That the sexual intercourse of adults appears strange and alarming to children who observe it, and arouses anxiety in them, is, I may say, a fact established by everyday experience. I have explained this anxiety on the ground that we have here a sexual excitation which is not mastered by the child’s understanding, and which probably also encounters repulsion because their parents are involved, and is therefore transformed into anxiety. At a still earlier period of life the sexual impulse towards the parent of opposite sex does not yet suffer repression, but as we have seen (chapter V., D.) expresses itself freely.
For the night terrors with hallucinations (pavor nocturnus) so frequent in children I should without hesitation offer the same explanation. These, too, can only be due to misunderstood and rejected sexual impulses which, if recorded, would probably show a temporal periodicity, since an intensification of sexual libido may equally be produced by accidentally exciting impressions and by spontaneous periodic processes of development.
I have not the necessary observational material for the full demonstration of this explanation. * On the other hand, pediatrists seem to lack the point of view which alone makes intelligible the whole series of phenomena, both from the somatic and from the psychic side. To illustrate by a comical example how closely, if one is made blind by the blinkers of medical mythology, one may pass by the understanding of such cases, I will cite a case which I found in a thesis on pavor nocturnus (Debacker, 1881, p. 66).
* This material has since been provided in abundance by the literature of psycho-analysis.
A boy of thirteen, in delicate health, began to be anxious and dreamy; his sleep became uneasy, and once almost every week it was interrupted by an acute attack of anxiety with hallucinations. The memory of these dreams was always very distinct. Thus he was able to relate that the devil had shouted at him: “Now we have you, now we have you!” and then there was a smell of pitch and brimstone, and the fire burned his skin. From this dream he woke in terror; at first he could not cry out; then his voice came back to him, and he was distinctly heard to say: “No, no, not me; I haven’t done anything,” or: “Please, don’t; I will never do it again!” At other times he said: “Albert has never done that!” Later he avoided undressing, “because the fire attacked him only when he was undressed.” In the midst of these evil dreams, which were endangering his health, he was sent into the country, where he recovered in the course of eighteen months. At the age of fifteen he confessed one day: “Je n’osais pas l’avouer, mais j’eprouvais continuellement des picotements et des surexcitations aux parties; * a la fin, cela m’enervait tant que plusieurs fois j’ai pense me jeter par la fenetre du dortoir.” *(2)
* The emphasis [on 'parties'] is my own, though the meaning is plain enough without it.
*(2) I did not dare admit it, but I continually felt tinglings and overexcitements of the parts; at the end, it wearied me so much that several times I thought to throw myself from the dormitory window.
It is, of course, not difficult to guess: 1. That the boy had practised masturbation in former years, that he had probably denied it, and was threatened with severe punishment for his bad habit (His confession: Je ne le ferai plus; * his denial: Albert n’a jamais fait ca.) *(2) 2. That, under the advancing pressure of puberty, the temptation to masturbate was re-awakened through the titillation of the genitals. 3. That now, however, there arose within him a struggle for repression, which suppressed the libido and transformed it into anxiety, and that this anxiety now gathered up the punishments with which he was originally threatened.
* I will not do it again.
*(2) Albert never did that.
Let us, on the other hand, see what conclusions were drawn by the author (p. 69):
“1. It is clear from this observation that the influence of puberty may produce in a boy of delicate health a condition of extreme weakness, and that this may lead to a very marked cerebral anaemia. *
* The italics ['very marked cerebral anaemia.'] are mine.
“2. This cerebral anaemia produces an alteration of character, demono-maniacal hallucinations, and very violent nocturnal, and perhaps also diurnal, states of anxiety.
“3. The demonomania and the self-reproaches of the boy can be traced to the influences of a religious education which had acted upon him as a child.
“4. All manifestations disappeared as a result of a lengthy sojourn in the country, bodily exercise, and the return of physical strength after the termination of puberty.
“5. Possibly an influence predisposing to the development of the boy’s cerebral state may be attributed to heredity and to the father’s former syphilis.”
Then finally come the concluding remarks: “Nous avons fait entrer cette observation dans le cadre delires apyretiques d’inanition, car c’est a l’ischemie cerebrale que nous rattachons cet etat particulier.” *
* We put this case in the file of apyretic delirias of inanition, for it is to cerebral anaemia that we attach this particular state.
