bei't"). When winter came and the house was heated she once went too near the stove and burned her hand slightly. She began to cry, saying "Bow-wow bite!" The fact that a dog that bites and a hot stove both hurt was enough to make the child identify the two. Because the hot stove hurt her it was a bow-wow.

Another baby, about two years old, spent much time by the cage of a canary which she kept on calling by its name "Hans." One day she called a feather dropped by the bird "Hans" and after that she gave the same name to all feathers and before long to one of her mother's hats which was trimmed with feathers, to her mother's hair and to her own, to a soft cushion and so on. Everything which felt soft was in her language "Hans." To the adult, whose thinking differentiates, a canary and a woman's hair are two very different things. Thought which differentiates will ascribe to both the same quality 'soft,' but in so doing it will not neglect the more important differences between the two objects.

We find analogous thought-processes amongst primitive peoples. The primitive form of thinking persists moreover in the symbolic mode of expression as we meet with it in myths and fairy-tales of different races and in the dreams and other phantastic creations of individuals. As the child grows older he finds great scope in play for thinking by the method of identification, though of course he has by this time become conscious of the imaginary character of his play. One example will suffice to illustrate my meaning: A boy of seven years old, when out for a walk, removed some scattered pieces of paper from the pavement with a stick, saying as he did so: "I am the old general!" A retired general did as a matter of fact live near the boy's home and made it his business to keep the street tidy. In his play the child identified himself with the general simply on the strength of the imitation of this habit of his. To adult thought a vague analogy of this sort is trivial and could never be made the basis of an identification of two persons.

Owing to this peculiarity of infantile thinking it is possible for any person who acts in the same way as another has done previously quite easily to take the latter's place in the child's mental life. A little boy had lost his father in the War. An uncle took charge of him and gave him much affection, and it seemed as if the child was on his side much attached to his uncle. In about a year's time the latter died, whereupon another relation appeared on the scene with the intention of taking charge of the little orphan. It happened that the child was asked if he were sad because his uncle had died. The boy, who was four

years old

at the time, answered: "Oh no; you see we have the other uncle now and he gave me a piece of bread and marmalade twice."

It is only gradually that differentiation in thinking establishes its claims. An important motive in this process is the child's tendency to emphasize points in which he is superior and thus to contrast himself with the outside world. A two-year-old boy was asked if he liked his new baby-sister. The child, who was not yet able to frame connected sentences, answered quickly: "No teeth...red...smelly!" It is easy to see that the leading motive in this typical way of comparing himself with little brothers and sisters is the child's narcissism.

Another and particularly interesting instance of identification should be mentioned here, and that is the substitution of animals for people in the animal-phobias of children. Psycho-analysis succeeded in proving that in these cases there is regularly an identification of the father or mother with an animal. Here the psychological process is clearly exactly analogous to the phenomena of the animal-totemism of primitive peoples. Originally the prevailing tendency in the child's relation to objects was the desire to incorporate them in itself. Gradually this aim is replaced by another, namely the craving to possess and master the object. "I want, I want!" ("Haben, haben!") is the phrase with which the child reacts to the sight of any object. This attitude towards the object includes a tendency to preserve and protect it and this is the first step in the direction of adaptation to the outside world; it is on this basis only that the adaptation of thought to reality is possible. We cannot follow out this process of adaptation in detail here.

Even at this stage of intellectual development the child is still far removed from adult modes of thinking. The influence of narcissism on his thinking is still paramount and is seen particularly in his ideas of his own power. He ascribes to his desires and thoughts an unlimited omnipotence which can so operate on the outside world as to effect changes in it. Only gradually does his critical faculty teach him the bounds which are set to his influence upon that world. To follow out this process further would be a tempting task and, if we did so, we should be able to convince ourselves that in its later stages it is intimately connected with the child's attitude towards those with whom he has the closest relations. Here we enter the sphere of the 'Oedipus complex' which embraces the most important phenomena of infantile sexuality.

In this paper it is not possible to do more than indicate briefly the subsequent fate of the child's ideas of omnipotence. They become dis

placed on to some being who is endowed with peculiar authority (father, God).

To return once more to the manner in which thinking in early childhood is dominated by the pleasure-principle, I want further to call attention to the fact that free thinking, unadapted to reality--that is to say, phantasy-is in itself an important source of pleasure. Children play with thoughts as with toys and just on that account logical thinking, in accordance with reality, replaces only gradually this pleasure-giving play.

Thus we see that, in childhood, thinking is far more influenced by the instinctive life than in riper years. The regulative factors which are derived from the repression of the instincts have not as yet been brought to bear upon it.

