ABSTRACT
i shall attempt to conform with your request and give you a cursive and true insight into my sexual and mental life. Born and raised the youngest of ten children, three of whom died early of children’s diseases, I lived in the country till my fifth year, when I started going to school and I remember nothing of that period except that I was tremendously fond of playing with fire and that I kept up till then, more or less, the habit of bed-wetting, an act which was associated with the pleasurable feeling that I was sitting on the chamber. I know also that I envied my sisters a great deal. My unusually strict and religious parents naturally subjected me to rigorous training and thus I learned early to distinguish between mine and thine, good and evil, truth and falsehood. Continually watched over by parents and instructors—a custom contrary to the modern spirit—I was kept from many of the children’s games.
