by Ruth Snowden
Jokes and the unconscious
Freud was also interested in the way jokes demonstrate the workings of the unconscious. His book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, which appeared in 1905, is quite a collection of mainly Jewish jokes. Unfortunately, there are cultural and language problems in translation so that many of the jokes do not come across very well in English. The main point he made was that jokes are another indication of the repression and sublimation of unconscious material. This may either be the work of an internal censor mechanism, or it may be due to the presence of another person who might be shocked. In the second case, when the shocking idea is presented under disguise in the form of a joke, it is still done in order to evade internal inhibitions in the mind of the person telling the joke. So, the joke is really a way of expressing something that is normally banned by society. The pleasure gained by telling a joke in this way gives a sudden release of pent-up energy.
Some of the mechanisms used in jokes are the same as those used in dreams, for example one word is substituted for another, or condensation is used. Freud identified various mechanisms at work in jokes:
Condensation – a composite word is formed, or a word is modified.
Repetition – the same material is used in various different ways during the joke.
Double meaning – jokes which play upon words and one thing is used to represent another.
Freud identified two categories of joke:
Tendentious jokes – this type is dependent on indirect expression of hostility or sexual urges. The category would include classic mother-in-law jokes, and dirty jokes.
Innocent jokes – these depend on verbal ingenuity. The category would include puns and riddles.
The first category is the one in which Freud was chiefly interested. These are the jokes that allow the joker to get around internal inhibition by expressing a sexual or aggressive urge indirectly, as in schoolboy humour, where rude jokes are told to relieve adolescent tension. Freud eventually claimed that all jokes are in fact tendentious, even the innocent ones that play with words, which he saw as a kind of mental foreplay, leading up to the tendentious ones! This was a rather circular argument really – any pleasure derived from clever wordplay must be a minor form of pleasure, because the only real pleasure had to be derived from the release of sexual tension.
Even jokes that allowed a person to express aggression fitted this rule, because at this stage of his thinking Freud still saw aggression merely as a sadistic aspect of the sexual instinct. It is a dismal fact that Freud tended to reduce everything to the need to release libidinal tension. Why overlook fun, clever wordplay, or the cathartic effect of simply having a good laugh among friends?
Much of Freud’s work that we have covered in this chapter – dreams, the pleasure and reality principles, parapraxes and jokes – is actually looking at ways in which the ego defends itself. If the ego finds an idea too painful, embarrassing or socially unacceptable, the idea is repressed. The unconscious then finds endless little ways of letting the ideas leak back out.
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THINGS TO REMEMBER
Freud originally divided the mind into three sections – the conscious, preconscious and unconscious.
Freud said that the unconscious was formed by repression of ideas that were too painful to keep in the conscious mind.
Sublimation is the process of re-channelling unacceptable instinctive drives.
Freud suggested two opposing processes that controlled human behaviour. These were the pleasure principle and the reality principle.
Psychic conflicts arise as a result of conflict between the two processes.
Freud was interested in parapraxes (Freudian slips) and jokes because they showed the unconscious mind at work in ‘normal’ people.
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6
Sexual theories
In this chapter you will learn:
how Freud’s new theories about sex caused uproar in the scientific community
Freud’s theories about sexual deviations
theories about infantile sexuality and how sexuality develops.
Freud attacks current thinking
Theories about sexuality and sexual development became important in psychoanalysis from an early stage. Freud published his book Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905. Alongside his earlier book, The Interpretation of Dreams, this was to be one of his most important works because it outlines the foundation for his theory of neurosis, explaining why people need to repress things and what unconscious, instinctive drives affect their behaviour. The three essays in the book cover three main areas of his thinking about sexuality: sexual deviations or aberrations, infantile sexuality, and developments that occur at puberty.
This seems a strange order in which to write the book, but of course Freud was dealing mostly with adults in his medical practice, so logically this would have been the starting point for his thought process. As a result of his work with neurotic adults, Freud began to ask himself whether sexual aberrations arose from some innate disposition, or were acquired later as a result of experiences in life. Later on he himself decided to introduce his readers to the subject of sexuality by discussing infantile sexuality first.
Typically, Freud constantly developed and modified his ideas, so the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality were revised many times over the 20 years following publication. He explained that it was very difficult to define exactly what was meant by the word ‘sexual’, and that most people had a very limited concept of what the word meant. To say that it meant everything to do with the differences between the two sexes was too vague. On the other hand, the view that it was only concerned with actual genital contact between two people of the opposite sex was too limiting. This view would mean that sex was only connected with what Freud saw as being ‘improper’. There again, to say that it just referred to everything to do with reproduction would leave out obviously sexual things such as kissing and masturbation.
