Freud - Complete Works (273 page)

1538

THE BARRIER
AGAINST INCEST
   We see, therefore, that the
parents’ affection for their child may

                                                   
awaken his sexual instinct prematurely (i.e. before the somatic
conditions of puberty are present) to such a degree that the mental
excitation breaks through in an unmistakable fashion to the genital
system. If, on the other hand, they are fortunate enough to avoid
this, then their affection can perform its task of directing the
child in his choice of a sexual object when he reaches maturity. No
doubt the simplest course for the child would be to choose as his
sexual objects the same persons whom, since his childhood, he has
loved with what may be described as damped-down libido.¹ But,
by the postponing of sexual maturation, time has been gained in
which the child can erect, among other restraints on sexuality, the
barrier against incest, and can thus take up into himself the moral
precepts which expressly exclude from his object-choice, as being
blood relations, the persons whom he has loved in his childhood.
Respect for this barrier is essentially a cultural demand made by
society. Society must defend itself against the danger that the
interests which it needs for the establishment of higher social
units may be swallowed up by the family; and for this reason, in
the case of every individual, but in particular of adolescent boys,
it seeks by all possible means to loosen their connection with
their family - a connection which, in their childhood, is the only
important one.²

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1915:] Cf. what has
been said on
p. 1518
about
children’s object-choice and the ‘affectionate
current’.

  
²
[
Footnote added
1915:] The barrier
against incest is probably among the historical acquisitions of
mankind, and, like other moral taboos, has no doubt already become
established in many persons by organic inheritance. (Cf. my
Totem and Taboo
, 1912-13.) Psycho-analytic investigation
shows, however, how intensely the individual struggles with the
temptation to incest during his period of growth and how frequently
the barrier is transgressed in phantasies and even in
reality.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1539

   It is in the world of ideas,
however, that the choice of an object is accomplished at first; and
the sexual life of maturing youth is almost entirely restricted to
indulging in phantasies, that is, in ideas that are not destined to
be carried into effect.¹ In these phantasies the infantile
tendencies invariably emerge once more, but this time with
intensified pressure from somatic sources. Among these tendencies
the first place is taken with uniform frequency by the
child’s sexual impulses towards his parents, which are as a
rule already differentiated owing to the attraction of the opposite
sex - the son being drawn towards his mother and the daughter
towards her father.² At the same time as these plainly
incestuous phantasies are overcome and repudiated, one of the most
significant, but also one of the most painful, psychical
achievements of the pubertal period is completed: detachment from
parental authority, a process that alone makes possible the
opposition, which is so important for the progress of civilization,
between the new generation and the old. At every stage in the
course of development through which all human beings ought by
rights to pass, a certain number are held back; so there are some
who have never got over their parents’ authority and have
withdrawn their affection from them either very incompletely or not
at all. They are mostly girls, who, to the delight of their
parents, have persisted in all their childish love far beyond
puberty. It is most instructive to find that it is precisely these
girls who in their later marriage lack the capacity to give their
husbands what is due to them; they make cold wives and remain
sexually anaesthetic. We learn from this that sexual love and what
appears to be non-sexual love for parents are fed from the same
sources; the latter, that is to say, merely corresponds to an
infantile fixation of the libido.

   The closer one comes to the
deeper disturbances of psychosexual development, the more
unmistakably the importance of incestuous object-choice emerges. In
psychoneurotics a large portion or the whole of their psychosexual
activity in finding an object remains in the unconscious as a
result of their repudiation of sexuality. Girls with an exaggerated
need for affection and an equally exaggerated horror of the real
demands made by sexual life have an irresistible temptation on the
one hand to realize the ideal of asexual love in their lives and on
the other hand to conceal their libido behind an affection which
they can express without self-reproaches, by holding fast
throughout their lives to their infantile fondness, revived at
puberty, for their parents or brothers and sisters. Psycho-analysis
has no difficulty in showing persons of this kind that they are
in love
, in the everyday sense of the word, with these
blood-relations of theirs; for, with the help of their symptoms and
other manifestations of their illness, it traces their unconscious
thoughts and translates them into conscious ones. In cases in which
someone who has previously been healthy falls ill after an unhappy
experience in love it is also possible to show with certainty that
the mechanism of his illness consists in a turning-back of his
libido on to those whom he preferred in his infancy.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1920:] The
phantasies of the pubertal period have as their starting-point the
infantile sexual researches that were abandoned in childhood. No
doubt, too, they are also present before the end of the latency
period. They may persist wholly, or to a great extent,
unconsciously and for that reason it is often impossible to date
them accurately. They are of great importance in the origin of many
symptoms, since they precisely constitute preliminary stages of
these symptoms and thus lay down the forms in which the repressed
libidinal components find satisfaction. In the same way, they are
the prototypes of the nocturnal phantasies which become conscious
as dreams. Dreams are often nothing more than revivals of pubertal
phantasies of this kind under the influence of, and in relation to,
some stimulus left over from the waking life of the previous day
(the ‘day’s residues’). Some among the sexual
phantasies of the pubertal period are especially prominent, and are
distinguished by their very general occurrence and by being to a
great extent independent of individual experience. Such are the
adolescent’s phantasies of overhearing his parents in sexual
intercourse, of having been seduced at an early age by someone he
loves and of having been threatened with castration; such, too, are
his phantasies of being in the womb, and even of experiences there,
and the so-called ‘Family Romance’, in which he reacts
to the difference between his attitude towards his parents now and
in his childhood. The close relations existing between these
phantasies and myths has been demonstrated in the case of the last
instance by Otto Rank (1909).

