A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes

by Sanford Bell

II. Love between children and those of opposite sex who are much older. Give complete details on such points as indicated in I, with whatever differences the disparity in age would naturally make.

III. Give fully, frankly, and as accurately as you can the details of your own childish love affairs.

IV. Give your name (this may be left blank), age, and sex.

360 people reported more than 1,700 cases. With few exceptions those who reported had had experience in teaching. 355 gave accounts of their own childish love affairs. The other five stated that they did not recall any such experience in their own lives. The 1,700 cases include the confessions. Added to the 800 cases of my own collection there are in all more than 2,500 cases that form the basis of this study.

It will be seen that the syllabus calls for data of three kinds, viz., concerning (1) observed love between children of opposite sex about the same in age, (2) observed love between persons of opposite sex with disparity in ages, (3) personal confessions. The first two kinds of data were obtained by the objective method, while the last is obtained through retrospection. Having both observations and confessions many errors that could not otherwise be detected are eliminated since the two classes of material act, to a degree, as mutual controls. Each kind of data according to the first named classification has its particular virtue. The confessions (1) exhibit the continuity in the development of the emotion during the life-span of the individual as he sees it himself (enough cases (355) were given to make a reasonable allowance for individual variations); (2) they indicate the general prevalence of the emotion during childhood; (3) they reinforce observation in the same way that introspection always reinforces the objective method of study. In estimating the value of these confessions one must be mindful of the common defect of most auto-biographical statements, viz., that they are influenced by the almost irresistible tendency to write about one's self in a literary way and so touch plain facts as to make them less prosaic. The observations help us in eliminating this element of error. The data concerning the love that children have for adults of the opposite sex throw valuable light upon the nature of jealousy in children as it is much accentuated in these cases. They also show the effect of forcing the development of an emotion by a stimulus that is chronologically prior to the normal period of development. In the cases showing the love of the adult for a child are revealed facts bearing upon some forms of sexual perversion. In these cases the child is used as a means of escape for suppressed love. Love that normally should go out to an adult, is through some real or supposed necessity suppressed until it finally seeks quiescence through discharge upon a child or pet animal. This is not infrequent among women whose relatively passive role decreed by nature in love affairs has been exaggerated by society. The observations concerning love between children of opposite sex and about the same age aid us in determining the phase of the emotion's development that normally belongs to any given period of life; i. e., there are many observations upon children who are five years old, or six, seven, eight, nine, etc., respectively, and these reveal the nature of the emotion that normally belongs to those years. The various kinds of observations extend over the entire periods of infancy, childhood, and into adolescence, and are very well distributed in number among the years of these periods, although more cases were reported for the years 4 to 8, and 12 to 15, both inclusive, than for the years of the period between 8 and 12. The reason for this becomes clearly apparent later.

Analysis of the data contained in all of this material reveals the fact that the emotion of sex-love may appear in the life of the child as early as the middle of the third year. From its appearance at this early age it can be traced in its development through five more or less well marked stages whose time limits are as follows: the first stage extending, as a rule, from the age of three years to the age of eight years; the second from eight to fourteen; the third from fourteen to maturity at about twenty-two in women and twenty-six in men; the fourth from maturity to senescence, whose limits vary widely; the fifth extending through senescence. Not every individual passes through all five stages. Individual differences also keep the time limits of the stages from being exact.

Characteristics of the First Stage.

The presence of the emotion in children between three and eight years of age is shown by such action as the following: hugging, kissing, lifting each other, scuffling, sitting close to each other; confessions to each other and to others, talking about each other when apart; seeking each other and excluding others, grief at being separated; giving of gifts, extending courtesies to each other that are withheld from others, making sacrifices such as giving up desired things or foregoing pleasures; jealousies, etc. The unprejudiced mind in observing these manifestations in hundreds of couples of children cannot escape referring them to sex origin. The most exacting mind is satisfied when to these observations are added the confessions of those who have, as children, experienced the emotion to a marked degree of intensity, and whose memories of childhood are relatively distinct. We are prone to refer many of the manifestations enumerated to imitation. Imitation can account in part for the form in which the emotion shows itself, whose presence is established by the accumulation of a vast amount of evidence. Imitation plays an important role in the development of the sex instinct, and love between the sexes as one of this instinct's derivatives, as it does with the development of most other instincts. It would be no more satisfactory to account for these manifestations by referring them to imitation than it would to account for the love for dolls, the instinct of hunting, the interest in “playing house” by reference to the same cause. When we observe in young puppies, shoats, squirrels, seals, grouse, partridges, field-sparrows, starlings, wood-larks, water-wagtails, goldfinches, etc., actions corresponding to these which I have mentioned in children, we have no hesitancy in referring them to the sex instinct for explanation.

