Freud - Complete Works (559 page)

   Children are alone in not falling
in with these conventions. They assert their animal rights with
complete
naïveté
and give constant evidence that
they have still to travel the road to purity. Strangely enough, the
people who deny the existence of sexuality in children do not on
that account become milder in their educational efforts but pursue
the manifestations of what they deny exists with the utmost
severity - describing them as ‘childish naughtinesses’.
It is also of the highest theoretical interest that the period of
life which contradicts the prejudice of an asexual childhood most
glaringly - the years of a child’s life up to the age of five
or six - is afterwards covered in most people by the veil of
amnesia which is only completely torn away by an analytic enquiry,
though it has been permeable earlier for the construction of a few
dreams.

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   I will now set out before you
what is most definitely known about the sexual life of children.
Let me at the same time, for convenience sake, introduce the
concept of ‘libido’. On the exact analogy of
‘hunger’, we use ‘libido’ as the name of
the force (in this case that of the sexual instinct, as in the case
of hunger that of the nutritive instinct) by which the instinct
manifests itself. Other concepts, such as sexual
‘excitation’ and ‘satisfaction’, call for
no explanation. You yourselves will easily perceive that the sexual
activities of infants in arms are mostly a matter of
interpretation, or you will probably use that as a ground of
objection. These interpretations are arrived at on the basis of
analytic examinations made by tracing from the symptoms backwards.
In an infant the first impulses of sexuality make their appearance
attached to other vital functions. His main interest is, as you
know, directed to the intake of nourishment; when children fall
asleep after being sated at the breast, they show an expression of
blissful satisfaction which will be repeated later in life after
the experience of a sexual orgasm. This would be too little on
which to base an inference. But we observe how an infant will
repeat the action of taking in nourishment without making a demand
for further food; here, then, he is not actuated by hunger. We
describe this as sensual sucking, and the fact that in doing this
he falls asleep once more with a blissful expression shows us that
the act of sensual sucking has in itself alone brought him
satisfaction. Soon, as we know, things come to a point at which he
cannot go to sleep without having sucked. A paediatrician in
Budapest, Dr. Lindner, was the first to point out long ago the
sexual nature of this activity. Those who are in charge of
children, and who have no theoretical views on the subject, seem to
form a similar judgement of sucking. They have no doubt of its only
purpose being to obtain pleasure, class it as one of a
child’s ‘naughtinesses’ and compel him to abandon
it by causing him distress, if he will not give it up of his own
accord. Thus we learn that infants perform actions which have no
purpose other than obtaining pleasure. It is our belief that they
first experience this pleasure in connection with taking
nourishment but that they soon learn to separate it from that
accompanying condition. We can only refer this pleasure to an
excitation of the areas of the mouth and lips; we call those parts
of the body ‘erotogenic zones’ and describe the
pleasure derived from sucking as a sexual one. We shall no doubt
have to discuss further whether this description is
justifiable.

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   If an infant could speak, he
would no doubt pronounce the act of sucking at his mother’s
breast by far the most important in his life. He is not far wrong
in this, for in this single act he is satisfying at once the two
great vital needs. We are therefore not surprised to learn from
psycho-analysis how such psychical importance the act retains all
through life. Sucking at the mother’s breast is the
starting-point of the whole of sexual life, the unmatched prototype
of every later sexual satisfaction, to which phantasy often enough
recurs in times of need. This sucking involves making the
mother’s breast the first object of the sexual instinct. I
can give you no idea of the important bearing of this first object
upon the choice of every later object, of the profound effects it
has in its transformations and substitutions in even the remotest
regions of our sexual life. But at first the infant, in his sucking
activity, gives up this object and replaces it by a part of his own
body. He begins to suck his thumbs or his own tongue. In this way
he makes himself independent of the consent of the external world
as regards gaining pleasure, and besides this he increases it by
adding the excitation of a second area of his body. The erotogenic
zones are not all equally generous in yielding pleasure; it is
therefore an important experience when the infant, as Lindner
reports, discovers, in the course of feeling around, the specially
excitable regions afforded by his genitals and so finds his way
from sucking to masturbation.

   In forming this opinion of
sensual sucking we have already become acquainted with two decisive
characteristics of infantile sexuality. It makes its appearance
attached to the satisfaction of the major organic needs, and it
behaves
auto-erotically
- that is, it seeks and finds its
objects in the infant’s own body. What has been shown most
clearly in connection with the intake of nourishment is repeated in
part with the excretions. We conclude that infants have feelings of
pleasure in the process of evacuating urine and faeces and that
they soon contrive to arrange those actions in such a way as to
bring them the greatest possible yield of pleasure through the
corresponding excitations of the erotogenic zones of the mucous
membrane. It is here for the first time (as Lou
Andreas-Salomé has subtly perceived) that they encounter the
external world as an inhibiting power, hostile to their desire for
pleasure, and have a glimpse of later conflicts both external and
internal. An infant must not produce his excreta at whatever moment
he chooses, but when other people decide that he shall. In order to
induce him to forgo these sources of pleasure, he is told that
everything that has to do with these functions is improper and must
be kept secret. This is where he is first obliged to exchange
pleasure for social respectability. To begin with, his attitude to
his excreta themselves is quite different. He feels no disgust at
his faeces, values them as a portion of his own body with which he
will not readily part, and makes use of them as his first
‘gift’, to distinguish people whom he values especially
highly. Even after education has succeeded in its aim of making
these inclinations alien to him, he carries on his high valuation
of faeces in his estimate of ‘gifts’ and
‘money’. On the other hand he seems to regard his
achievements in urinating with peculiar pride.

