The so-called _amnesia of childhood_, which plays an important part in the “Three Contributions,” is a similar illegitimate retrograde application from pathology. Amnesia is a pathological condition, consisting in the repression of certain contents of the conscious. This condition cannot possibly be the same as the antegrade amnesia of children, which consists in an incapacity for intentional reproduction, a condition we find also among savages. This incapacity for reproduction dates from birth, and can be understood on obvious anatomical and biological grounds. It would be a strange hypothesis were we willing to regard this totally different quality of early infantile consciousness as one to be attributed to repression, in analogy with the condition in neurosis. The amnesia of neurosis is punched out, as it were, from the continuity of memory, but the remembrances of earlier childhood exist in separate islands in the continuity of the non-memory. This condition is the opposite in every sense of the condition of neurosis, so that the expression “amnesia,” generally used for this condition, is incorrect. The “amnesia of childhood” is a conclusion _a posteriori_ from the psychology of neurosis, just as is the “polymorphic perverse” disposition of the child. The Latent Sexual Period Criticized This error in the theoretical conception is shown clearly in the so-called _latent sexual period of childhood_. Freud has remarked that the early infantile so-called sexual manifestations, which I now call the phenomena of the pre-sexual stage, vanish after a while, and only reappear much later. Everything that Freud has termed the “suckling’s masturbation,” that is to say, all those sexual-like actions of which we spoke before, are said to return later as real onanism. Such a process of development would be biologically unique. In conformity with this theory one would have to say, for instance, that when a plant forms a bud, from which a blossom begins to unfold, the blossom is taken back again before it is fully developed, and is again hidden within the bud, to reappear later on in the same form. This impossible supposition is a consequence of the assertion that the early infantile activities of the pre-sexual stage are sexual phenomena, and that those manifestations, which resemble masturbation, are genuinely acts of masturbation. In this way Freud had to assert that there is a disappearance of sexuality, or, as he calls it, a _latent sexual period_. What he calls a disappearance of sexuality is nothing but the _real beginning of sexuality_, everything preceding was but the fore-stage to which no real sexual character can be imputed. In this way, the impossible phenomenon of the latent period is very simply explained. This theory of the latent sexual period is a striking instance of the incorrectness of the conception of the early infantile sexuality. But there has been no error of observation.