   It
has justly been said that the Oedipus complex is the nuclear
complex of the neuroses, and constitutes the essential part of
their content. It represents the peak of infantile sexuality,
which, through its after-effects, exercises a decisive influence on
the sexuality of adults. Every new arrival on this planet is faced
by the task of mastering the Oedipus complex; anyone who fails to
do so falls a victim to neurosis. With the progress of
psycho-analytic studies the importance of the Oedipus complex has
became more and more clearly evident; its recognition has become
the shibboleth that distinguishes the adherents of psycho-analysis
from its opponents.

  
[
Added
1924:] In another work (1924), Rank has traced
attachment to the mother back to the prehistoric intra-uterine
period and has thus indicated the biological foundation of the
Oedipus complex. He differs from what has been said above, by
deriving the barrier against incest from the traumatic effect of
anxiety at birth.

  
²
Cf. my remarks in
The Interpretation of
Dreams
(1900
a
), on the inevitability of Fate in the
fable of Oedipus.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1540

AFTER-EFFECTS OF
INFANTILE OBJECT-CHOICE
   Even a person who has
been fortunate enough

                                                                              
to avoid an incestuous fixation of his libido does not entirely
escape its influence. It often happens that a young man falls in
love seriously for the first time with a mature woman, or a girl
with an elderly man in a position of authority; this is clearly an
echo of the phase of development that we have been discussing,
since these figures are able to re-animate pictures of their mother
or father.¹ There can be no doubt that every object-choice
whatever is based, though less closely, on these prototypes. A man,
especially, looks for someone who can represent his picture of his
mother, as it has dominated his mind from his earliest childhood;
and accordingly, if his mother is still alive, she may well resent
this new version of herself and meet her with hostility. In view of
the importance of a child’s relations to his parents in
determining his later choice of a sexual object, it can easily be
understood that any disturbance of those relations will produce the
gravest effects upon his adult sexual life. Jealousy in a lover is
never without an infantile root or at least an infantile
reinforcement. If there are quarrels between the parents or if
their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their
children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual
development or to a neurotic illness.

   A child’s affection for his
parents is no doubt the most important infantile trace which, after
being revived at puberty, points the way to his choice of an
object; but it is not the only one. Other starting-points with the
same early origin enable a man to develop more than one sexual
line, based no less upon his childhood, and to lay down very
various conditions for his object-choice.²

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1920:] Cf. my paper
‘A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men’
(1910
h
).

  
²
[
Footnote added
1915:] The
innumerable peculiarities of the erotic life of human beings as
well as the compulsive character of the process of falling in love
itself are quite unintelligible except by reference back to
childhood and as being residual effects of childhood.

Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

1541

PREVENTION OF
INVERSION
   One of the tasks implicit in
object-choice is that it should find its

                                               
way to the opposite sex. This, as we know, is not accomplished
without a certain amount of fumbling. Often enough the first
impulses after puberty go astray, though without any permanent harm
resulting. Dessoir has justly remarked upon the regularity with
which adolescent boys and girls form sentimental friendships with
others of their own sex. No doubt the strongest force working
against a permanent inversion of the sexual object is the
attraction which the opposing sexual characters exercise upon one
another. Nothing can be said within the framework of the present
discussion to throw light upon it.¹ This factor is not in
itself, however, sufficient to exclude inversion; there are to
doubt a variety of other contributory factors. Chief among these is
its authoritative prohibition by society. Where inversion is not
regarded as a crime it will be found that it answers fully to the
sexual inclinations of no small number of people. It may be
presumed, in the next place, that in the case of men a childhood
recollection of the affection shown them by their mother and others
of the female sex who looked after them when they were children
contributes powerfully to directing their choice towards women; on
the other hand their early experience of being deterred by their
father from sexual activity and their competitive relation with him
deflect them from their own sex. Both of these two factors apply
equally to girls, whose sexual activity is particularly subject to
the watchful guardianship of their mother. They thus acquire a
hostile relation to their own sex which influences their
object-choice decisively in what is regarded as the normal
direction. The education of boys by male persons ( by slaves, in
antiquity) seems to encourage homosexuality. The frequency of
inversion among the present-day aristocracy is made somewhat more
intelligible by their employment of menservants, as well as by the
fact that their mothers give less personal care to their children.
In the case of some hysterics it is found that the early loss of
one of their parents, whether by death, divorce or separation, with
the result that the remaining parent absorbs the whole of the
child’s love, determines the sex of the person who is later
to be chosen as a sexual object, and may thus open the way to
permanent inversion.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1924:] This is the
place at which to draw attention to Ferenczi’s
Versuch
einer Genitaltheorie
(1924), a work which, though somewhat
fanciful, is nevertheless of the greatest interest, and in which
the sexual life of the higher animals is traced back to their
biological evolution.