Freud - Complete Works (342 page)

   If this idea of a woman with a
penis becomes ‘fixated’ in an individual when he is a
child, resisting all the influences of later life and making him as
a man unable to do without a penis in his sexual object, then,
although in other respects he may lead a normal sexual life, he is
bound to become a homosexual, and will seek his sexual object among
men who, owing to some other physical and mental characteristics,
remind him of women. Real women, when he comes to know them later,
remain impossible as sexual objects for him, because they lack the
essential sexual attraction; indeed, in connection with another
impression of his childhood life, they may even become abhorrent to
him. The child, having been mainly dominated by excitations in the
penis, will usually have obtained pleasure by stimulating it with
his hand; he will have been detected in this by his parents or
nurse and terrorized by the threat of having his penis cut off. The
effect of this ‘threat of castration’ is proportionate
to the value set upon that organ and is quite extraordinarily deep
and persistent. Legends and myths testify to the upheaval in the
child’s emotional life and to the horror which is linked with
the castration complex - a complex which is subsequently remembered
by consciousness with corresponding reluctance. The woman’s
genitalia, when seen later on, are regarded as a mutilated organ
and recall this threat, and they therefore arouse horror instead of
pleasure in the homosexual. This reaction cannot be altered in any
way when the homosexual comes to learn from science that his
childish assumption that women had a penis too was not so far wrong
after all. Anatomy has recognized the clitoris within the female
pudenda as being an organ that is homologous to the penis; and the
physiology of the sexual processes has been able to add that this
small penis which does not grow any bigger behaves in fact during
childhood like a real and genuine penis - that it becomes the seat
of excitations which lead to its being touched, that its
excitability gives the little girl’s sexual activity a
masculine character and that a wave of repression in the years of
puberty is needed in order for this masculine sexuality to be
discarded and the woman to emerge. Since the sexual function of
many women is crippled, whether by their obstinate clinging on to
this excitability of the clitoris so that they remain anaesthetic
in intercourse, or by such excessive repression occurring that its
operation is partly replaced by hysterical compensatory formations
- all this seems to show that there is some truth in the infantile
sexual theory that women, like men, possess a penis.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1972

   It is easy to observe that little
girls fully share their brother’s opinion of it. They develop
a great interest in that part of the boy’s body. But this
interest promptly falls under the sway of envy. They feel
themselves unfairly treated. They make attempts to micturate in the
posture that is made possible for boys by their possessing a big
penis; and when a girl declares that ‘she would rather be a
boy’, we know what deficiency her wish is intended to put
right.

   If children could follow the
hints given by the excitation of the penis they would get a little
nearer to the solution of their problem. That the baby grows inside
the mother’s body is obviously not a sufficient explanation.
How does it get inside? What starts its development? That the
father has something to do with it seems likely; he says that the
baby is
his
baby as well.¹ Again, the penis certainly
has a share, too, in these mysterious happenings; the excitation in
it which accompanies all these activities of the child’s
thoughts bears witness to this. Attached to this excitation are
impulsions which the child cannot account for - obscure urges to do
something violent, to press in, to knock to pieces, to tear open a
hole somewhere. But when the child thus seems to be well on the way
to postulating the existence of the vagina and to concluding that
an incursion of this kind by his father’s penis into his
mother is the act by means of which the baby is created in his
mother’s body - at this juncture his enquiry is broken off in
helpless perplexity. For standing in its way is his theory that his
mother possesses a penis just as a man does, and the existence of
the cavity which receives the penis remains undiscovered by him. It
is not hard to guess that the lack of success of his intellectual
efforts makes it easier for him to reject and forget them. This
brooding and doubting, however, becomes the prototype of all later
intellectual work directed towards the solution of problems, and
the first failure has a crippling effect on the child’s whole
future.

  
¹
Cf. the ‘Analysis of a Five-Year-Old
Boy’ (1909
b
).

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1973

   Their ignorance of the vagina
also makes it possible for children to believe in the second of
their sexual theories. If the baby grows in the mother’s body
and is then removed from it, this can only happen along the one
possible pathway -the anal aperture.
The baby must be evacuated
like a piece of excrement, like a stool
. When, in later
childhood, the same question is the subject of solitary reflection
or of a discussion between two children, the explanations probably
arrived at are that the baby emerges from the navel, which comes
open, or that the abdomen is slit up and the baby taken out - which
was what happened to the wolf in the story of Little Red
Riding-Hood. These theories are expressed aloud and also
consciously remembered later on;  they no longer contain
anything objectionable. These same children have by then completely
forgotten that in earlier years they believed in another theory of
birth, which is now obstructed by the repression of the anal sexual
components that has meanwhile occurred. At that time a motion was
something which could be talked about in the nursery without shame.
The child was still not so distant from his constitutional
coprophilic inclinations. There was nothing degraded about coming
into the world like a heap of faeces, which had not yet been
condemned by feelings of disgust. The cloacal theory, which, after
all, is valid for so many animals, was the most natural theory, and
it alone could obtrude upon the child as being a probable one.

