by Ruth Snowden
SADISM AND MASOCHISM
This is another pair of complementary opposites, and Freud saw them as being the most common and significant of the perversions. Sadism is the desire to inflict pain or humiliation on the sexual object, masochism is the opposite – the desire to receive pain or humiliation from the sexual object. Freud said that the roots of these two perversions are easy to detect. In the normal male, sexuality has a strong element of aggression – there is the desire to overcome resistance and dominate the sexual partner. In sadism this urge gets out of hand. (One could ask how this explanation accounts for sadistic behaviour in women.) Masochism seemed to Freud to be further removed from the normal sexual aim – he said that it was probably caused primarily through guilt and fear, and saw it as a kind of extension of sadism turned in upon the self.
Freud added that there was definitely a connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct in the history of human civilization, but he was not able to explain why – he suggested that a number of factors combined to produce this single result. He was particularly interested in his observation that sadism and masochism are habitually found together in the same person, although one aspect often dominates. He saw this contrast between activity and passivity as being one of the universal characteristics of sexual life, reflecting the basic opposing forces of masculinity and femininity.
Freud drew several conclusions from his study of sexual deviations:
The sexual instinct has to struggle against various mental resistances. This is probably a mechanism to keep the sexual instinct restrained within what is considered to be ‘normal’.
Some perversions are complex in their origin. This shows that the sexual instinct is much more complicated than people had previously maintained.
The sexuality of neurotics has usually remained in, or been brought back to, an infantile state. This discovery brought Freud to the study of infantile sexuality.
Infantile sexuality
The popular view in Freud’s day was that sexuality lay dormant until puberty. Psychologists writing about child development generally omitted any reference to sexuality. This was probably mainly because it was ‘not nice’ to mention sex at all, so to imply that children thought about it was the ultimate horror. Once again, Freud stuck his neck out and suggested two main reasons for the silence about infant sexuality:
the taboo aspect
the fact that most people tend to forget what happens to them before the age of six or eight years.
Freud thought that this second aspect was strange, because small children show plenty of evidence of awareness and insight into what is going on in their lives. However, early recollections could be brought to light under hypnosis. Freud therefore proposed that there was a special process of infantile amnesia (a process of forgetting that may be total or partial), that went into action to repress thoughts about sexual experiences.
So, according to Freud, sexual impulses are present from birth but are soon overcome by a progressive process of repression. This process comes about as the child discovers that it has to comply with various rules in order to fit into society. Feelings of disgust and shame begin to arise and these suppress the sexual urge. The process of infantile amnesia is the forerunner of and basis for the process of hysterical amnesia in adult life.
According to Freud, infantile sexuality is not concerned only with the genital region but shows up at different stages of development in various parts of the body, such as the oral zone, the anal zone and finally the genital zone. The aim of all infantile sexual activity is to get satisfaction by stimulating an erotogenic zone, but by the age of about six or eight years, this early sexual activity goes dormant until puberty. This is known as the latency period.
* * *
Insight
For more about the latency period, see Chapter 7.
* * *
INFANT EXPLORATION OF SEXUALITY
Children are naturally curious about sex. Freud says that they explore sexuality in various ways. Often, when a threatening younger sibling arrives, one of the first things the older child wants to know is where babies come from, but many of them are dissatisfied by nursery explanations such as the stork bringing them. Misunderstandings are common too, for example, children may think the baby is born through the anus, because they are used to the idea of faeces appearing in this way.
Small children are also curious to find out about the opposite sex. There was not so much scope for this in Freud’s day because children were kept ‘decently’ covered up. The eventual revelation was often very traumatic according to Freud – for boys it led to a ‘castration complex’.
* * *
Insight
We all have the odd complex lurking in our unconscious – they develop as a result of our unique life experiences and tend to be associated with a particular subject or theme. Our attitudes and behaviour are influenced by these personal complexes, but they are difficult to spot in oneself because of course they are unconscious. Things that one tends to get het up about are often powerful pointers to a hidden complex.
