Freud - Complete Works (264 page)

  
¹ We are reminded at this point of
Moll’s analysis of the sexual instinct into an instinct of
‘contrectation’ and an instinct of
‘detumescence’. Contrectation represents a need for
contact with the skin.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1494

(6)
REASONS FOR THE APPARENT PREPONDERANCE OF

PERVERSE SEXUALITY IN THE PSYCHONEUROSES

   The preceding discussion may
perhaps have placed the sexuality of psychoneurotics in a false
light. It may have given the impression that, owing to their
disposition, psychoneurotics approximate closely to perverts in
their sexual behaviour and are proportionately remote from normal
people. It may indeed very well be that the constitutional
disposition of these patients (apart from their exaggerated degree
of sexual repression and the excessive intensity of their sexual
instinct)  includes an unusual tendency to perversion, using
that word in its widest sense. Nevertheless, investigation of
comparatively slight cases shows that this last assumption is not
absolutely necessary, or at least that in forming a judgement on
these pathological developments there is a factor to be considered
which weighs in the other direction. Most psychoneurotics only fall
ill after the age of puberty as a result of the demands made upon
them by normal sexual life. (It is most particularly against the
latter that repression is directed.) Or else illnesses of this kind
set in later, when the libido fails to obtain satisfaction along
normal lines. In both these cases the libido behaves like a stream
whose main bed has become blocked. It proceeds to fill up
collateral channels which may hitherto have been empty. Thus, in
the same way, what appears to be the strong tendency (though, it is
true, a negative one) of psychoneurotics to perversion may be
collaterally determined, and must, in any case, be collaterally
intensified. The fact is that we must put sexual repression as an
internal factor alongside such external factors as limitation of
freedom, inaccessibility of a normal sexual object, the dangers of
the normal sexual act, etc., which bring about perversions in
persons who might perhaps otherwise have remained normal.

   In this respect different cases
of neurosis may behave differently: in one case the preponderating
factor may be the innate strength of the tendency to perversion, in
another it may be the collateral increase of that tendency owing to
the libido being forced away from a normal sexual aim and sexual
object. It would be wrong to represent as opposition what is in
fact a co-operative relation. Neurosis will always produce its
greatest effects when constitution and experience work together in
the same direction. Where the constitution is a marked one it will
perhaps not require the support of actual experiences; while a
great shock in real life will perhaps bring about a neurosis even
in an average constitution. (Incidentally, this view of the
relative aetiological importance of what is innate and what is
accidentally experienced applies equally in other fields.)

   If we prefer to suppose,
nevertheless, that a particularly strongly developed tendency to
perversion is among the characteristics of psychoneurotic
constitutions, we have before us the prospect of being able to
distinguish a number of such constitutions according to the innate
preponderance of one or the other of the erotogenic zones or of one
or the other of the component instincts. The question whether a
special relation holds between the perverse disposition and the
particular form of illness adopted, has, like so much else in this
field, not yet been investigated.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1495

(7)
INTIMATION OF THE INFANTILE CHARACTER OF SEXUALITY

   By demonstrating the part played
by perverse impulses in the formation of symptoms in the
psychoneuroses, we have quite remarkably increased the number of
people who might be regarded as perverts. It is not only that
neurotics in themselves constitute a very numerous class, but it
must also be considered that an unbroken chain bridges the gap
between the neuroses in all their manifestations and normality.
After all, Moebius could say with justice that we are all to some
extent hysterics. Thus the extraordinarily wide dissemination of
the perversions forces us to suppose that the disposition to
perversions is itself of no great rarity but must form a part of
what passes as the normal constitution.

   It is, as we have seen, debatable
whether the perversions go back to innate determinants or arise, as
Binet assumed was the case with fetishism, owing to chance
experiences. The conclusion now presents itself to us that there is
indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but that it is
something innate in
everyone
, though as a disposition it may
vary in its intensity and may be increased by the influences of
actual life. What is in question are the innate constitutional
roots of the sexual instinct. In one class of cases (the
perversions) these roots may grow into the actual vehicles of
sexual activity; in others they may be submitted to an insufficient
suppression (repression) and thus be able in a roundabout way to
attract a considerable proportion of sexual energy to themselves as
symptoms; while in the most favourable cases, which lie between
these two extremes, they may by means of effective restriction and
other kinds of modification bring about what is known as normal
sexual life.

   We have, however, a further
reflection to make. This postulated constitution, containing the
germs of all the perversions, will only be demonstrable in
children
, even though in them it is only with modest degrees
of intensity that any of the instincts can emerge. A formula begins
to take shape which lays it down that the sexuality of neurotics
has remained in, or been brought back to, an infantile state. Thus
our interest turns to the sexual life of children, and we will now
proceed to trace the play of influences which govern the evolution
of infantile sexuality till its outcome in perversion, neurosis or
normal sexual life.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1496

II

INFANTILE SEXUALITY

NEGLECT OF THE
INFANTILE FACTOR
   One feature of the popular view
of the sexual instinct is

                                                             
that it is absent in childhood and only awakens in the period of
life described as puberty. This, however, is not merely a simple
error but one that has had grave consequences, for it is mainly to
this idea that we owe our present ignorance of the fundamental
conditions of sexual life. A thorough study of the sexual
manifestations of childhood would probably reveal the essential
characters of the sexual instinct and would show us the course of
its development and the way in which it is put together from
various sources.