Psychology has busied itself much with the development of the intellect in children, but it has generally treated the subject from points of view very different from that of psycho-analysis. Either the interest has been focussed on purely quantitative processes, as, for example, the number of words that a child learns within a given period, or else only formal phenomena have been taken into consideration for instance, the child's capacity for expressing his thoughts in the form of sentences. These problems are deserving of the greatest interest, but the development of infantile thinking includes a number of questions which are not generally regarded but must take the chief place in our discussion.

Psycho-analysis urgently calls attention to the importance of infantile instincts in the evolution of thought. Our justification for laying so much stress on them must be that in the evolution of both the individual and the race the instincts are earlier than thought. Psychoanalysis therefore takes the position that it is impossible to give a correct account of any mental phenomenon without thoroughly analysing its instinctive determination.

A NOTE ON SEX DIFFERENCES, FROM THE

PSYCHO-ANALYTIC POINT OF VIEW

BY S. S. BRIERLEY.

I. Introductory.

THE psychological problem of sex differences shares with other psychological inquiries, in contrast to the problems of the physical sciences, the essential difficulty that the very facts under discussion, the particular trends and mechanisms at issue, may themselves colour our observations and influence our judgments. These inherent difficulties would seem to be unusually great with this problem, for a study of both popular and quasi-scientific literature on the subject gives one the impression that there is nowhere a greater confusion between what is and what 'ought' to be the truth, what is and what we should like to be the truth. To the psycho-analyst, this is scarcely surprising; for it is clear that the question of sex differences must be peculiarly liable to affective judgments, since from its nature it lies so close to the major elements in the unconscious life of both men and women. Indeed, a study of the unconscious factors in opinion and belief on this matter would indirectly be, in large measure, a psycho-analytic study of the sex differences themselves. One knows that no one is exempt from these influences; but one has, nevertheless, to press forward with at least the intention of objectivity, and with the hope that awareness of the nature of some of the pitfalls in one's path may somewhat lessen the risk of falling into them.

The total differences between the sexes in the human species may be divided, for the purpose of this discussion, into three groups, (a) the primary anatomical differences, (b) the secondary sex characters, and (c) the psychological differences. These three groups are by no means independent of each other, but the relation between them is highly complex and to some extent variable. I refer to the primary distinction between male and female as 'anatomical,' for a good psychological reason. The strict definition of maleness and femaleness is in physiological terms, a female being any individual organism producing egg-cells or ova which, after uniting with cells of different character derived from a male, give rise to new organisms. Normally, however, this egg- or sperm-producing power is accompanied by the appropriate external

genitalia; and these constitute for the ordinary mind the gross physical distinction between male and female, awareness of which is the fundamental and primitive content of specific sex consciousness, reverberating profoundly, as psycho-analysis has shown, throughout the mental life as a whole.

The second group of differences, those known as the secondary sex characters, covering differences in the skeleton, musculature, rate of growth, skin, hair, voice, gait, and the other obvious or more subtle physiological sex characteristics, are now, as is well known, attributed to the internal secretions of the essential reproductive organs, acting in conjunction with the secretions of the other ductless glands. They are, in fact, an expression of the total and highly complex metabolisms of the male and female. Here, however, as both common and more exact observations show, we do not find the sharp distinction between male and female which normally occurs in regard to primary maleness and femaleness. As might, perhaps, be expected from the number of variables which enter into the determination of these characters, we find, within the range of normality, an indefinitely graded series passing over from the typical male to the typical female, the great majority of actual men and women lying somewhere in between the completely feminine female and masculine male. This, again, is a fact of considerable psychological importance. It is so directly, since our third group of sex differences, the mental, are in their turn determined, at least to some extent, by the action of the endocrine secretions, and would for many purposes be included in the secondary sex characters. This is generally held to be true of emotional and temperamental characteristics, at least. And the serial gradation of actual men and women between the typical male and female, so easily to be observed in the more obvious differences of outward structure, affords a strong presumption that there will be no sharp line of difference in the case of the subtler emotional and temperamental characteristics, but that every degree of difference will be found. A study of the experimental evidence suggests that the gradation is even smoother in the latter than in the former respects. In any case, it is clear that any thorough study of the problem involves not merely the identification of the sex groups, for purposes of comparison, with the mean difference found rather than with the extreme case, but also a reference to the actual curve of distribution, to the degree of scatter of the differences.

This fact of the gradation of the secondary sex characters, including the emotional and temperamental, and the contrast of this gradation