even in these cases, the friction of the genital organs does not necessarily possess a specifically sexual character, since friction of the lobule of the ear or of some other part of the body is an equivalent act. It is certain that there is here no intimate connexion between the act of sucking and the sexual life. Thus, there is no proof whatever for the view of Lindner, which has recently been carried to a still greater extreme by Freud, that this "voluptuous sucking" (_Wonnesaugen_) is a truly sexual process. We may, indeed, assume, as does Rohleder,[86] that such sucking movements occur with especial frequency in children with a congenital morbid predisposition, and that to this extent therefore it is connected with masturbation. But in my opinion it is essential to regard the two movements as clearly independent in character.