   This being so, however, it was
only logical that the child should refuse to grant women the
painful prerogative of giving birth to children. If babies are born
through the anus, then a man can give birth just as well as a
woman. It is therefore possible for a boy to imagine that he, too,
has children of his own, without there being any need to accuse him
on that account of having feminine inclinations. He is merely
giving evidence in this of the anal erotism which is still alive in
him.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1974

   If the cloacal theory of birth is
preserved in consciousness during later years of childhood, as
occasionally happens, it is accompanied too by a solution - no
longer, it is true, a primary one - of the problem of the origin of
babies. Here it is like being in a fairy story; one eats some
particular thing and gets a child from it. This infantile theory of
birth is revived in cases of insanity. A manic woman, for instance,
will lead the visiting doctor to a little heap of faeces which she
has deposited in a corner of her cell, and say to him with a laugh:
‘That’s the baby I had to-day.’

   The third of the typical sexual
theories arises in children if, through some chance domestic
occurrence, they become witnesses of sexual intercourse between
their parents. Their perceptions of what is happening are bound,
however, to be only very incomplete. Whatever detail it may be that
comes under their observation - whether it is the relative
positions of the two people, or the noises they make, or some
accessory circumstance - children arrive in every case at the same
conclusion. They adopt what may be called a
sadistic view of
coition
. They see it as something that the stronger participant
is forcibly inflicting on the weaker, and they (especially boys)
compare it to the romping familiar to them from their childish
experience - romping which, incidentally, is not without a dash of
sexual excitation. I have not been able to ascertain that children
recognize this behaviour which they have witnessed between their
parents as the missing link needed for solving the problem of
babies; it appears more often that the connection is overlooked by
them for the very reason that they have interpreted the act of love
as an act of violence. But this view of it itself gives an
impression of being a return of the obscure impulse towards cruel
behaviour which became attached to the excitations of the
child’s penis when he first began to think about the problem
of where babies came from. The possibility, too, cannot be excluded
that this premature sadistic impulse, which might so nearly have
led to the discovery of coition, itself first emerged under the
influence of extremely obscure memories of parental intercourse,
for which the child had obtained the material - though at the time
he made no use of it - while he was still in his first years and
was sharing his parents’ bedroom.¹

 
 
¹
Restif de la
Bretonne, in his autobiographical work
Monsiur Nocholas
(1794), tells a story of an impression he received at the age of
four, which confirms this sadistic misunderstanding of
coitus.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1975

   The sadistic theory of coitus
which, taken in isolation, is misleading where it might have
provided confirmatory evidence, is, once again, the expression of
one of the innate components of the sexual instinct, any of which
may be strongly marked to a greater or lesser degree in each
particular child. For this reason the theory is correct up to a
certain point; it has in part divined the nature of the sexual act
and the ‘sex-battle’ that precedes it. Not
infrequently, too, the child is in a position to support this view
by accidental observations which he understands in part correctly,
but also in part incorrectly and indeed in a reversed sense. In
many marriages the wife does in fact recoil from her
husband’s embraces, which bring her no pleasure, but the risk
of a fresh pregnancy. And so the child who is believed to be asleep
(or who is pretending to be asleep) may receive an impression from
his mother which he can only interpret as meaning that she is
defending herself against an act of violence. At other times the
whole marriage offers an observant child the spectacle of an
unceasing quarrel, expressed in loud words and unfriendly gestures;
so that he need not be surprised if the quarrel is carried on at
night as well, and finally settled by the same method which he
himself is accustomed to use in his relations with his brothers and
sisters or playmates.

   Moreover, if the child discovers
spots of blood in his mother’s bed or on her underclothes, he
regards it as a confirmation of his view. It proves to him that his
father has made another similar assault on his mother during the
night (whereas we should rather take the fresh spots of blood to
mean that there had been a temporary cessation of sexual
intercourse). Much of the otherwise inexplicable ‘horror of
blood’ shown by neurotics finds its explanation from this
connection. Once again, however, the child’s mistake contains
a fragment of truth. For in certain familiar circumstances a trace
of blood is in fact judged as a sign that sexual intercourse has
been begun.

   A question connected somewhat
indirectly with the insoluble problem of where babies come from
also engages the child - the question as to the nature and content
of the state called ‘being married’; and he answers the
question differently according as his chance perceptions in
relation to his parents have coincided with instincts of his own
which are still pleasurably coloured. All that these answers seem
to have in common is that the child promises himself pleasurable
satisfaction from being married and supposes that it involves a
disregard of modesty. The notion I have most frequently met with is
that
each of the married couple urinate in front of the
other
. A variation of this, which sounds as if it was meant to
indicate a greater knowledge symbolically, is that
the man
urinates into the woman’s chamber-pot
. In other instances
the meaning of marriage is supposed to be that
the two people
show their behinds to each other
(without being ashamed). In
one case, in which education had succeeded in postponing sexual
knowledge especially late, a fourteen-year-old girl, who had
already begun to menstruate, arrived from the books she had read at
the idea that being married consisted in a ‘mixing of
blood’; and since her own sister had not yet started her
periods, the lustful girl made an assault on a female visitor who
had confessed that she was just then menstruating, so as to force
her to take part in this ‘blood mixing’.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1976

   Childhood opinions about the
nature of marriage, which are not seldom retained by conscious
memory, have great significance for the symptomatology of later
neurotic illness. At first they find expression in children’s
games in which each child does with another whatever it is that in
his view constitutes being married; and then, later on, the wish to
be married may choose the infantile form of expression and so make
its appearance in a phobia which is at first sight unrecognizable,
or in some corresponding symptom.¹