Freud - Complete Works (268 page)

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1910:] When the
account which I have given above of infantile sexuality was first
published in 1905, it was founded for the most part on the results
of psycho-analytic research upon adults. At that time it was
impossible to make full use of direct observation on children: only
isolated hints and some valuable pieces of confirmation came from
that source. Since then it has become possible to gain direct
insight into infantile psycho-sexuality by the analysis of some
cases of neurotic illness during the early years of childhood. It
is gratifying to be able to report that direct observation has
fully confirmed the conclusions arrived at by psycho-analysis -
which is incidentally good evidence of the trustworthiness of that
method of research. In addition to this, the ‘Analysis of a
Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ (1909
b
) has taught us
much that is new for which we have not been prepared by
psycho-analysis: for instance, the fact that sexual symbolism - the
representation of what is sexual by non-sexual objects and
relations - extends back into the first years of possession of the
power of speech.

   I
was further made aware of a defect in the account I have given in
the text, which, in the interests of lucidity, describes the
conceptual distinction between the two phases of auto-erotism and
object-love as though it were also a separation in time. But the
analyses that I have just mentioned, as well as the findings of
Bell quoted on
p. 1496 
n
.
, above, show that
children between the ages of three and five are capable of very
clear object-choice, accompanied by strong affects.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1513

THE
SEXUAL RESEARCHES OF CHILDHOOD

THE INSTINCT FOR
KNOWLEDGE
   At about the same time as the sexual
life of children reaches

                                                    
 its first peak, between the ages of three and five, they also
begin to show signs of the activity which may be ascribed to the
instinct for knowledge or research. This instinct cannot be counted
among the elementary instinctual components, nor can it be classed
as exclusively belonging to sexuality. Its activity corresponds on
the one hand to a sublimated manner of obtaining mastery, while on
the other hand it makes use of the energy of scopophilia. Its
relations to sexual life, however, are of particular importance,
since we have learnt from psycho-analysis that the instinct for
knowledge in children is attracted unexpectedly early and
intensively to sexual problems and is in fact possibly first
aroused by them.

THE RIDDLE OF
THE SPHINX
   It is not by theoretical interests
but by practical ones that activities

                                              
of research are set going in children. The threat to the bases of a
child’s existence offered by the discovery or the suspicion
of the arrival of a new baby and the fear that he may, as a result
of it, cease to be cared for and loved, make him thoughtful and
clear-sighted. And this history of the instinct’s origin is
in line with the fact that the first problem with which it deals is
not the question of the distinction between the sexes but the
riddle of where babies come from. (This, in a distorted form which
can easily be rectified, is the same riddle that was propounded by
the Theban Sphinx.) On the contrary, the existence of two sexes
does not to begin with arouse any difficulties or doubts in
children. It is self-evident to a male child that a genital like
his own is to be attributed to everyone he knows, and he cannot
make its absence tally with his picture of these other people.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1514

CASTRATION COMPLEX AND PENIS
ENVY
   This conviction is energetically maintained
by boys,

                                                                   
is obstinately defended against the contradictions which soon
result from observation, and is only abandoned after severe
internal struggles (the castration complex). The substitutes for
this penis which they feel is missing in women play a great part in
determining the form taken by many perversions.¹

   The assumption that all human
beings have the same (male) form of genital is the first of the
many remarkable and momentous sexual theories of children. It is of
little use to a child that the science of biology justifies his
prejudice and has been obliged to recognize the female clitoris as
a true substitute for the penis.

   Little girls do not resort to
denial of this kind when they see that boys’ genitals are
formed differently from their own. They are ready to recognize them
immediately and are overcome by envy for the penis - an envy
culminating in the wish, which is so important in its consequences,
to be boys themselves.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1920:] We are
justified in speaking of a castration complex in women as well.
Both male and female children form a theory that women no less than
men originally had a penis, but that they have lost it by
castration. The conviction which is finally reached by males that
women have no penis often leads them to an enduringly low opinion
of the other sex.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1515

THEORIES OF
BIRTH
   Many people can remember clearly what an
intense interest they took

                                   
during the prepubertal period in the question of where babies come
from. The anatomical answers to the question were at the time very
various: babies come out of the breast, or are cut out of the body,
or the navel opens to let them through.¹ Outside analysis,
there are very seldom memories of any similar researches having
been carried out in the early years of childhood. These earlier
researches fell a victim to repression long since, but all their
findings were of a uniform nature: people get babies by eating some
particular thing (as they do in fairy tales) and babies are born
through the bowel like a discharge of faeces. These infantile
theories remind us of conditions that exist in the animal kingdom -
and especially of the cloaca in types of animals lower than
mammals.