Freud concluded that the word sexual concerned all these things and more. He then went on to write various additional letters and papers connected with sexuality during his life, which covered a broad spectrum, including topics such as the sexual theories of children, the taboo of virginity, fetishism and female sexuality.
Freud knew that the ideas he was presenting in his new book about sexuality would meet with enormous resistance. The accepted view at the time was that sex was all about efforts to bring the genitals into contact with those of somebody of the opposite sex.
This naturally also involved kissing, looking at and touching the other person, but the behaviour was only concerned with reproduction. Infantile sexuality was seen as being totally dormant and sexual behaviour did not appear until puberty, when the body became sexually mature. Before this it was only brought out into the open accidentally when the child was sexually abused by an adult; experiences of this sort led to neurotic disturbances later in the person’s life. Initially, Freud thought this too, but by 1897 he had abandoned this ‘seduction theory’, and decided that children have sexual impulses right from the beginning and don’t need any outside influence to trigger them.
As he had expected, Freud caused uproar when he suggested that people needed to take a much broader view in order to study sex scientifically. He pointed out that:
Homosexual people are often only attracted sexually to members of their own sex. They may even find the opposite sex repellent. Freud called this group of people ‘inverts’. For them, sexuality has nothing to do with the reproductive process.
For other people the sexual drive disregards the genitals or their normal use. They may be turned on by inappropriate body parts, inanimate objects, and so on. Freud said that the words ‘sexual’ and ‘genital’ therefore had very different meanings. Freud calls this group of people ‘perverts’.
Psychoanalytical research had shown that neurotic problems and perversions were often caused by early childhood sexual experiences. As children
were not supposed to have a sex life, this suggestion caused particular furore.
Freud’s theories about sexuality were so new and challenging that even by the time he wrote a preface to the fourth edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1920 he was still defending his position. By then people had accepted many of his other ideas, but his sexual theories were still being ridiculed and some people were challenging the whole psychoanalytical theory because they claimed that it said absolutely everything could be explained by sex.
Freud tried to give academic backing to his ideas by suggesting that they had parallels in the work of Schopenhauer and Plato, both famous philosophers. He suggested that people often rejected sexual theories because they felt threatened by them and so they wanted to block them out – thus once more rather cunningly ‘proving’ the validity of his own ideas. He also pointed out that early childhood sexuality could only be investigated by somebody such as a psychoanalyst, who had a great deal of time to devote to the process. In many cases there simply was not enough time or money to do this and so the very early childhood experiences would never be unearthed.
What Freud was really doing was extending the concept of what was sexual, emphasizing that sexuality was important in all human achievements, not just in the reproduction of the species. He did this in order to support his theory that neuroses were caused by sexual problems and that neurotic symptoms therefore had sexual meaning. He found that neurotics often showed great resistance to any mention of sex, and that their sexual urges were often very strongly repressed. ‘Normal’ people, on the other hand, satisfied their sexual urges in ordinary sexual activity and in dreams.
Sexual deviations
From his work with neurotic patients, Freud came to the conclusion that tendencies to all kinds of sexual deviation existed unconsciously in many people and led to the formation of neurotic symptoms. In fact, he went so far as to suggest that initial tendencies to ‘perversion’ are universal in the sense that the sexual urges of the infant are not aimed at a specific object. ‘Normal’ sexual behaviour, that is behaviour which is aimed specifically at an adult member of the opposite sex, develops gradually as a result of inhibitions that occur during maturation.
The inhibitions that gradually lead the growing child towards ‘normal’ sexual behaviour arise as a result of reactions from other people (such as shock or disgust) when the child displays unacceptable sexual behaviour. The moral structure imposed by society as a whole is also very important. When this process goes wrong or gets stuck in some way, then sexual deviations become apparent. Freud defines various types of sexual deviation, which he divides into two groups:
Deviations in respect of the sexual object – the sexual object is the person or thing from which the sexual attraction comes.
Deviations in respect of the sexual aim – the sexual aim is the sexual act that a person is driven towards.
This division seems fairly artificial and even Freud seems to get rather muddled about it at times, for example, he says that fetishism could go into either category.
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Insight
Freud’s distinction between the sexual object and the sexual aim is perhaps another example of his trying to be precise and scientific, when actually the human psyche is not always quite so easy to analyse.
