Freud - Complete Works (341 page)

   All these unavoidable and
unintended consequences of the requirement for abstinence converge
in the one common result of completely ruining the preparation for
marriage - marriage, which civilized sexual morality thinks should
be the sole heir to the sexual impulsions. Every man whose libido,
as a result of masturbatory or perverse sexual practices, has
become habituated to situations and conditions of satisfaction
which are not normal, develops diminished potency in marriage.
Women, too, who have been able to preserve their virginity with the
help of similar measures, show themselves anaesthetic to normal
intercourse in marriage. A marriage begun with a reduced capacity
to love on both sides succumbs to the process of dissolution even
more quickly than others. As a result of the man’s weak
potency, the woman is not satisfied, and she remains anaesthetic
even in cases where her disposition to frigidity, derived from her
education, could have been overcome by a powerful sexual
experience. A couple like this finds more difficulties, too, in the
prevention of children than a healthy one, since the
husband’s diminished potency tolerates the use of
contraceptives badly. In this perplexity, sexual intercourse, as
being the source of all their embarrassments, is soon given up, and
with this the basis of married life is abandoned.

   I ask any well-informed person to
bear witness to the fact that I am not exaggerating but that I am
describing a state of affairs of which equally bad instances can be
observed over and over again. To the uninitiated it is hardly
credible how seldom normal potency is to be found in a husband and
how often a wife is frigid among married couples who live under the
dominance of our civilized sexual morality, what a degree of
renunciation, often on both sides, is entailed by marriage, and to
what narrow limits married life - the happiness that is so ardently
desired - is narrowed down. I have already explained that in these
circumstances the most obvious outcome is nervous illness; but I
must further point out the way in which a marriage of this kind
continues to exercise its influence on the few children, or the
only child born of it. At a first glance, it seems to be a case of
transmission by inheritance; but closer inspection shows that it is
really a question of the effect of powerful infantile impressions.
A neurotic wife who is unsatisfied by her husband is, as a mother,
over-tender and over-anxious towards her child, on to whom she
transfers her need for love; and she awakens it to sexual
precocity. The bad relations between its parents, moreover, excite
its emotional life and cause it to feel love and hatred to an
intense degree while it is still at a very tender age. Its strict
upbringing, which tolerates no activity of the sexual life that has
been aroused so early, lends support to the suppressing force and
this conflict at such an age contains everything necessary for
bringing about lifelong nervous illness.

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness

1962

   I return now to my earlier
assertion that, in judging the neuroses, their full importance is
not as a rule taken into account. I do not mean by this the
undervaluation of these states shown in their frivolous dismissal
by relatives and in the boasting assurances by doctors that a few
weeks of cold water treatment or a few months of rest and
convalescence will cure the condition. These are merely the
opinions of quite ignorant doctors and laymen and are mostly no
more than words intended to give the sufferer a short-lived
consolation. It is, on the contrary, a well-known fact that a
chronic neurosis, even if it does not totally put an end to the
subject’s capacity for existence, represents a severe
handicap in his life, of the same order, perhaps, as tuberculosis
or a cardiac defect. The situation would even be tolerable if
neurotic illness were to exclude from civilized activities only a
number of individuals who were in any case of the weaker sort, and
allowed the rest to play their part in it at the cost of troubles
that were merely subjective. But, far from this being so, I must
insist upon the view that neuroses, whatever their extent and
wherever they occur, always succeed in frustrating the purposes of
civilization, and in that way actually perform the work of the
suppressed mental forces that are hostile to civilization. Thus,
when society pays for obedience to its far-reaching regulations by
an increase in nervous illness, it cannot claim to have purchased a
gain at the price of sacrifices; it cannot claim a gain at all. Let
us, for instance, consider the very common case of a woman who does
not love her husband, because, owing to the conditions under which
she entered marriage, she has no reason to love him, but who very
much wants to love him, because that alone corresponds to the ideal
of marriage to which she has been brought up. She will in that case
suppress every impulse which would express the truth and contradict
her endeavours to fulfil her ideal, and she will make special
efforts to play the part of a loving, affectionate and attentive
wife. The outcome of this self-suppression will be a neurotic
illness; and this neurosis will in a short time have taken revenge
on the unloved husband and have caused him just as much lack of
satisfaction and worry as would have resulted from an
acknowledgement of the true state of affairs. This example is
completely typical of what a neurosis achieves. A similar failure
to obtain compensation is to be seen after the suppression of
impulses inimical to civilization which are not directly sexual. If
a man, for example, has become over-kind as a result of a violent
suppression of a constitutional inclination to harshness and
cruelty, he often loses so much energy in doing this that he fails
to carry out all that his compensatory impulses require, and he
may, after all, do less good on the whole than he would have done
without the suppression.