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   I know you have been wanting for
a long time to interrupt me and exclaim: ‘Enough of these
atrocities! You tell us that defaecating is a source of sexual
satisfaction, and already exploited in infancy! that faeces is a
valuable substance and that the anus is a kind of genital! We
don’t believe all that but we do understand why
paediatricians and educationists have given a wide berth to
psycho-analysis and its findings.’ No, Gentlemen. You have
merely forgotten that I have been trying to introduce the facts of
infantile sexual life to you in connection with the facts of the
sexual perversions. Why should you not be aware that for a large
number of adults, homosexual and heterosexual alike, the anus does
really take over the role of the vagina in sexual intercourse? And
that there are many people who retain a voluptuous feeling in
defaecating all through their lives and describe it as being far
from small? As regards interest in the act of defaecation and
enjoyment ill watching someone else defaecating, you can get
children themselves to confirm the fact when they are a few years
older and able to tell you about it. Of course, you must not have
systematically intimidated them beforehand, or they will quite
understand that they must be silent on the subject. And as to the
other things that you are anxious not to believe, I will refer you
to the findings of analysis and of the direct observation of
children and will add that it calls for real ingenuity not to see
all this or to see it differently. Nor do I complain if you find
the kinship between infantile sexual activity and sexual
perversions something very striking. But it is in fact
self-evident: if a child has a sexual life at all it is bound to be
of a perverse kind; for, except for a few obscure hints, children
are without what makes sexuality into the reproductive function. On
the other hand, the abandonment of the reproductive function is the
common feature of all perversions. We actually describe a sexual
activity as perverse if it has given up the aim of reproduction and
pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it. So,
as you will see, the breach and turning-point in the development of
sexual life lies in its becoming subordinate to the purposes of
reproduction. Everything that happens before this turn of events
and equally everything that disregards it and that aims solely at
obtaining pleasure is given the uncomplimentary name of
‘perverse’ and as such is proscribed.

   Allow me, therefore, to proceed
with my brief account of infantile sexuality. What I have already
reported of two systems of organs might be confirmed in reference
to the others. A child’s sexual life is indeed made up
entirely of the activities of a number of component instincts which
seek, independently of one another, to obtain pleasure, in part
from the subject’s own body and in part already from an
external object. Among these organs the genitals come into
prominence very soon. There are people in whom obtaining pleasure
from their own genitals, without the assistance of any other
genitals or of an object, continues uninterruptedly from infantile
masturbation to the unavoidable masturbation of puberty and
persists for an indefinite length of time afterwards. Incidentally,
the topic of masturbation is not one that can be so easily disposed
of: it is something that calls for examination from many
angles.

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   Though I am anxious to cut short
this discussion still further, I must nevertheless tell you a
little about the sexual researches of children: they are too
characteristic of infantile sexuality and of too great significance
for the symptomatology of the neuroses to be passed over. Infantile
sexual researches begin very early, sometimes before the third year
of life. They do not relate to the distinction between the sexes,
for this means nothing to children, since they (or at any rate
boys) attribute the same male genital to both sexes. If,
afterwards, a boy makes the discovery of the vagina from seeing his
little sister or a girl playmate, he tries, to begin with, to
disavow the evidence of his senses, for he cannot imagine a human
creature like himself who is without such a precious portion. Later
on, he takes fright at the possibility thus presented to him; and
any threats that may have been made to him earlier, because he took
too intense an interest in his little organ, now produce a deferred
effect. He comes under the sway of the castration complex, the form
taken by which plays a great part in the construction of his
character if he remains normal, in his neurosis if he falls ill,
and in his resistances if he comes into analytic treatment. As
regards little girls, we can say of them that they feel greatly at
a disadvantage owing to their lack of a big, visible penis, that
they envy boys for possessing one and that, in the main for this
reason, they develop a wish to be a man - a wish that re-emerges
later on, in any neurosis that may arise if they meet with a mishap
in playing a feminine part. In her childhood, moreover, a
girl’s clitoris takes on the role of a penis entirely: it is
characterized by special excitability and is the area in which
auto-erotic satisfaction is obtained. The process of a girl’s
becoming a woman depends very much on the clitoris passing on this
sensitivity to the vaginal orifice in good time and completely. In
cases of what is known as sexual anaesthesia in women the clitoris
has obstinately retained its sensitivity.

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   The sexual interest of children
begins by turning, rather, to the problem of where babies come from
- the same problem which underlies the question put by the Theban
Sphinx - and it is most often raised by egoistic fears on the
arrival of a new baby. The reply which is ready to hand in the
nursery, that babies are brought by the stork, comes up against
disbelief on the part even of small children far oftener than we
are aware. The sense of being defrauded of the truth by the
grown-ups contributes much to making children feel lonely and to
developing their independence. But a child is not in a position to
solve this problem by his own means. His undeveloped sexual
constitution sets definite limits to his power of perception. He
begins by supposing that babies come from people taking in
something special in their food, nor does he know that only women
can have babies. Later he becomes aware of this limitation and
ceases to regard eating as the origin of babies - though the theory
persists in fairy tales. When the child has grown bigger, he soon
notices that his father must play some part in getting babies, but
he cannot guess what. If he happens to witness a sexual act, he
regards it as an attempt at subjugation, a struggle, and this is
the sadistic misunderstanding of coition. But at first he does not
connect this act with the coming into being of a baby. So, too, if
he finds traces of blood on his mother’s bed or on her
underclothes, he takes it as a sign that she has been injured by
his father. Still later in childhood, he no doubt suspects that the
man’s sexual organ has an essential share in producing
babies, but the only function he can attribute to that part of the
body is micturition.