I don't remember much of that sort
of thing in my own case. It may have faded out of my mind. There were
probably some uneasy curiosities, a grotesque dream or so perhaps; I
can't recall anything of that sort distinctly now. I had a very lively
interest in women, even when I was still quite a little boy, and a
certain--what shall I call it?--imaginative slavishness--not towards
actual women but towards something magnificently feminine. My first
love--"
Sir Richmond smiled at some secret memory. "My first love was Britannia
as depicted by Tenniel in the cartoons in PUNCH. I must have been a very
little chap at the time of the Britannia affair. I just clung to her in
my imagination and did devoted things for her. Then I recall, a little
later, a secret abject adoration for the white goddesses of the Crystal
Palace. Not for any particular one of them that I can remember,--for all
of them. But I don't remember anything very monstrous or incestuous
in my childish imaginations,--such things as Freud, I understand, lays
stress upon. If there was an Oedipus complex or anything of that sort
in my case it has been very completely washed out again. Perhaps a child
which is brought up in a proper nursery of its own and sees a lot of
pictures of the nude human body, and so on, gets its mind shifted off
any possible concentration upon the domestic aspect of sex.
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