Freud - Complete Works (267 page)
Actual masturbatory stimulation
of the anal zone by means of the finger, provoked by a centrally
determined or peripherally maintained sensation of itching, is by
no means rare among older children.
¹
[
Footnote added
1920:] Lou
Andreas-Salomé (1916), in a paper which has given us a very
much deeper understanding of the significance of anal erotism, has
shown how the history of the first prohibition which a child comes
across - the prohibition against getting pleasure from anal
activity and its products - has a decisive effect on his whole
development. This must be the first occasion on which the infant
has a glimpse of an environment hostile to his instinctual
impulses, on which he learns to separate his own entity from this
alien one and on which he carries out the first
‘repression’ of his possibilities for pleasure. From
that time on, what is ‘anal’ remains the symbol of
everything that is to be repudiated and excluded from life. The
clear-cut distinction between anal and genital processes which is
later insisted upon is contradicted by the close anatomical and
functional analogies and relations which hold between them. The
genital apparatus remains the neighbour of the cloaca, and actually
‘in the case of women is only taken from it on
lease’.
Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality
1508
ACTIVITY OF THE
GENITAL ZONES
Among the erotogenic zones that
form part of the child’s
body there is one which certainly does not play the opening part,
and which cannot be the vehicle of the oldest sexual impulses, but
which is destined to great things in the future. In both male and
female children it is brought into connection with micturition (in
the glans and clitoris) and in the former is enclosed in a pouch of
mucous membrane, so that there can be no lack of stimulation of it
by secretions which may give an early start to sexual excitation.
The sexual activities of this erotogenic zone, which forms part of
the sexual organs proper, are the beginning of what is later to
become ‘normal’ sexual life. The anatomical situation
of this region, the secretions in which it is bathed, the washing
and rubbing to which it is subjected in the course of a
child’s toilet, as well as accidental stimulation (such as
the movement of intestinal worms in the case of girls), make it
inevitable that the pleasurable feeling which this part of the body
is capable of producing should be noticed by children even during
their earliest infancy, and should give rise to a need for its
repetition. If we consider this whole range of contrivances and
bear in mind that both making a mess and measures for keeping clean
are bound to operate in much the same way, it is scarcely possible
to avoid the conclusion that the foundations for the future primacy
over sexual activity exercised by this erotogenic zone are
established by early infantile masturbation, which scarcely a
single individual escapes. The action which disposes of the
stimulus and brings about satisfaction consists in a rubbing
movement with the hand or in the application of pressure (no doubt
on the lines of a pre-existing reflex) either from the hand or by
bringing the thighs together. This last method is by far the more
common in the case of girls. The preference for the hand which is
shown by boys is already evidence of the important contribution
which the instinct for mastery is destined to make to masculine
sexual activity.¹
It will be in the interests of
clarity if I say at once that three phases of infantile
masturbation are to be distinguished. The first of these belongs to
early infancy, and the second to the brief efflorescence of sexual
activity about the fourth year of life; only the third phase
corresponds to pubertal masturbation, which is often the only kind
taken into account.
¹
[
Footnote added
1915:] Unusual
techniques in carrying out masturbation in later years seem to
point to the influence of a prohibition against masturbation which
has been overcome.
Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality
1509
SECOND PHASE OF
INFANTILE MASTURBATION
The masturbation of early
infancy seems to
disappear after a short time; but it may persist uninterruptedly
until puberty, and this would constitute the first great deviation
from the course of development laid down for civilized men. At some
point of childhood after early infancy, as a rule before the fourth
year, the sexual instinct belonging to the genital zone usually
revives and persists again for a time until it is once more
suppressed, or it may continue without interruption. This second
phase of infantile sexual activity may assume a variety of
different forms which can only be determined by a precise analysis
of individual cases. But all its details leave behind the deepest
(unconscious) impressions in the subject’s memory, determine
the development of his character, if he is to remain healthy, and
the symptomatology of his neurosis, if he is to fall ill after
puberty.¹ In the latter case we find that this sexual period
has been forgotten and that the conscious memories that bear
witness to it have been displaced. (I have already mentioned that I
am also inclined to relate normal infantile amnesia to this
infantile sexual activity.) Psycho-analytic investigation enables
us to make what has been forgotten conscious and thus do away with
a compulsion that arises from the unconscious psychical
material.