SADISTIC VIEW OF
SEXUAL INTERCOURSE
   If children at this early age
witness sexual

                                                                     
intercourse between adults - for which an opportunity is provided
by the conviction of grown-up people that small children cannot
understand anything sexual - they inevitably regard the sexual act
as a sort of ill-treatment or act of subjugation: they view it,
that is, in a sadistic sense. Psycho-analysis also shows us that an
impression of this kind in early childhood contributes a great deal
towards a predisposition to a subsequent sadistic displacement of
the sexual aim. Furthermore, children are much concerned with the
problem of what sexual intercourse - or, as they put it, being
married - consists in: and they usually seek a solution of the
mystery in some common activity concerned with the function of
micturition or defaecation.

TYPICAL FAILURE
OF INFANTILE SEXUAL RESEARCHES
   We can say in
general of the sexual

                                                                                         
theories of children that they are reflections of their own sexual
constitution, and that in spite of their grotesque errors the
theories show more understanding of sexual processes than one would
have given their creators credit for. Children also perceive the
alterations that take place in their mother owing to pregnancy and
are able to interpret them correctly. The fable of the stork is
often told to an audience that receives it with deep, though mostly
silent, mistrust. There are, however, two elements that remain
undiscovered by the sexual researches of children: the fertilizing
role of semen and the existence of the female sexual orifice - the
same elements, incidentally, in which the infantile organization is
itself undeveloped. It therefore follows that the efforts of the
childish investigator are habitually fruitless, and end in a
renunciation which not infrequently leaves behind it a permanent
injury to the instinct for knowledge. The sexual researches of
these early years of childhood are always carried out in solitude.
They constitute a first step towards taking an independent attitude
in the world, and imply a high degree of alienation of the child
from the people in his environment who formerly enjoyed his
complete confidence.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1924:] In these
later years of childhood there is a great wealth of sexual
theories, of which only a few examples are given in the
text.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1516

THE
PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT OF THE SEXUAL ORGANIZATION

The characteristics of infantile sexual life
which we have hitherto emphasized are the facts that it is
essentially auto-erotic (i.e. that it finds its object in the
infant’s own body) and that its individual component
instincts are upon the whole disconnected and independent of one
another in their search for pleasure. The final outcome of sexual
development lies in what is known as the normal sexual life of the
adult, in which the pursuit of pleasure comes under the sway of the
reproductive function and in which the component instincts, under
the primacy of a single erotogenic zone, form a firm organization
directed towards a sexual aim attached to some extraneous sexual
object.

PREGENITAL
ORGANIZATIONS
   The study, with the help of
psycho-analysis, of the inhibitions

                                                 
and disturbances of this process of development enables us to
recognize abortive beginnings and preliminary stages of a firm
organization of the component instincts such as this - preliminary
stages which themselves constitute a sexual regime of a sort. These
phases of sexual organization are normally passed through smoothly,
without giving more than a hint of their existence. It is only in
pathological cases that they become active and recognizable to
superficial observation.

   We shall give the name of
‘pregenital’ to organizations of sexual life in which
the genital zones have not yet taken over their predominant part.
We have hitherto identified two such organizations, which almost
seem as though they were harking back to early animal forms of
life.

   The first of these is the oral
or, as it might be called, cannibalistic pregenital sexual
organization. Here sexual activity has not yet been separated from
the ingestion of food; nor are opposite currents within the
activity differentiated. The
object
of both activities is
the same; the sexual
aim
consists in the incorporation of
the object - the prototype of a process which, in the form of
identification, is later to play such an important psychological
part. A relic of this constructed phase of organization, which is
forced upon our notice by pathology, may be seen in thumb-sucking,
in which the sexual activity, detached from the nutritive activity,
has substituted for the extraneous object one situated in the
subject’s own body.¹

   A second pregenital phase is that
of the sadistic-anal organization. Here the opposition between two
currents, which runs through all sexual life, is already developed:
they cannot yet, however, be described as ‘masculine’
and ‘feminine’, but only as ‘active’ and
‘passive’. The
activity
is put into operation by
the instinct for mastery through the agency of the somatic
musculature; the organ which, more than any other, represents the
passive
sexual aim is the erotogenic mucous membrane of the
anus. Both of these currents have objects, which, however, are not
identical. Alongside these, other component instincts operate in an
auto-erotic manner. In this phase, therefore, sexual polarity and
an extraneous object are already observable. But organization and
subordination to the reproductive function are still
absent.²

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1920:] For remnants
of this phase in adult neurotics, cf. Abraham (1916). [
Added
1924:] In another, later work (1924) the same writer has divided
both this oral phase, and also the later sadistic anal one, into
two sub-divisions, which are characterized by differing attitudes
towards the object.

  
²
[
Footnote added
1924:] Abraham, in
the paper last quoted (1924), points out that the anus is developed
from the embryonic blastopore - a fact which seems like a
biological prototype of psychosexual development.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1517

AMBIVALENCE
   This form of
sexual organization can persist throughout life and can
permanently

                        
attract a large portion of sexual activity to itself. The
predominance in it of sadism and the cloacal part played by the
anal zone give it a quite peculiarly archaic colouring. It is
further characterized by the fact that in it the opposing pairs of
instincts are developed to an approximately equal extent, a state
of affairs described by Bleuler’s happily chosen term
‘ambivalence’.