Freud - Complete Works (558 page)

   Now there cannot be the slightest
doubt that all these crazy, eccentric and horrible things really
constitute the sexual activity of these people. Not only do they
themselves regard them as such and are aware that they are
substitutes for each other, but we must admit that they play the
same part in their lives as normal sexual satisfaction does in
ours; they make the same, often excessive sacrifices for them, and
we can trace both in the rough and in finer detail the points at
which these abnormalities are based on what is normal and the
points at which they diverge from it. Nor can you fail to notice
that here once again you find the characteristic of being improper,
which clings to sexual activity, though here it is for the most
part intensified to the point of being abominable.

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   Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, what
attitude are we to adopt to these unusual kinds of sexual
satisfaction? Indignation, an expression of our personal repugnance
and an assurance that we ourselves do not share these lusts will
obviously be of no help. Indeed, that is not what we have been
asked for. When all is said and done, what we have here is a field
of phenomena like any other. A denial in the form of an evasive
suggestion that after all these are only rarities and curiosities
would be easy to refute. On the contrary, we are dealing with quite
common and widespread phenomena. If, however, it is argued that we
need not allow our views of sexual life to be misled by them
because they are one and all aberrations and deviations of the
sexual instinct, a serious answer is called for. Unless we can
understand these pathological forms of sexuality and can
co-ordinate them with normal sexual life, we cannot understand
normal sexuality either. In short, it remains an unavoidable task
to give a complete theoretical account of how it is that these
perversions can occur and of their connection with what is
described as normal sexuality.

   We shall be helped in this by a
piece of information and two fresh observations. We owe the former
to Iwan BIoch. It corrects the view that all these perversions are
‘signs of degeneracy’ by showing that aberrations of
this kind from the sexual aim, loosenings like these of the tie
with the sexual object, have occurred from time immemorial, in all
periods known to us, among all peoples, the most primitive and the
most civilized, and have occasionally obtained toleration and
general recognition. The two observations were derived from the
psycho-analytic investigation of neurotics; they are bound to have
a decisive influence on our view of the sexual perversions.

   I have said that neurotic
symptoms are substitutes for sexual satisfaction, and I indicated
to you that the confirmation of this assertion by the analysis of
symptoms would come up against a number of difficulties. For it can
only be justified if under ‘sexual satisfaction’ we
include the satisfaction of what are called perverse sexual needs,
since an interpretation of symptoms of that kind is forced upon us
with surprising frequency. The claim made by homosexuals or inverts
to being exceptions collapses at once when we learn that homosexual
impulses are invariably discovered in every single neurotic, and
that a fair number of symptoms give expression to this latent
inversion. Those who call themselves homosexuals are only the
conscious and manifest inverts, whose number is nothing compared to
that of the
latent
homosexuals. We are compelled, however,
to regard choice of an object of one’s own sex as a
divergence in erotic life which is of positively habitual
occurrence, and we are learning more and more to ascribe an
especially high importance to it. No doubt this does not do away
with the differences between manifest homosexuality and a normal
attitude; their practical significance remains, but their
theoretical value is greatly diminished. We have even found that a
particular disease, paranoia, which is not to be counted among the
transference neuroses, regularly arises from an attempt to fend off
excessively strong homosexual impulses. You will perhaps recall
that one of our patients (
p. 3343
)
behaved in her obsessional action like a man, her own husband whom
she had left; neurotic women very commonly produce symptoms in this
way in the character of a man. Even if this is not actually to be
regarded as homosexuality, it is closely related to its
preconditions.

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   As you probably know, the
hysterical neurosis can produce its symptoms in any system of
organs and so disturb any function. Analysis shows that in this way
all the so-called perverse impulses which seek to replace the
genital by some other organ manifest themselves: these organs are
then behaving like substitutive genitals. The symptoms of hysteria
have actually led us to the view that the bodily organs, besides
the functional part they play, must be recognized as having a
sexual (erotogenic) significance, and that the execution of the
first of these tasks is disturbed if the second of them makes too
many claims. Countless sensations and innervations which we come
across as symptoms of hysteria in organs that have no apparent
connection with sexuality are in this way revealed to us as being
in the nature of fulfilments of perverse sexual impulses in
relation to which other organs have acquired the significance of
the sexual parts. We learn too to what a large extent the organs
for the intake of nourishment and for excretion can in particular
become the vehicles of sexual excitation. Here, then, we have the
same thing that we were shown by the perversions; only in their
case it was visible easily and unmistakably, whereas in hysteria we
have to take a circuitous path by way of the interpretation of
symptoms, and do not then ascribe the perverse sexual impulses
concerned to the subject’s consciousness but locate them in
his unconscious.

   Of the many symptomatic pictures
in which obsessional neurosis appears, the most important turn out
to be those provoked by the pressure of excessively strong sadistic
sexual impulses (perverse, therefore, in their aim). The symptoms,
indeed, in accordance with the structure of an obsessional
neurosis, serve predominantly as a
defence
against these
wishes or give expression to the struggle between satisfaction and
defence. But satisfaction does not come off too badly either; it
succeeds in roundabout ways in putting itself into effect in the
patients’ behaviour and is preferably directed against
themselves and makes them into self-tormentors. Other forms of the
neurosis, the brooding kinds, correspond to an excessive
sexualization of actions which ordinarily have their place on the
path to normal sexual satisfaction - an excessive sexualization of
wanting to look or to touch or to explore. Here we have the
explanation of the great importance of the fear of touching and of
the obsession for washing. An unsuspectedly large proportion of
obsessional actions may be traced back to masturbation, of which
they are disguised repetitions and modifications; it is a familiar
fact that masturbation, though a single and uniform action,
accompanies the most various forms of sexual phantasying.