¹
[
Footnote added
1915:] The problem
of why the sense of guilt of neurotics is, as Bleuler recently
recognized, regularly attached to the memory of some masturbatory
activity, usually at puberty, still awaits an exhaustive analytic
explanation. [
Added
1920:] The most general and most
important factor concerned must no doubt be that masturbation
represents the executive agency of the whole of infantile sexuality
and is, therefore, able to take over the sense of guilt attaching
to it.
Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality
1510
RETURN OF EARLY
INFANTILE MASTURBATION
During the years of
childhood with which I am
now
dealing, the sexual excitation of early infancy returns, either as
a centrally determined tickling stimulus which seeks satisfaction
in masturbation, or as a process in the nature of a nocturnal
emission which, like the nocturnal emissions of adult years,
achieves satisfaction without the help of any action by the
subject. The latter case is the more frequent with girls and in the
second half of childhood; its determinants are not entirely
intelligible and often, though not invariably, it seems to be
conditioned by a period of earlier
active
masturbation. The
symptoms of these sexual manifestations are scanty; they are mostly
displayed on behalf of the still undeveloped sexual apparatus by
the
urinary
apparatus, which thus acts, as it were, as the
former’s trustee. Most of the so-called bladder disorders of
this period are sexual disturbances: nocturnal enuresis, unless it
represents an epileptic fit, corresponds to a nocturnal
emission.
The reappearance of sexual
activity is determined by internal causes and external
contingencies, both of which can be guessed in cases of neurotic
illness from the form taken by their symptoms and can be discovered
with certainty by psycho-analytic investigation. I shall have to
speak presently of the internal causes; great and lasting
importance attaches at this period to the accidental
external
contingencies. In the foreground we find the
effects of seduction, which treats a child as a sexual object
prematurely and teaches him, in highly emotional circumstances, how
to obtain satisfaction from his genital zones, a satisfaction which
he is then usually obliged to repeat again and again by
masturbation. An influence of this kind may originate either from
adults or from other children. I cannot admit that in my paper on
‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ (1896
c
) I
exaggerated the frequency or importance of that influence, though I
did not then know that persons who remain normal may have had the
same experiences in their childhood, and though I consequently
overrated the importance of seduction in comparison with the
factors of sexual constitution and development.¹ Obviously
seduction is not required in order to arouse a child’s sexual
life; that can also come about spontaneously from internal
causes.
POLYMORPHOUSLY
PERVERSE DISPOSITION
It is an instructive fact
that under the influence of
seduction children can become polymorphously perverse, and can be
led into all possible kinds of sexual irregularities. This shows
that an aptitude for them is innately present in their disposition.
There is consequently little resistance towards carrying them out,
since the mental dams against sexual excesses - shame, disgust and
morality - have either not yet been constructed at all or are only
in course of construction, according to the age of the child. In
this respect children behave in the same kind of way as an average
uncultivated woman in whom the same polymorphously perverse
disposition persists. Under ordinary conditions she may remain
normal sexually, but if she is led on by a clever seducer she will
find every sort of perversion to her taste, and will retain them as
part of her own sexual activities. Prostitutes exploit the same
polymorphous, that is, infantile, disposition for the purposes of
their profession; and, considering the immense number of women who
are prostitutes or who must be supposed to have an aptitude for
prostitution without becoming engaged in it, it becomes impossible
not to recognize that this same disposition to perversions of every
kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic.
