ABSTRACT
Animal experiments have shown unmistakably that the sex characters can be abolished, or even transformed into their opposites, by means of the implantation or extirpation of the gonads. A sexually quite atrophied male rat which from birth had been kept exclusively in the company of other males was suddenly placed in the vicinity of a cage of female rats. Within a short space the animal underwent a change in the direction of masculinity, internally, externally, and with regard to its behavior—under the influence, obviously, of the sight and smell of the female. Sigmund Freud's analysis of neuroses made possible the reconstruction of the beginnings of the sexual instinct in man, the demonstration of the existence of an "infantile sexuality" and of the twice occurring vivescence of sexuality, with a latency period interposed. Sexual intercouse thus contains a suggestion of mnemic traces of this catastrophe which overtook both the individual and the species.