'Civilized' Sexual Morality And Modern Nervous Illness

1963

   Let us add that a restriction of
sexual activity in a community is quite generally accompanied by an
increase of anxiety about life and of fear of death which
interferes with the individual’s capacity for enjoyment and
does away with his readiness to face death for any purpose. A
diminished inclination to beget children is the result, and the
community or group of people in question is thus excluded from any
share in the future. In view of this, we may well raise the
question whether our ‘civilized’ sexual morality is
worth the sacrifice which it imposes on us, especially if we are
still so much enslaved to hedonism as to include among the aims of
our cultural development a certain amount of satisfaction of
individual happiness. It is certainly not a physician’s
business to come forward with proposals for reform; but it seemed
to me that I might support the urgency of such proposals if I were
to amplify Von Ehrenfels’s description of the injurious
effects of our ‘civilized’ sexual morality by pointing
to the important bearing of that morality upon the spread of modern
nervous illness.

1964

ON THE SEXUAL THEORIES OF CHILDREN

(1908)

1965

Intentionally left blank

1966

ON THE SEXUAL THEORIES OF CHILDREN

The material on which the following synthesis
is based is derived from several sources. Firstly, from the direct
observation of what children say and do; secondly, from what adult
neurotics consciously remember from their childhood and relate
during psycho-analytic treatment; and thirdly, from the inferences
and constructions, and from the unconscious memories translated
into conscious material, which result from the psycho-analysis of
neurotics.

   That the first of these three
sources has not by itself supplied all that is worth knowing on the
subject is due to the attitude which the adult adopts towards the
sexual life of children. He does not credit them with having any
sexual activity and therefore takes no trouble to observe any such
thing while, on the other hand, he suppresses any manifestation of
such an activity which might claim his attention. Consequently the
opportunity of obtaining information from this, the most
unequivocal and fertile source of all, is a very restricted one.
Whatever comes from the uninfluenced communications made by adults
concerning their own conscious childhood memories is at the best
subject to the objection that it may have been falsified in
retrospect; but, in addition to thus, it has to be viewed in the
light of the fact that the informants have subsequently become
neurotic. The material that comes from the third source is open to
all the criticisms which it is the custom to marshal against the
trustworthiness of psycho-analysis and the reliability of the
conclusions that are drawn from it. Thus I cannot attempt to
justify it here; I can only give an assurance that those who know
and practise the psycho-analytic technique acquire an extensive
confidence in its findings.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1967

   I cannot guarantee the
completeness of my results, but I can answer for the care taken in
arriving at them.

   There remains a difficult
question to decide. How far may one assume that what is here
reported of children generally is true of all children - that is,
of every particular child? Pressure of education and varying
intensity of the sexual instinct certainly make great individual
variations in the sexual behaviour of children possible, and, above
all, influence the date at which a child’s sexual interest
appears. For this reason, I have not divided my presentation of the
material according to the successive epochs of childhood, but have
combined into a single account things that come into play in
different children sometimes earlier and sometimes later. It is my
conviction that no child - none, at least, who is mentally normal
and still less one who is intellectually gifted - can avoid being
occupied with the problems of sex in the years
before
puberty.