   It is noticeable that writers who
concern themselves with explaining the characteristics and
reactions of the adult have devoted much more attention to the
primaeval period which is comprised in the life of the
individual’s ancestors - have, that is, ascribed much more
influence to heredity - than to the other primaeval period, which
falls within the lifetime of the individual himself - that is, to
childhood. One would surely have supposed that the influence of
this latter period would be easier to understand and could claim to
be considered before that of heredity.¹ It is true that in the
literature of the subject one occasionally comes across remarks
upon precocious sexual activity in small children - upon erections,
masturbation and even activities resembling coitus. But these are
always quoted only as exceptional events, as oddities or as
horrifying instances of precocious depravity. So far as I know, not
a single author has clearly recognized the regular existence of a
sexual instinct in childhood; and in the writings that have become
so numerous on the development of children, the chapter on
‘Sexual Development’ is as a rule omitted.²

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1915:] Nor is it
possible to estimate correctly the part played by heredity until
the part played by childhood has been assessed.

  
²
The assertion made in the text has since
struck me myself as being so bold that I have undertaken the task
of testing its validity by looking through the literature once
more. The outcome of this is that I have allowed my statement to
stand unaltered. The scientific examination of both the physical
and mental phenomena of sexuality in childhood is still in its
earliest beginnings. One writer, Bell (1902, 327), remarks:
‘I know of no scientist who has given a careful analysis of
the emotion as it is seen in the adolescent.’ Somatic sexual
manifestations from the period before puberty have only attracted
attention in connection with phenomena of degeneracy and as
indications of degeneracy. In none of the accounts which I have
read of the psychology of this period of life is a chapter to be
found on the erotic life of children; and this applies to the
well-known works of Preyer, Baldwin (1898), Perez (1886),
Strümpell (1899), Groos (1904), Heller (1904), Sully (1895)
and others. We can obtain the clearest impression of the state of
things in this field to-day from the periodical
Die
Kinderfehler
from 1896 onwards. Nevertheless the conviction is
borne in upon us that the existence of love in childhood stands in
no need of discovery. Perez (1886, 272 ff.) argues in favour of its
existence. Groos (1899, 326) mentions as a generally recognized
fact that ‘some children are already accessible to sexual
impulses at a very early age and feel an urge to have contact with
the opposite sex’. The earliest instance of the appearance of
‘sex-love’ recorded by Bell (1902, 330) concerns a
child in the middle of his third year. On this point compare
further Havelock Ellis (1913, Appendix B).

  
[
Added
1910:] This judgement upon the literature of
infantile sexuality need no longer be maintained since the
appearance of Stanley Hall’s exhaustive work (1904). No such
modification is necessitated by Moll’s recent book (1909).
See, on the other hand, Bleuler (1908). [
Added
1915:] Since
this was written, a book by Hug-Hellmuth (1913) has taken the
neglected sexual factor fully into account.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1497

INFANTILE
AMNESIA
   The reason for this strange neglect is
to be sought, I think, partly in

                                  
considerations of propriety, which the authors obey as a result of
their own upbringing, and partly in a psychological phenomenon
which has itself hitherto eluded explanation. What I have in mind
is the peculiar amnesia which, in the case of most people, though
by to means all, hides the earliest beginnings of their childhood
up to their sixth or eighth year. Hitherto it has not occurred to
us to feel any astonishment at the fact of this amnesia, though we
might have had good grounds for doing so. For we learn from other
people that during these years, of which at a later date we retain
nothing in our memory but a few unintelligible and fragmentary
recollections, we reacted in a lively manner to impressions, that
we were capable of expressing pain and joy in a human fashion, that
we gave evidence of love, jealousy and other passionate feelings by
which we were strongly moved at the time, and even that we gave
utterance to remarks which were regarded by adults as good evidence
of our possessing insight and the beginnings of a capacity for
judgement. And of all this we, when we are grown up, have no
knowledge of our own! Why should our memory lag so far behind the
other activities of our minds? We have, on the contrary, good
reason to believe that there is no period at which the capacity for
receiving and reproducing impressions is greater than precisely
during the years of childhood.¹

  
¹
I have attempted to solve one of the
problems connected with the earliest memories of childhood in a
paper on ‘ Screen Memories’ (1899
a
).
[
Added
1924:] See also Chapter IV of my
Psychopathology
of Everyday Life
(1901
b
).

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1498

   On the other hand we must assume,
or we can convince ourselves by a psychological examination of
other people, that the very same impressions that we have forgotten
have none the less left the deepest traces on our minds and have
had a determining effect upon the whole of our later development.
There can, therefore, be no question of any real abolition of the
impressions of childhood, but rather of an amnesia similar to that
which neurotics exhibit for later events, and of which the essence
consists in a simple withholding of these impressions from
consciousness, viz., in their repression. But what are the forces
which bring about this repression of the impressions of childhood?
Whoever could solve this riddle would, I think, have explained
hysterical
amnesia as well.

   Meanwhile we must not fail to
observe that the existence of infantile amnesia provides a new
point of comparison between the mental states of children and
psychoneurotics. We have already come across another such point in
the formula to which we were led, to the effect that the sexuality
of psychoneurotics has remained at, or been carried back to, an
infantile stage. Can it be, after all, that infantile amnesia, too,
is to be brought into relation with the sexual impulses of
childhood?