1857. If a sexually normal child is thus seduced into taking part in a sexual relationship with a being of its own sex, an object of thought that creates extremely intense activity is introduced into its consciousness.The child speculates more and more about these newly awakened sexual relations.And this exaggerated mental activity can in turn become so persistent and intense in nature that a temporary connection arises between its waking day-consciousness and the structure of its opposite pole, which is of course the seat of the seduced child's as-yet hidden and unconscious opposite sex and opposite tendency.But the intensified mental activity associated with the image or memory of the artificial sexual release, which in the most fortunate case was, in spite of everything, a pleasure, gives rise in the child to a growing desire for a repetition.Since the child during its immature years is in closer, more intimate contact with friends of its own sex than with beings of the opposite sex, there is no great distance from the remembered image of the artificial sexual pleasure to the creation of a new image that expresses the desire for a repetition of the artificial sexual act, but with one of its friends of its own sex whom it already admires and has particularly sympathetic feelings for or is friends with.Its desire is continually nourished.And sooner or later the child will succeed in getting the artificial sexual relations.And in so doing the child's natural attitude towards the opposite sex is thereby forced into the background; it is overshadowed and inhibited by its artificial attitude in the same way as a useful plant can be overshadowed and inhibited in its development by a weed.And without the child thinking about it, it has thereby already engaged in far too intense sexual activity, which naturally, just like all other abnormal phenomena, collides with the natural or normal state of things, thereby creating greater or lesser processes of suffering for its originator.
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