My paternal ancestry (which is largely Huguenot) is noteworthy for its patriotism and its large families. My father, who died when I was a year old, is remembered for the singular uprightness and purity of his life from his earliest childhood. The photograph which I have shows him as possessed of a rare classic beauty of features. He was an ideal husband and father. At the time of his death he was a Master of Arts and a school principal. My mother is an extraordinarily neurotic woman, yet famed among her friends for her great domesticity, attachment to her husbands, and an almost abnormal love of babies. She has nobly borne the ill-treatment of her second husband, who for several years has been in a state of melancholia. My mother has been "highly-wrought" all her life, and has suffered intensely from fears of all kinds. As a young girl she was somnambulistic, and once fell down a stairhead during sleep. In spite of her bodily sufferings with indigestion, eye-strain, and depression she retains her youthfulness. She has slight powers of reasoning. She has had times of unconsciousness and rigidity, I have never heard any mention of epilepsy. She has a horror of showing prudishness in regard to the healthful manifestations of sex life, and is always praising examples of what she terms "a natural woman."
I have heard that during my first year my mother detected my nurse in the act of putting a morphine powder on my tongue for the purpose of keeping me quiet. I was subject to convulsions at this period, and narrowly escaped a permanent hernia. My family tell me that from the beginning I was a well-developed and boyish boy, full of mischief, impulsive, good to look upon, unusually affectionate, beloved by all.
In my third year I took pleasure in crawling under the bed with my boy-cousin who was nine months my senior, and after we had taken down our drawers, in kissing each other's nates. I do not remember which of us first thought of this pastime.
At the age of 4 I gave myself a treat by gazing upward through a cellar window at the nates of a woman who was defecating from several feet above into a cesspool that lay beneath. It was during this summer also that I frightened myself by pulling back my prepuce far enough to disclose the purple glans, which I had never seen before. But this act gave me no desire to masturbate.
When 5 years old, and living in a great city, I drew indecent pictures in company with a little girl and her younger brother. These pictures represented men in the act of urinating. The penes were drawn large, and the streams of urine plainly indicated. One afternoon I induced the boy to go to the bath-room, lie on his back, and allow me to perform fellatio on him. I did not ask him to return the favor. I remember the curious tar-like smell of his clothing and the region about his genitals. It is possible that I gained my knowledge of fellatio from an unknown boy of 10, who had induced me, during the preceding summer to enter a sandy lot with him, watch him urinate, and then, kneeling before him, commit fellatio. A year later, as I was walking home in the rain to our summer cottage, with an open umbrella over my shoulder, a boy of 15, who was leaning against our fence, exhibited a large, erect penis, and when I had passed him urinated upon me and my umbrella. I never saw the boy again. I felt peculiarly insulted by his act. Back of the house there lived a 12-year-old boy who invited me to watch him defecate in the outdoor privy, and during the act told me a number of indecent stories and words which I cannot remember.
About this time I fell in love with a little Jewish boy next door. Often I cried myself to sleep over the thought that perhaps he was lying on a sofa alone and crying with a stomach-ache. I longed to embrace him; and yet I saw little of him, and made little of him when I was with him.
Living in a Western city a few months later, some girls of 12 and 14 led me to their barn, where they dressed themselves in boys' clothing and made believe that they were cowboys. One of them told me to "shut my eyes, open my mouth, and get a surprise." When I opened my eyes once more a piece of hen-dung lay in my mouth. I have a vague remembrance of one of the girls asking me to enter a water-closet with her. She uttered some indelicate phrase, but I performed no act with her. In the house where I lived I once entered the bedroom of a half-grown girl while she was dressing. She knelt to kiss me innocently enough, and I, by a sudden impulse, ran my hand between her bare neck and her corset as far as I could reach. Apparently she took no notice of my movement. Although I did not masturbate, yet during this winter I experienced a tickling sensation about my genitals when I placed my hand beneath them as I lay on my stomach in bed. One evening I pulled up my night-dress and, holding my penis in my hand, I danced to and fro on the carpet. I imagined that I was one of a line of naked men and women who were advancing toward another similar line that faced them. I imagined myself as pleasurably coming in contact with my female partner who possessed male genitals.
The following summer I lived in the woods. My next-door playmate was a little girl of my own age—6 years. She sat down before me in the barn and exposed her genitals. This was the first time I had seen female organs, or had thought for a moment that they differed from my own. In great perplexity I asked the little girl: "Has it been cut off?" She and I defecated in peach baskets that we found in the upper part of the barn.
When I was 7 years old and back in the Eastern city I lived in the house of a physician. Alone with his 3-year-old daughter one day, I showed her my erect organ, and felt a delicious gratification when she stroked it with the words: "Nice! Nice!" I confessed my fault to my guardian that night after I had said my prayers. I had complained to my mother a year before of the inconvenience I found in my penis being "so long sometimes." She said that she would "see about having the end taken off." But I was never circumcised. Her words gave me the doubly unpleasant impression that my glans was to be cut off.
There came occasionally to the kitchen of Dr. W.'s house a foul-mouthed Irish laundress who used coarse language to me concerning urination. I loathed the woman, and yet one night I dreamed that I was embracing her naked form and rolling over and over with her on the bed; and in spite of my sight of female genitals a few months before, I thought of her as having organs of my own kind and size. At my first school I watched a red-haired boy of 12 expose the penis of a 7-year-old boy as he lay on his back in the bath-room. I do not remember that the sight gave me sexual pleasure.