There came the years in which I had to discover anew that there was within me an instinct which had to lie close and concealed in the bright world of moral sanction. As to every man, the slowly awakening sense of sex came to me as an enemy and a destroyer, as something forbidden, as seduction and sin. What my curiosity sought to know, what caused me dreams, desire and fear, the great secret of puberty, that was not at all in keeping with the guarded happiness of my peaceful childhood. I did as everyone else. I led the double life of a child, who is yet a child no longer. My conscious self lived under the conditions sanctioned at home; it denied the existence of the new world whose dawn glimmered before me. But I lived as well in dreams, impelled by desires of a secret nature, upon which my conscious self anxiously attempted to build a new fabric, as the world of my childhood fell in ruins about me. Like almost all parents, my own did nothing to help the awakening life-instincts, about which not a syllable was uttered. They only aided, with untiring care, my hopeless attempts to deny the reality, and to continue my existence in a childlike world which was ever becoming more unreal and more mendacious. I do not know whether parents can do much in such a case, and I make mine no reproach.
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