因習的な性の取り扱いから生じる不幸
比較的(性格及び知能の)優れた少年の中には,同時に,美や詩歌に対する,また,性とはまったくかけ離れていると考えられる, 理想的な愛に対する,この上ない極端な理想主義の衝動も存在(同居)している。キリスト教の教えにあるマニ教的な要素(注:二元論的要素)のために,思春期の理想主義的な衝動と肉欲的な衝動が,われわれの中で完全に分離したままで存在し,ときには戦い(せめぎあい)さえする傾向がある(at war one with the other)。この点について,私はある知的な友人の次の告白を引用してもよいだろう。彼は言う。 「私自身の思春期は,非典型的なものではなかったと信じているが,この(理想主義と肉欲の)分離をきわめてはっきりした形で現わしていた。。昼間,何時間もシェリーを読んで,感傷にふけったものである。」 |
Chapter XIX: Sex and Individual Well-being, n.5In the next stage, that of adolescence, the misery caused by the conventional handling of sex is even greater than in childhood. Many boys do not know at all accurately what is happening to them, and are terrified when they first experience nocturnal emissions. They find themselves filled with impulses which they have been taught to consider extremely wicked. These impulses are so strong as to be an obsession, day and night. In the better sort of boy, there are at the same time impulses of the most extreme idealism towards beauty and poetry, and towards ideal love, which is thought of as wholly divorced from sex. Owing to the Manichaean elements in Christian teaching, the idealistic and the carnal impulses of adolescence are apt, among ourselves, to remain wholly dissociated, and even at war one with the other. On this point I may quote the confession of an intellectual friend, who says :"My own adolescence was, I believe, not untypical, and it exhibited this dissociation in a very marked form. For hours in the day I would read Shelley and sentimentalize over :The desire of the moth for the star,Then suddenly I would leave these heights and try to catch a surreptitious glimpse of the housemaid undressing. The latter impulse caused me profound shame ; the former had, of course, an element of silliness, since its idealism was the obverse of a foolish fear of sex." |