The resistance is wholly external; the whole child still desires its pleasure and its whole resources, mental and physical, are directed to gain the object. Mere failure may be painful and may lead to an outburst of rage which possibly even discharges some of the mental energy of the wish, but the situation psychically is simple and the incident tends of itself to go no farther.
The gratification may prove to be physically painful in itself. This seems to promise certain elements of mental conflict in balancing the pleasure of the gratification against the remembered pain it involves. We are assuming that the pain is the immediate consequence of the act, as when, for example, a child makes the immemorial scientific discovery that fire burns fingers. Such a direct experience without the interposition of a second person or the pointing of a moral does not in fact involve any real mental conflict. The source of the pain is external, its only emotional quality is that of its simple unpleasantness, and this cannot, as it were, enter into the