Freud - Complete Works (707 page)

   ‘I am sorry to hear you say
that. Your reliance on me seems to be shaken. But in that case why
not have chosen someone else as your Impartial Person?’

   Because that someone else would
not have thought any differently from you. But if he had been
prepared from the first to recognize the importance of sexual life,
everyone would have exclaimed: ‘Why, that is no Impartial
Person, he is one of your supporters!’ No, I am far from
abandoning the expectation of being able to influence your
opinions. I must admit, however, that from my point of view this
situation is different from the one we dealt with earlier. As
regards our psychological discussions it is a matter of
indifference to me whether you believe me or not, provided only
that you get an impression that what we are concerned with are
purely psychological problems. But here, as regards the question of
sexuality, I should nevertheless be glad if you were accessible to
the realization that your strongest motive for contradiction is
precisely the ingrained hostility which you share with so many
other people.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4352

   ‘But after all I am without
the experience that has given you your unshakeable
certainty.’

   Very well. I can now proceed with
my exposition. Sexual life is not simply something spicy; it is
also a serious scientific problem. There was much that was novel to
be learnt about it, many strange things to be explained. I told you
just now that analysis has to go back into the early years of the
patient’s childhood, because the decisive repressions have
taken place then, while his ego was feeble. But surely in childhood
there is no sexual life? surely it only starts at puberty? On the
contrary. We have to learn that sexual instinctual impulses
accompany life from birth onwards, and that it is precisely in
order to fend off those instincts that the infantile ego institutes
repressions. A remarkable coincidence, is it not? that small
children should already be struggling against the power of
sexuality, just as the speaker in the learned society was to do
later, and later still my followers who have set up their own
theories. How does that come about? The most general explanation
would be that our civilization is built up entirely at the expense
of sexuality; but there is much more to be said on the subject.

   The discovery of infantile
sexuality is one of those of which we have reason to feel ashamed.
A few paediatricians have, it seems, always known about it, and a
few children’s nurses. Clever men, who call themselves child
psychologists, have thereupon spoken in tones of reproach of a
‘desecration of the innocence of childhood’. Once
again, sentiment instead of argument! Events of that kind are of
daily occurrence in political bodies. A member of the Opposition
rises and denounces some piece of maladministration in the Civil
Service, in the Army, in the Judiciary and so on. Upon this another
member, preferably one of the Government, declares that such
statements are an affront to the sense of honour of the body
politic, of the army, of the dynasty, or even of the nation. So
they are as good as untrue. Feelings such as these can tolerate no
affronts.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4353

   The sexual life of children is of
course different from that of adults. The sexual function, from its
beginnings to the definitive form in which it is so familiar to us,
undergoes a complicated process of development. It grows together
from numerous component instincts with different aims and passes
through several phases of organization till at last it comes into
the service of reproduction. Not all the component instincts are
equally serviceable for the final outcome; they must be diverted,
remodelled and in part suppressed. Such a far-reaching course of
development is not always passed through without a flaw;
inhibitions in development take place, partial fixations at early
stages of development. If obstacles arise later on to the exercise
of the sexual function, the sexual urge - the libido, as we call it
- is apt to hark back to these earlier points of fixation. The
study of the sexuality of children and its transformations up to
maturity has also given us the key to an understanding of what are
known as the sexual perversions, which people used always to
describe with all the requisite indications of disgust but whose
origin they were never able to explain. The whole topic is of
uncommon interest, but for the purposes of our conversation there
is not much sense in telling you more about it. To find one’s
way about in it one of course needs anatomical and physiological
knowledge, all of which is unfortunately not to be acquired in
medical schools. But a familiarity with the history of civilization
and with mythology is equally indispensable.

   ‘After all that, I still
cannot form any picture of the sexual life of children.’

   Then I will pursue the subject
further; in any case it is not easy for me to get away from it. I
will tell you, then, that the most remarkable thing about the
sexual life of children seems to me that it passes through the
whole of its very far-reaching development in the first five years
of life. From then onwards until puberty there stretches what is
known as the period of latency. During it sexuality normally
advances no further; on the contrary, the sexual urges diminish in
strength and many things are given up and forgotten which the child
did and knew. During that period of life, after the early
efflorescence of sexuality has withered, such attitudes of the ego
as shame, disgust and morality arise, which are destined to stand
up against the later tempest of puberty and to lay down the path of
the freshly awakening sexual desires. This ‘diphasic
onset’, as it is named, of sexual life has a great deal to do
with the genesis of neurotic illnesses. It seems to occur only in
human beings, and it is perhaps one of the determinants of the
human privilege of becoming neurotic. The prehistory of sexual life
was just as much overlooked before psycho-analysis as, in another
department, the background to conscious mental life. You will
rightly suspect that the two are intimately connected.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4354

   There is much to be told, for
which our expectations have not prepared us, about the contents,
manifestations and achievements of this early period of sexuality.
For instance, you will no doubt be surprised to hear how often
little boys are afraid of being eaten up by their father. (And you
may also be surprised at my including this fear among the phenomena
of sexual life.) But I may remind you of the mythological tale
which you may still recall from your schooldays of how the god
Kronos swallowed his children. How strange this must have sounded
to you when you first heard it! But I suppose none of us thought
about it at the time. To-day we can also call to mind a number of
fairy tales in which some ravenous animal like a wolf appears, and
we shall recognize it as a disguise of the father. And this is an
opportunity of assuring you that it was only through the knowledge
of infantile sexuality that it became possible to understand
mythology and the world of fairy tales. Here then something has
been gained as a by-product of analytic studies.