* * *
Having observed that little girls had no penis, the boy was terrified that he would somehow lose his own. This could lead to fantasies about the penis being damaged during sexual intercourse with a woman – hence the alarming idea of the ‘vagina dentata’, a ferocious vagina with teeth waiting to rip off the penis! Such fears could be one reason for some men preferring to stick to intercourse with their own sex.
* * *
Insight
One is tempted to speculate that Freud suffered from a castration complex as a child and so developed this as a theory that applied to all small boys.
* * *
For girls there was also a castration complex, because when they discovered that boys have a penis it was immediately obvious to them that they had somehow lost their own. This led to a terrible ‘penis envy’, where the little girl was overcome with jealousy at the marvellous male organ and immediately starting wanting to be a boy. This urge was sometimes replaced later by a desire to have a baby, which in some way could make up for the missing penis.
Freud also claimed that if a child witnessed adults having sex, it invariably thought that they were fighting, and glimpses of menstrual blood on sheets or underwear only served to confirm this horrid suspicion. Because children were not supposed to have sexual feelings at all, people generally concealed any information about sex from them until puberty, when, if they were lucky, they got a rudimentary explanation at best. To his great credit, Freud totally disagreed with all this secrecy. He argued that children are naturally curious about sexual matters, as they are about everything. Therefore, he suggested that questions about sex that arise at home should be answered truthfully from the outset, and that children should be properly educated about sex in school before the age of ten.
The struggles of puberty
Freud’s ideas about what happened at puberty, explained in the third of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, gained far more acceptance at the time than his ideas about infant sexuality and sexual deviance. He said that sexual changes in the physical body begin to occur at puberty and change the whole pattern of infantile sexuality. The latency period ends and hormonal changes cause a huge resurgence of the powerful sexual drive which was present in infancy:
The child’s first sexual feelings arise from sucking at the mother’s breast. At this very early stage the mother is the sexual object.
Next is the stage of infantile sexuality where the child is excited by the sensations in its own body. This stage is autoerotic – the infant derives pleasure from its own body, so the child’s own body is the sexual object. Sexual activity at this stage is derived from a number of separate instinctive urges, such as eating, or emptying the bowels.
At puberty the child begins to be attracted to members of the opposite sex. A new sexual object, outside the self, now has to be discovered and all the component instincts of the sexual drive now have
to combine to attain the new sexual aim.
Freud maintains that a normal sexual life is only attained at puberty by the coming together of two currents of energy directed towards the sexual object and the sexual aim. At puberty, the two sexes diverge greatly because different functions emerge for their sexual aims. According to Freud, the development of sexual inhibitions of sexuality appears earlier in little girls, and in the face of less resistance. Rather bizarrely, he views the early autoerotic and masturbatory activity of the infant as being ‘wholly masculine’ in both sexes. In fact, he maintains that libido is invariably of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or women. In little girls the erotogenic zone is the clitoris, which is homologous (i.e. fundamentally similar in structure) to the penis.
At puberty, the sexual organs grow and become functional in the reproductive sense. Freud says that observations show that stimuli work on the complex sexual apparatus from three directions, namely the external world, the organic interior of the body, and mental activity. All three kinds of stimuli produce sexual excitement of two kinds: mental and physical. The mental excitement gives rise to a feeling of tension and the physical excitement gives rise to changes in the genitalia in preparation for the sexual act. Freud insists that although sexual arousal is undeniably pleasurable, the accompanying sexual tension necessarily involves ‘unpleasure’. This fits in with his idea that the body is constantly seeking a state of equilibrium.
