ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author describes a series of observations on normal toddlers and young psychotic children that suggested to him that children, both boys and girls, between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four months, normally and regularly demonstrate a marked increase in manipulation of their genitals, including frank masturbatory behavior. A sharp upsurge in sexual interest and activity was thought to follow from the increase in endogenous genital sensation that children of this age experience. One of the unexpected findings of our research is that the whole process of toilet training is subject to the influence of the minor castration insults, such as a child of this age may quite readily come by in the ordinary course of events. The emergence of the castration complex in this little girl, as with several others in our research, had fateful implications for some of the major developmental during the second year of life.
