[231] It has been denied by some (Meynert, Naecke, etc.) that there is any
sexual _instinct_ at all. I may as well, therefore, explain in what sense
I use the word. (See also "Analysis of the Sexual Impulse" in vol. iii of
these _Studies_.) I mean an inherited aptitude the performance of which
normally demands for its full satisfaction the presence of a person of the
opposite sex. It might be asserted that there is no such thing as an
instinct for food, that it is all imitation, etc. In a sense this is true,
but the automatic basis remains. A chicken from an incubator needs no hen
to teach it to eat. It seems to discover eating and drinking, as it were,
by chance, at first eating awkwardly and eating everything, until it
learns what will best satisfy its organic mechanism. There is no instinct
for food, it may be, but there is an instinct which is only satisfied by
food. It is the same with the "sexual instinct." The tentative and
omnivorous habits of the newly hatched chicken may be compared to the
uncertainty of the sexual instinct at puberty, while the sexual pervert is
like a chicken that should carry on into adult age an appetite for worsted
and paper.
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