So far as the observations given to me by others are concerned, with very few exceptions, they all report hugging, kissing and other means of affecting physical contact, as being indulged in by the child lovers. This is largely due to the fact that the observers took these actions as the main ones that indicate the presence of the emotion and reported no cases in which they did not occur. My own observations and some of the confessions show that although some form of embrace is general, it is not always present. Through all of the stages of the emotion's development the embrace in some of its forms is the most general means of its expression. A quotation from Groos[6] in this connection is deemed appropriate. In speaking of natural courtship he says: “But a scientific system of natural courtship of the various human races does not exist; nor, indeed, have we systematic observations of any one people. It is, therefore, impossible to affirm whether there are such things as instinctive gestures, expressions, caresses, etc., which all human beings recognize as sexual stimuli. From the little that is known it seems probable that the number of such tokens is not great,—even the kiss is by no means general! We can only be sure of a universal tendency to approach and to touch one another, and of a disposition to self exhibition and coquetry as probably instinctive and of the special forms which these tendencies take under the influence of imitation and tradition as secondary causes. Caressing contact may then be regarded as play when it is an end in itself, which is possible under two conditions. First, when the pursuance of the instinctive movements to their legitimate end is prevented by incapacity or ignorance; and, second, when it is prevented by an act of the will on part of the participants. Children exhibit the first case, adults often enough the second. It is generally known that children are frequently very early susceptible to sexual excitement, and show a desire for contact with others as well as an enjoyment of it, without having the least suspicion of its meaning.” In the cases in which I have recorded lifting each other as indicating sex-love, it was unmistakably apparent that the lifting was not a trial of strength but an indulgence in the pleasures of bodily contact, as was also true of the scuffling. In few, if in any of the cases which I have observed upon children of eight, have the participants been conscious of the meaning of their actions, although I have sometimes seen them attended by great sexual excitement. Schaeffer[7] believes that “the fundamental impulse of sexual life for the utmost intensive and extensive contact, with a more or less clearly defined idea of conquest underlying it,” plays a conspicuous part in the ring fighting of belligerent boys. Bain[8] attaches very great importance to the element of physical contact in sex-love. He says: “In considering the genesis of tender emotion, in any or all of its modes, I am inclined to put great stress upon the sensation of animal contact, or the pleasure of the embrace, a circumstance not adverted to by Mr. Spencer. Many facts may be adduced as showing this to be a very intense susceptibility, as well as a starting point of associations. (1) Touch is the fundamental and generic sense, the first born of sensibility, from which, in the view of evolution, all others take their rise. (2) Even after the remaining senses are differentiated, the primary sense continues to be a leading susceptibility of the mind. The soft, warm touch, if not a first-class influence, is at least an approach to that. The combined power of soft contact and warmth amounts to a considerable pitch of massive pleasure; while there may be subtle influences not reducible to these two heads, such as we term, from not knowing anything about them, magnetic or electric. The sort of thrill from taking a baby in arms is something beyond mere warm touch; and it may rise to the ecstatic height, in which case, however, there may be concurring sensations and ideas. Between male and female the sexual appetite is aroused. A predisposed affection through other means, makes the contact thrilling. (3) The strong fact that cannot be explained away is, that under tender feeling there is a craving for the embrace. Between the sexes there is the deeper appetite; while in mere tender emotion, not sexual, there is nothing but the sense of touch to gratify unless we assume the occult magnetic influences. As anger is consummated, reaches a satisfactory term, by knocking some one down, love is completed and satisfied with an embrace. This would seem to show that the love emotion, while fed by sights and sounds, and even by odors, reaches its climax in touch; and, if so, it must be more completely identified with this sensibility than with any other. In a word, our love pleasures begin and end in sensual contact. Touch is both the alpha and omega of affection. As the terminal and satisfying sensation, the ne plus ultra, it must be a pleasure of the highest degree.” While it is the contact through the sense of touch that acts both as the most natural and most complete expression of love between the sexes and a powerful sexual excitant, there is a contact of the eyes of adolescent and adult lovers,—a sort of embrace by means of the eyes—that is as exciting to many as contact through touch.

The pleasure derived from hugging and kissing, etc., in children who have the emotion in this first stage of its development, is not specifically sexual except in some cases which I am inclined to consider as precocious. Normally, there appears to be no erethism of the sexual organs during the process of love-making. But erethism, as we shall see in another chapter upon the analysis of the sex impulse, is not confined to the sexual organs, but is distributed throughout the entire body, especially through the vascular and nervous systems. In these children there is a state of exaltation, indeed as yet not comparable in intensity to that of the adolescent or adult, which is, nevertheless, erethistic in its nature. It is massive, vague, and generally distributed throughout the body. In some cases there is specific sexual excitement with erections of the penis and hyperæmia of the female genitalia. Such phenomena are seen only in the cases that seem to me to be precocious. This point will be more fully treated in the chapter referred to above. Suffice it to say here that in love between the sexes at this early period or in the next following, the physical sensations of sexual excitement are generally wholly wanting, or if present are entirely unlocated. Love between children of the opposite sex bears much the same relation to that between adults as the flower does to the fruit, and has about as little of physical sexuality in it as an apple-blossom has of the apple that develops from it.