The normal, healthy school-boy,
preferring the company of his school-fellows to all others, shunning his
mother and sisters, ashamed of his female relatives, is the modern
individual representative of those early leagues and unions of young men
who opposed matriarchy and finally brought about its overthrow and the
establishment of male government. The promiscuous sexuality
characteristic of adolescence reproduces the first, merely sexual, stage
of the erotic life of the race in the life of the individual. As a rule
this phase is followed by a period of woman-worship; love has conquered
the sexual instinct and the latter is felt as base and degrading.
Atavism is not so much the persistence of the earlier, as the absence of
the later stages of psychical development.
I need not emphasise the fact that the three stages are often
intermingled and not traceable with equal clearness in the life of every
individual. Many men never advance beyond the first stage and others are
fragmentary and undeveloped; but certain phases are more or less
distinguishable in every well-endowed male individual.
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