   You will be no less surprised to
hear that male children suffer from a fear of being robbed of their
sexual organ by their father, so that this fear of being castrated
has a most powerful influence on the development of their character
and in deciding the direction to be followed by their sexuality.
And here again mythology may give you the courage to believe
psycho-analysis. The same Kronos who swallowed his children also
emasculated his father Uranus, and was afterwards himself
emasculated in revenge by his son Zeus, who had been rescued though
his mother’s cunning. If you have felt inclined to suppose
that all that psycho-analysis reports about the early sexuality of
children is derived from the disordered imagination of the
analysts, you must at least admit that their imagination has
created the same product as the imaginative activities of primitive
man, of which myths and fairy tales are the precipitate. The
alternative friendlier, and probably also the more pertinent view
would be that in the mental life of children to-day we can still
detect the same archaic factors which were once dominant generally
in the primaeval days of human civilization. In his mental
development the child would be repeating the history of his race in
an abbreviated form, just as embryology long since recognized was
the case with somatic development.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4355

   Another characteristic of early
infantile sexuality is that the female sexual organ proper as yet
plays no part in it: the child has not yet discovered it. Stress
falls entirely on the male organ, all the child’s interest is
directed towards the question of whether it is present or not. We
know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But
we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual
life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for
psychology. But we have learnt that girls feel deeply their lack of
a sexual organ that is equal in value to the male one; they regard
themselves on that account as inferior, and this ‘envy for
the penis’ is the origin of a whole number of characteristic
feminine reactions.

   It is also characteristic of
children that their two excretory needs are cathected with sexual
interest. Later on, education draws a sharp distinction here, which
is once more obliterated in the practice of joking. It may seem to
us an unsavoury fact, but it takes quite a long time for children
to develop feelings of disgust. This is not disputed even by people
who insist otherwise on the seraphic purity of the child’s
mind.

   Nothing, however, deserves more
notice than the fact that children regularly direct their sexual
wishes towards their nearest relatives - in the first place,
therefore, towards their father and mother, and afterwards towards
their brothers and sisters. The first object of a boy’s love
is his mother, and of a girl’s her father (except in so far
as an innate bisexual disposition favours the simultaneous presence
of the contrary attitude). The other parent is felt as a disturbing
rival and not infrequently viewed with strong hostility. You must
understand me aright. What I mean to say is not that the child
wants to be treated by its favourite parent merely with the kind of
affection which we adults like to regard as the essence of the
parent-child relation. No, analysis leaves us in no doubt that the
child’s wishes extend beyond such affection to all that we
understand by sensual satisfaction - so far, that is, as the
child’s powers of imagination allow. It is easy to see that
the child never guesses the actual facts of sexual intercourse; he
replaces them by other notions derived from his own experience and
feelings. As a rule his wishes culminate in the intention to bear,
or in some in definable way, to procreate a baby. Boys, too, in
their ignorance, do not exclude themselves from the wish to bear a
baby. We give the whole of this mental structure the name of
‘Oedipus complex’, after the familiar Greek legend.
With the end of the early sexual period it should normally be given
up, should radically disintegrate and become transformed; and the
results of this transformation are destined for important functions
in later mental life. But as a rule this is not effected radically
enough, in which case puberty brings about a revival of the
complex, which may have serious consequences.

   I am surprised that you are still
silent. That can scarcely mean consent. - In asserting that a
child’s first choice of an object is, to use the technical
term, an incestuous one, analysis no doubt once more hurt the most
sacred feelings of humanity, and might well be prepared for a
corresponding amount of disbelief, contradiction and attack. And
these it has received in abundance. Nothing has damaged it more in
the good opinion of its contemporaries than its hypothesis of the
Oedipus complex as a structure universally bound to human destiny.
The Greek myth, incidentally, must have had the same meaning; but
the majority of men to-day, learned and unlearned alike, prefer to
believe that Nature has laid down an innate abhorrence in us as a
guard against the possibility of incest.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4356

   But let us first summon history
to our aid. When Caius Julius Caesar landed in Egypt, he found the
young Queen Cleopatra (who was soon to become so important to him)
married to her still younger brother Ptolemy. In an Egyptian
dynasty there was nothing peculiar in this; the Ptolemies, who were
of Greek origin, had merely carried on the custom which had been
practised by their predecessors, the ancient Pharaohs, for a few
thousand years. This, however, was merely brother-and-sister
incest, which even at the present time is not judged so harshly. So
let us turn to our chief witness in matters concerning primaeval
times - mythology. It informs us that the myths of every people,
and not only of the Greeks, are filled with examples of
love-affairs between fathers and daughters and even between mothers
and sons. Cosmology, no less than the genealogy of royal races, is
founded upon incest. For what purpose do you suppose these legends
were created? To brand gods and kings as criminals? to fasten on
them the abhorrence of the human race? Rather, surely, because
incestuous wishes are a primordial human heritage and have never
been fully overcome, so that their fulfilment was still granted to
gods and their descendants when the majority of common humans were
already obliged to renounce them. It is in complete harmony with
these lessons of history and mythology that we find incestuous
wishes still present and operative in the childhood of the
individual.