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INVERSION
This is the word Freud uses for homosexuality: the word implies an in-turning of the libido onto an object like oneself. In other words, the sexual object is never fully separate from the self. This way of thinking partly goes back to early childhood when the child does not recognize sex differences and is very close to the mother, who supplies all its needs regardless of its sex. Freud saw all sexual deviations in this way – as examples of an incomplete maturity of sexual object or aim.
Freud recognizes different types of behaviour in this category:
some people go exclusively for their own sex
some are happy with either sex
some people turn to their own sex when the need arises, e.g. in prison.
Freud goes on to say that some inverts accept their sexuality as a natural state of affairs, whereas others are horrified by it and see it as a pathological compulsion. In the more extreme cases the person has been an invert from a very early age and is more likely to have accepted the state of affairs.
Freud was not able to identify one single sexual aim among inverts, nor was it possible to find a satisfactory explanation for the origin of inversion. But he did say that it points us to one important fact – that the sexual instinct does not always draw everybody to the same object. In fact, it is surprisingly common for deviations to occur.
ORAL AND ANAL SEX
Oral and anal sex were definitely considered as perversions by Freud. He said that a feeling of disgust prevents most people from indulging in either perversion. This sense of disgust is one of the natural repressive mechanisms that make people develop in the direction of normal sexuality. However, this feeling can go too far, so that the genitals of the opposite sex seem totally disgusting too. Freud found this to be a common reaction among hysterics.
Freud says that in early childhood sexual excitation arises as a kind of by-product of normal processes that occur in the body. There are various erotogenic zones in the body: areas where certain stimuli, especially rubbing, produce feelings of pleasure.
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Insight
An erotogenic zone is the same thing as an erogenous zone, or an erotogenous zone. People love to invent posh, scientific-sounding words, especially for subjects that are slightly taboo.
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Examples are the mouth, the anus and the genitalia, each of which exert their own influence on the child as it goes through a series of maturational changes. At this early stage, the sexual instinct is not focused on a specific external object but is auto-erotic, i.e. the child is turned on by parts of itself. As sucking is one of the first things from which the infant gets satisfaction, oral sex obviously relates back to a very early stage. Similarly, anal sex is linked back to a child’s first awareness of the pleasure to be gained from emptying the bowels.
FETISHISM
Fetishism occurs when the normal sexual object becomes replaced by an object that bears some relation to it. The fetish object is usually something normally considered to be non-sexual, for example a different part of the body such as the hair or the feet. In other cases it is an inanimate object, such as an item of clothing. Freud said that fetishism usually occurred as the result of a sexual experience in early childhood. A symbolic train of thought later connects the fetish to the sexual urge.
Sometimes this train of thought is fairly easy to track – for example, fur may relate to pubic hair, and so on – but it is not always that straightforward. Freud was particularly interested in fetishism because it produced such a bizarre range of behaviours, but he said that to some extent it is present in all of us, especially if the normal sexual aim is unattainable. Freud gives us the rather innocent example of someone yearning over a handkerchief or a garter that has been close to the loved one. In extreme cases, however, the power of the fetish may be so great that it completely takes the place of any kind of human relationship. In this case it can be seen to reflect an incomplete development of both sexual object and sexual aim.
SEX WITH CHILDREN OR ANIMALS
Freud was quite tolerant of homosexual people, saying that they could be ‘quite sound in other respects’. This sounds patronizing to us today, but considering the times in which he lived, when homosexuality was repressed by society, it is really quite a liberal point of view. However, he definitely frowned upon people who had sex with children, saying that they were too cowardly or impotent to find a more appropriate object. His attitude to sexual intercourse with animals (not uncommon amongst country people, where lack of availability of an appropriate sexual object could lead them to override the species barrier) was similar. Freud says that this kind of behaviour throws
light on the sexual instinct, which permits huge variation and lack of discrimination in its objects: in fact, at times it seems almost any old thing will do. This does not happen with hunger – another basic biological drive – except in very extreme circumstances.
TOUCHING AND LOOKING
Tactile and visual stimulation between sexual partners only constituted a perversion to Freud if:
they were restricted only to the genitals
they were involved with the overcoming of disgust, for example in voyeurism, or in people who enjoy watching excretory functions
they totally supplanted the normal sexual aim, instead of just leading up to it.
The opposite of voyeurism is exhibitionism, which is the urge to display the sexual organs and hopefully to see the other person’s too – ‘show me yours and I’ll show you mine’. Both conditions often crop up in the same person. In small children there is obviously no shame in running around naked and happily showing off the body – this is perfectly normal – but as the child grows older, shame gradually arises and this is the force that normally opposes voyeurism and exhibitionism in adult life.