   I do not think much of the
objection that neurotics are a special class of people, marked by
an innate disposition that is ‘degenerate’, from whose
childhood life we must not be allowed to infer anything about the
childhood of other people. Neurotics are people much like others.
They cannot be sharply differentiated from normal people, and in
their childhood they are not always easily distinguishable from
those who remain healthy in later life. It is one of the most
valuable results of our psycho-analytic investigations to have
discovered that the neuroses of such people have no special mental
content that is peculiar to them, but that, as Jung has expressed
it, they fall ill of the same complexes against which we healthy
people struggle as well. The only difference is that healthy people
know how to overcome those complexes without any gross damage
demonstrable in practical life, whereas in nervous cases the
suppression of the complexes succeeds only at the price of costly
substitutive formations - that is to say, from a practical point of
view it is a failure. In childhood neurotic and normal people
naturally approximate to each other much more closely than they do
in later life, so that I cannot regard it as a methodological error
to make use of the communications of neurotics about their
childhood for drawing conclusions by analogy about normal childhood
life. But since those who later become neurotics very often have in
their inborn constitution an especially strong sexual instinct and
a tendency to precocity and to a premature expression of that
instinct, they make it possible for us to recognize a great deal of
infantile activity more sharply and clearly than our capacity for
observation (which is in any case a blunted one) would enable us to
do in other children. But we shall of course only be able to assess
the true value of these communications made by neurotic adults
when, following Havelock Ellis’s example, we shall have
thought it worth while to collect the childhood memories of
healthy
adults as well.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1968

   In consequence of unfavourable
circumstances, both of an external and an internal nature, the
following observations apply chiefly to the sexual development of
one sex only - that is, of males. The value of a compilation such
as I am attempting here need not, however, be a purely descriptive
one. A knowledge of infantile sexual theories in the shapes they
assume in the thoughts of children can be of interest in various
ways - even, surprisingly enough, for the elucidation of myths and
fairy tales. They are indispensable, moreover, for an understanding
of the neuroses themselves; for in them these childish theories are
still operative and acquire a determining influence upon the form
taken by the symptoms.

   If we could divest ourselves of
our corporeal existence, and could view the things of this earth
with a fresh eye as purely thinking beings, from another planet for
instance, nothing perhaps would strike our attention more forcibly
than the fact of the existence of two sexes among human beings,
who, though so much alike in other respects, yet mark the
difference between them with such obvious external signs. But it
does not seem that children choose this fundamental fact in the
same way as the starting-point of their researches into sexual
problems. Since they have known a father and mother as far back as
they can remember in life, they accept their existence as a reality
which needs no further enquiry, and a boy has the same attitude
towards a little sister from whom he is separated by only a slight
difference of age of one or two years. A child’s desire for
knowledge on this point does not in fact awaken spontaneously,
prompted perhaps by some inborn need for established causes; it is
aroused under the goad of the self-seeking instincts that dominate
him, when - perhaps after the end of his second year - he is
confronted with the arrival of a new baby. And a child whose own
nursery has received no such addition is able, from observations
made in other homes, to put himself in the same situation. The loss
of his parents’ care, which he actually experiences or justly
fears, and the presentiment that from now on he must for evermore
share all his possessions with the newcomer, have the effect of
awakening his emotions and sharpening his capacities for thought.
The elder child expresses unconcealed hostility towards his rival,
which finds vent in unfriendly criticisms of it, in wishes that
‘the stork should take it away again’ and occasionally
even in small attacks upon the creature lying helpless in the
cradle. A wider difference in age usually softens the expression of
this primary hostility. In the same way, at a rather later age, if
no small brother or sister has appeared, the child’s wish for
a playmate, such as he has seen in other families, may gain the
upper hand.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1969

   At the instigation of these
feelings and worries, the child now comes to be occupied with the
first, grand problem of life and asks himself the question:
‘
Where do babies come from
?’ - a question which,
there can be no doubt, first ran: ‘Where did this particular,
intruding baby come from?’ We seem to hear the echoes of this
first riddle in innumerable riddles of myth and legend. The
question itself is, like all research, the product of a vital
exigency, as though thinking were entrusted with the task of
preventing the recurrence of such dreaded events. Let us assume,
however, that the child’s thinking soon becomes independent
of this instigation, and henceforward goes on operating as a
self-sustained instinct for research. Where a child is not already
too much intimidated, he sooner or later adopts the direct method
of demanding an answer from his parents or those in charge of him,
who are in his eyes the source of all knowledge. This method,
however, fails. The child receives either evasive answers or a
rebuke for his curiosity, or he is dismissed with the
mythologically significant piece of information which, in German
countries, runs: ‘The stork brings the babies; it fetches
them out of the water.’ I have reason to believe that far
more children than their parents suspect are dissatisfied with this
solution and meet it with energetic doubts, which, however, they do
not always openly admit. I know of a three-year-old boy who, after
receiving this piece of enlightenment, disappeared - to the terror
of his nurse. He was found at the edge of the big pond adjoining
the country house, to which he had hurried in order to see the
babies in the water. I also know of another boy who could only
allow his disbelief to find expression in a hesitant remark that he
knew better, that it was not a stork that brought babies but a
heron. It seems to me to follow from a great deal of information I
have received that children refuse to believe the stork theory and
that from the time of this first deception and rebuff they nourish
a distrust of adults and have a suspicion of there being something
forbidden which is being withheld from them by the
‘grown-ups’, and that they consequently hide their
further researches under a cloak of secrecy. With this, however,
the child also experiences the first occasion for a
‘psychical conflict’, in that views for which he feels
an instinctual kind of preference, but which are not
‘right’ in the eyes of the grown-ups, come into
opposition with other views, which are supported by the authority
of the grown-ups without being acceptable to him himself. Such a
psychical conflict may soon turn into a ‘psychical
dissociation’. The set of views which are bound up with being
‘good’, but also with a cessation of reflection, become
the dominant and conscious views; while the other set, for which
the child’s work of research has meanwhile obtained fresh
evidence, but which are not supposed to count, become the
suppressed and ‘unconscious’ ones. The nuclear complex
of a neurosis is in this way brought into being.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1970

