The Three Phases of Life
The first phase embraces the first years of life. I call this part of life the pre-sexual stage. These years correspond to the caterpillar-stage of butterflies, and are characterized almost exclusively by the functions of nutrition and growth.
The second phase embraces the later years of childhood up to puberty, and might be called the pre-pubertal stage.
The third phase is that of riper years, proceeding only from puberty onwards, and could be called the time of maturity.
You cannot have failed to notice that we become conscious of the greatest difficulty when we arrive at the question at what age we must put the limit of the pre-sexual stage. I am ready to confess my uncertainty with regard to this problem. If I survey the psychoanalytical experiences with children, as yet insufficiently numerous, at the same time keeping in mind the observations made by Freud, it seems to me that the limit of this phase lies between the third and fifth years. This, of course, with due consideration for the greatest individual diversities. From various aspects this is an important age. The child has emancipated itself already from the helplessness of the baby, and a series of important psychological functions have acquired a firm hold. From this period on, the obscurity of the early infantile "amnesia," or the discontinuity of the early infantile consciousness, begins to clear up through the sporadic continuity of memory. It seems as if, at this age, a considerable step had been made towards emancipation and the formation of a new and independent personality. As far as we know, the first signs of interest and activity which may fairly be called sexual fall into this period, although these sexual indications have still the infantile characteristics of harmlessness and naiveté. I think I have sufficiently demonstrated why a sexual terminology cannot be given to the pre-sexual stage, and so we may now consider the other problems from the standpoint we have just reached. You will remember that we dropped the problem of the libido in childhood, because it seemed impossible to arrive at any clearness in that way. But now we are obliged to take up the question again, if only to see whether the energic conception harmonizes with the principles just advanced. We saw, following Freud's conception,
