" (G. Stanley Hall, _Adolescence_, vol. i, p. 116.)
The nature of such scatalogical phenomena in childhood--which are
often clearly the instinctive manifestations of an erotic
symbolism--and their wide prevalence among both boys and girls,
are very well illustrated in a narrative which I include in
Appendix B, History II.
In boys as they approach the age of puberty, this attraction to the
scatalogic, when it exists, tends to die out, giving place to more normal
sexual conceptions, or at all events it takes a subordinate and less
serious place in the mind. In girls, on the other hand, it often tends to
persist. Edmond de Goncourt, a minute observer of the feminine mind,
refers in _Cherie_ to "those innocent and triumphant gaieties which
scatalogic stories have the privilege of arousing in women who have
remained still children, even the most distinguished women." The extent to
which innocent young women, who would frequently be uninterested or
repelled in presence of the sexually obscene are sometimes attracted by
the scatalogically obscene, becomes intelligible, however, if we realize
that a symbolism comes here into play. In women the more specifically
sexual knowledge and experience of life frequently develop much later than
in men or even remains in abeyance, and the specifically sexual phenomena
cannot therefore easily lend themselves to wit, or humor, or imagination.
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