   Recently, the analysis of a
five-year-old boy, which his father undertook and which he has
handed over to me for publication, has given me irrefutable proof
of the correctness of a view towards which the psycho-analysis of
adults had long been leading me. I now know that the change which
takes place in the mother during pregnancy does not escape the
child’s sharp eyes and that he is very well able before long
to establish the true connection between the increase in his
mother’s stoutness and the appearance of the baby. In the
case just mentioned the boy was three and a half years old when his
sister was born and four and three quarters when he showed his
better knowledge by the most unmistakable allusions. This
precocious discovery, however, is always kept secret, and later, in
conformity with the further vicissitudes of the child’s
sexual researches, it is repressed and forgotten.

   The ‘stork fable’,
therefore, is not one of the sexual theories of children. On the
contrary, it is the child’s observation of animals, who hide
so little of their sexual life and to whom he feels so closely
akin, that strengthens his disbelief in it. With his knowledge,
independently obtained, that babies grow inside the mother’s
body, he would be on the right road to solving the problem on which
he first tries out his powers of thinking. But this further
progress is inhibited by a piece of ignorance which cannot be made
good and by false theories which the state of his own sexuality
imposes on him.

   These false sexual theories,
which I shall now discuss, all have one very curious
characteristic. Although they go astray in a grotesque fashion, yet
each one of them contains a fragment of real truth; and in this
they are analogous to the attempts of adults, which are looked at
as strokes of genius, at solving the problems of the universe which
are too hard for human comprehension. What is correct and hits the
mark in such theories is to be explained by their origin from the
components of the sexual instinct which are already stirring in the
childish organism. For it is not owing to any arbitrary mental act
or to chance impressions that those notions arise, but to the
necessities of the child’s psychosexual constitution; and
this is why we can speak of sexual theories in children as being
typical, and why we find the same mistaken beliefs in every child
whose sexual life is accessible to us.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1971

   The first of these theories
starts out from the neglect of the differences between the sexes on
which I laid stress at the beginning of this paper as being
characteristic of children. It consists in
attributing to
everyone, including females, the possession of a penis
, such as
the boy knows from his own body. It is precisely in what we must
regard as the ‘normal’ sexual constitution that already
in childhood the penis is the leading erotogenic zone and the chief
auto-erotic sexual object; and the boy’s estimate of its
value is logically reflected in his inability to imagine a person
like himself who is without this essential constituent. When a
small boy sees his little sister’s genitals, what he says
shows that his prejudice is already strong enough to falsify his
perception. He does not comment on the absence of a penis, but
invariably
says, as though by way of consolation and to put
things right: ‘Her ---'s still quite small. But when she
gets bigger it’ll grow all right.’ The idea of a woman
with a penis returns in later life, in the dreams of adults: the
dreamer, in a state of nocturnal sexual excitation, will throw a
woman down, strip her and prepare for intercourse - and then, in
place of the female genitals, he beholds a well-developed penis and
breaks off the dream and the excitation. The numerous
hermaphrodites of classical antiquity faithfully reproduce this
idea, universally held in childhood; one may observe that to most
normal people they cause no offence, while the real hermaphroditic
formations of the genitals which are permitted to occur by Nature
nearly always excite the greatest abhorrence.