¹
Havelock Ellis has published a number of
autobiographical narratives written by people who remained
predominantly normal in later life and describing the first sexual
impulses of their childhood and the occasions which gave rise to
them. These reports naturally suffer from the fact that they omit
the prehistoric period of the writers' sexual lives, which is
veiled by infantile amnesia and which can only be filled in by
psycho-analysis in the case of an individual who has developed a
neurosis. In more than one respect, nevertheless, the statements
are valuable, and similar narratives were what led me to make the
modification in my aetiological hypotheses which I have mentioned
in the text.
Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality
1511
COMPONENT
INSTINCTS
Moreover, the effects of seduction do
not help to reveal the early
history of the sexual instinct; they rather confuse our view of it
by presenting children prematurely with a sexual object for which
the infantile sexual instinct at first shows no need. It must,
however, be admitted that infantile sexual life, in spite of the
preponderating dominance of erotogenic zones, exhibits components
which from the very first involve other people as sexual objects.
Such are the instincts of scopophilia, exhibitionism and cruelty,
which appear in a sense independently of erotogenic zones; these
instincts do not enter into intimate relations with genital life
until later, but are already to be observed in childhood as
independent impulses, distinct in the first instance from
erotogenic sexual activity. Small children are essentially without
shame, and at some periods of their earliest years show an
unmistakable satisfaction in exposing their bodies, with especial
emphasis on the sexual parts. The counterpart of this supposedly
perverse inclination, curiosity to see other people’s
genitals, probably, does not become manifest until somewhat later
in childhood, when the obstacle set up by a sense of shame has
already reached a certain degree of development. Under the
influence of seduction the scopophilic perversion can attain great
importance in the sexual life of a child. But my researches into
the early years of normal people, as well as of neurotic patients,
force me to the conclusion that scopophilia can also appear in
children as a spontaneous manifestation. Small children whose
attention has once been drawn - as a rule by masturbation - to
their own genitals usually take the further step without help from
outside and develop a lively interest in the genitals of their
playmates. Since opportunities for satisfying curiosity of this
kind usually occur only in the course of satisfying the two kinds
of need for excretion, children of this kind turn into
voyeurs
, eager spectators of the processes of micturition
and defaecation. When repression of these inclinations sets in, the
desire to see other people’s genitals (whether of their own
or the opposite sex) persists as a tormenting compulsion, which in
some cases of neurosis later affords the strongest motive force for
the formation of symptoms.
Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality
1512
The cruel component of the sexual
instinct develops in childhood even more independently of the
sexual activities that are attached to erotogenic zones. Cruelty in
general comes easily to the childish nature, since the obstacle
that brings the instinct for mastery to a halt at another
person’s pain - namely a capacity for pity - is developed
relatively late. The fundamental psychological analysis of this
instinct has, as we know, not yet been satisfactorily achieved. It
may be assumed that the impulse of cruelty arises from the instinct
for mastery and appears at a period of sexual life at which the
genitals have not yet taken over their later role. It then
dominates a phase of sexual life which we shall later describe as a
pregenital organization. Children who distinguish themselves by
special cruelty towards animals and playmates usually give rise to
a just suspicion of an intense and precocious sexual activity
arising from erotogenic zones; and, though all the sexual instincts
may display simultaneous precocity,
erotogenic
sexual
activity seems, nevertheless, to be the primary one. The absence of
the barrier of pity brings with it a danger that the connection
between the cruel and the erotogenic instincts, thus established in
childhood, may prove unbreakable in later life. Ever since Jean
Jacques Rousseau’s
Confessions
, it has been well known
to all educationalists that the painful stimulation of the skin of
the buttocks is one of the erotogenic roots of the
passive
instinct of cruelty (masochism). The conclusion has rightly been
drawn by them that corporal punishment, which is usually applied to
this part of the body, should not be inflicted upon any children
whose libido is liable to be forced into collateral channels by the
later demands of cultural education.¹