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  THE SEXUAL LIFE OF
  THE CHILD

  By
  Dr. Albert Moll

  TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY
  DR. EDEN PAUL

  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
  EDWARD L. THORNDIKE
  PROFESSOR OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY
  TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

  NEW YORK
  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  1919
  _All rights reserved_

  COPYRIGHT, 1912,
  BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

  Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1912.

  NORWOOD PRESS
  J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
  Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.




INTRODUCTION


Dr. Moll is a gifted physician of long experience whose work with those
problems of medicine and hygiene which demand scientific acquaintance
with human nature has made him well known to experts in these fields. In
this book he has undertaken to describe the origin and development, in
childhood and youth, of the acts and feelings due to sex; to explain the
forces by which sex-responses are directed and misdirected; and to judge
the wisdom of existing and proposed methods of preventing the
degradation of a child's sexual life.

This difficult task is carried out, as it should be, with dignity and
frankness. In spite of the best intentions, a scientific book on
sex-psychology is likely to appear, at least in spots, to gratify a low
curiosity; but in Dr. Moll's book there is no such taint. Popular books
on sex-hygiene, on the other hand, are likely to suffer from a
pardonable but harmful delicacy whereby the facts of anatomy,
physiology, and psychology which are necessary to make their principles
comprehensible and useful, are omitted, veiled, or even distorted. Dr.
Moll honors his readers by a frankness which may seem brutal to some of
them. It is necessary.

With dignity and frankness Dr. Moll combines notable good sense. In the
case of any exciting movement in advance of traditional custom, the
forerunners are likely to combine a certain one-sidedness and lack of
balance with their really valuable progressive ideas. The greater
sagacity and critical power are more often found amongst the men of
science who avoid public discussion of exciting social or moral reforms,
and are suspicious of startling and revolutionary doctrines or
practices. It is therefore fortunate that a book on the sexual life
during childhood should have been written by a man of critical,
matter-of-fact mind, of long experience as a medical specialist, and of
wide scholarship, who has no private interest in any exciting
psychological doctrine or educational panacea.

The translation of this book will be welcomed by men and women from many
different professions, but alike in the need of preparation to guide the
sex-life of boys and girls and to meet emergencies caused by its
corruption by weakness within or attack from without. Of the clergymen
in this country who are in real touch with the lives of their charges,
there is hardly a one who does not, every so often, have to minister to
a mind whose moral and religious distress depends on an unfortunate sex
history. Conscientious and observant teachers realize, in a dim way,
that they cannot do justice to even the purely intellectual needs of
pupils without understanding the natural history of those instinctive
impulses, which, concealed and falsified as they are under our
traditional taboos, nevertheless retain enormous potency. The facts, so
clearly shown in the present volume, that the life of sex begins long
before its obvious manifestations at puberty, and that