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 thoseproblems of medicine and hygiene which demand scientific acquaintancewith human nature has made him well known to experts in these fields. Inthis book he has undertaken to describe the origin and development, inchildhood and youth, of the acts and feelings due to sex; to explain theforces by which sex-responses are directed and misdirected; and to judgethe wisdom of existing and proposed methods of preventing thedegradation of a child's sexual life.
This difficult task is carried out, as it should be, with dignity andfrankness. In spite of the best intentions, a scientific book onsex-psychology is likely to appear, at least in spots, to gratify a lowcuriosity; but in Dr. Moll's book there is no such taint. Popular bookson sex-hygiene, on the other hand, are likely to suffer from apardonable but harmful delicacy whereby the facts of anatomy,physiology, and psychology which are necessary to make their principlescomprehensible and useful, are omitted, veiled, or even distorted. Dr.Moll honors his readers by a frankness which may seem brutal to some ofthem. It is necessary.
With dignity and frankness Dr. Moll combines notable good sense. In thecase of any exciting movement in advance of traditional custom, theforerunners are likely to combine a certain one-sidedness and lack ofbalance with their really valuable progressive ideas. The greatersagacity and critical power are more often found amongst the men ofscience who avoid public discussion of exciting social or moral reforms,and are suspicious of startling and revolutionary doctrines orpractices. It is therefore fortunate that a book on the sexual lifeviduring childhood should have been written by a man of critical,matter-of-fact mind, of long experience as a medical specialist, and ofwide scholarship, who has no private interest in any excitingpsychological doctrine or educational panacea.
The translation of this book will be welcomed by men and women from manydifferent professions, but alike in the need of preparation to guide thesex-life of boys and girls and to meet emergencies caused by itscorruption by weakness within or attack from without. Of the clergymenin 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 toa mind whose moral and religious distress depends on an unfortunate sexhistory. Conscientious and observant teachers realize, in a dim way,that they cannot do justice to even the purely intellectual needs ofpupils without understanding the natural history of those instinctiveimpulses, which, concealed and falsified as they are under ourtraditional taboos, nevertheless retain enormous potency. The facts, soclearly shown in the pr