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   I should not have much difficulty
in giving you a far more intimate picture of the relations between
perversion and neurosis; but I think what I have already said will
serve our purpose. We must however guard against being misled by
what I have told you of the meaning of symptoms into
over-estimating the frequency and intensity of people’s
perverse inclinations. It is possible, as you have heard, to fall
ill of a neurosis as a result of a frustration of normal sexual
satisfaction. But when a real frustration like this occurs, the
need moves over on to abnormal methods of sexual excitation. You
will later learn the way in which this happens. But in any case you
will realize that as a result of this ‘collateral’
damming-back the perverse impulses must emerge more strongly than
they would have if normal sexual satisfaction had met with no
obstacle in the real world. More over a similar influence is to be
recognized also as affecting the
manifest
perversions. In
some cases they are provoked or made active if the normal
satisfaction of the sexual instinct encounters too great
difficulties for temporary reasons or because of permanent social
regulations. In other cases, it is true, the inclination to
perversions is quite independent of such favouring conditions; they
are, we might say, the normal species of sexual life for those
particular individuals.

   For the moment, perhaps, you may
have an impression that I have confused rather than explained the
relation between normal and perverse sexuality. But you must bear
the following consideration in mind. If it is true that increased
difficulty in obtaining normal sexual satisfaction in real life, or
deprivation of that satisfaction, brings out perverse inclinations
in people who had not shown any previously, we must suppose that
there was something in these people which came half-way to meet the
perversions; or, if you prefer it, the perversions must have been
present in them in a latent form.

   And this brings us to the second
novelty that I announced to you. For psycho-analytic research has
had to concern itself, too, with the sexual life of children, and
this is because the memories and associations arising during the
analysis of symptoms regularly led back to the early years of
childhood. What we inferred from these analyses was later confirmed
point by point by direct observations of children. And it then
turned out that all these inclinations to perversion had their
roots in childhood, that children have a predisposition to all of
them and carry them out to an extent corresponding to their
immaturity - in short, that perverse sexuality is nothing else than
a magnified infantile sexuality split up into its separate
impulses.

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   At all events you will now see
the perversions in a new light and no longer fail to realize their
connection with the sexual life of human beings: but at the price
of what surprises and of what feelings of distress over these
incongruities! No doubt you will feel inclined at first to deny the
whole business: the fact that children have anything that can be
described as sexual life, the correctness of our observations and
the justification for finding any kinship between the behaviour of
children and what is later condemned as perversion. So allow me to
begin by explaining to you the motives for your opposition, and
then to present you with the sum of our observations. To suppose
that children have no sexual life - sexual excitations and needs
and a kind of satisfaction - but suddenly acquire it between the
ages of twelve and fourteen, would (quite apart from any
observations) be as improbable, and indeed senseless, biologic ally
as to suppose that they brought no genitals with them into the
world and only grew them at the time of puberty. What
does
awaken in them at this time is the reproductive function, which
makes use for its purposes of physical and mental material already
present. You are committing the error of con fusing sexuality and
reproduction and by doing so you are blocking your path to an
understanding of sexuality, the perversions and the neuroses. This
error is, however, a tendentious one. Strangely enough, it has its
source in the fact that you yourselves were once children and,
while you were children, came under the influence of education. For
society must undertake as one of its most important educative tasks
to tame and restrict the sexual instinct when it breaks out as an
urge to reproduction, and to subject it to an individual will which
is identical with the bidding of society. It is also concerned to
postpone the full development of the instinct till the child shall
have reached a certain degree of intellectual maturity, for, with
the complete irruption of the sexual instinct, educability is for
practical purposes at an end. Otherwise, the instinct would break
down every dam and wash away the laboriously erected work of
civilization. Nor is the task of taming it ever an easy one; its
success is sometimes too small, sometimes too great. The motive of
human society is in the last resort an economic one; since it does
not possess enough provisions to keep its members alive unless they
work, it must restrict the number of its members and divert their
energies from sexual activity to work. It is faced, in short, by
the eternal, primaeval exigencies of life, which are with us to
this day.

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   Experience must no doubt have
taught the educators that the task of making the sexual will of the
new generation tractable could only be carried out if they began to
exercise their influence very early, if they did not wait for the
storm of puberty but intervened already in the sexual life of
children which is preparatory to it. For this reason almost all
infantile sexual activities were forbidden to children and frowned
upon; an ideal was set up of making the life of children asexual,
and in course of time things came to the point at which people
really believed they were asexual and thereafter science pronounced
this as its doctrine. To avoid contradicting their belief and their
intentions, people since then overlook the sexual activities of
children (no mean achievement) or are content in science to take a
different view of them. Children are pure and innocent, and anyone
who describes them otherwise can be charged with being an infamous
blasphemer against the tender and sacred feelings of mankind.