Sex education and national health / C. Gasquoine Hartley.

  • Catherine Gasquoine Hartley
Date:
1920
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sex education and national health / C. Gasquoine Hartley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    dangers to be avoided by the teacher of sexual hygiene is the almost universal error of representing as great sins and crimes the bad sexual habits, which are usually the result in the young of a diseased condition of the emotional life. We have found that the self-abuse of the adolescent arises in most cases as a makeshift and a way of relief from conditions of emotional repression for which we, as adults, are responsible. Eleventh : We have to accept our responsibilities in a quite new spirit of honesty and humility. We know that the habit is usually learnt by evil example, and is done, at any rate at first, without much thought, and as a quick way of gaining the emotional satis¬ faction which we have been too dull and too lazy to supply. I have asserted again and again, that if the necessary stimulus to right conduct is missing there must be a regression to primitive satisfaction. To understand this will help us to help the young. Twelfth : We saw that there can be no greater blunder than that of exaggerating and falsifying the importance of adolescent masturbation by representing it as a horrible and extremely dangerous vice. In certain cases it is connected with deeply seated neurotic formations, and can be helped only by special treatment that is able to relieve the psyche and bring about a successful readaptation with the circumstances of life. Thirteenth : The most important result we have gained from our inquiry, is the knowledge that it is not the good and pious precepts of the teachers or the parents ; not, indeed, the inculcation of any new formula of pedagogic morality that will have
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