The development of the sexual organs at puberty causes new sexual tensions. Freud says that in boys there is a great increase in libido, which is fairly straightforward because the new sexual aim is the ‘discharge of sexual products’. On the other hand, he suggests that the unfortunate girls are attacked by a fresh wave of suppression, because they have to overcome their previous ‘masculine’ sexuality and transfer the erotogenic zone from the clitoris to the vagina. This process is very difficult, and apparently takes place during what Freud referred to rather obscurely as a period of anaesthesia in the young woman. If this process is not properly completed, and the clitoris remains the main focus of sexual excitation, it is a frequent cause of neurosis, especially hysteria.
Freud’s theories on female sexuality and development now seem highly dubious and confused. However, it is important to remember that he developed these theories nearly a hundred years ago, when female sexuality was very poorly understood. Astoundingly, the true structure and function of the clitoris has only very recently been revealed. This lack of understanding was not really because Freud was sexist – it simply reflects the general lack of understanding that people had at the time. There is a fascinating snippet in one of his letters to Wilhelm Fliess, dated 15 October 1897, which indicates strongly that he was actually very interested in exploring the psychology of both men and women and the ways in which they overlap. In this letter he is talking about his self-analysis and complains of experiencing a block in his exploration, which lasted for three days. He had a feeling of being ‘tied up inside’ – a feeling that his patients had often complained to him about. Then, on the fourth day, things began to flow smoothly again. He was baffled by all this until he realized that a similar block had occurred 28 days before. From this he concludes that what he refers to as the ‘female period’ is not conducive to doing analytical work. This suggests that he is exploring the idea that the male psyche has important female aspects within it – an interesting idea that was surely way ahead of his time.
According to Freud, childhood and puberty are fraught with sexual pitfalls and one false step along the way can lead to any number of problems in later life, as discussed below.
INCEST
The object choice begins with the child’s early relationships with parents and carers. It is only later diverted away to other people by incest taboos. Freud says that sometimes the parents’ natural affection for a child may awaken sexual interest too soon. On the other hand, if this can be avoided, then the emotional support of the parents will help the child towards choosing an appropriate sexual object when maturity is reached. Perhaps then the simplest choice would seem to be for the child to choose one of the parents as a sexual object – after all, since early childhood the parents have been associated with a kind of damped-down libido.
However, in reality this is not the best choice because the cultural demands of society prevent incest. The latency period allows the child to learn about these rules, and is followed at puberty by the teenage rebellion period, when the child gradually loosens the connection with the parents. In some cases this process goes wrong and the child is unable to overcome the sense of parental authority and may persist in childish affection for the parents long after puberty. Freud says that this is particularly common, even encouraged, among girls. Even if a person manages to avoid an incestuous relationship, he or she may still fall in love for the first time with a much older person. This echoes the earlier relationship with the mother or father.
FIXATION
The child can get stuck at any stage in the sexual development process. This is called fixation. Freud says that in some cases it is possible to trace a connection between a character trait and specific erotogenic components. For example, obstinacy, thrift and orderliness are linked with anal eroticism, while ambition is determined by strong urethral eroticism. He attributed a great many of the sexual deviations that he met in clinical practice to fixations caused by early impressions in childhood.
* * *
Insight
The word fixation is nowadays often used in a slightly different way. We speak of someone ‘having a fixation’, meaning a state where they become obsessed by a particular object or person.
* * *
REPRESSION
Repression of sexual urges may lead to psychoneurotic illness, such as the perversions we looked at earlier. Freud emphasized that repressing an urge was not the same thing as abolishing it. Instead, the urge is prevented by psychical blocks from attaining its aim. It may then be diverted into numerous other channels, and find its way to the surface as neurotic symptoms. The affected person may then be able to lead a comparatively normal, often somewhat restricted sexual life, but will tend to suffer from psychoneurotic illness.
SUBLIMATION
Very often the libido finds an outlet in another, non-sexual field. This is called sublimation (see Chapter 5). According to Freud, sublimation is one of the origins of artistic ability: on analysis, people who are gifted creatively often prove to have various sexual deviations and neurotic symptoms. In fact, Freud sees a person’s whole character as being built to a considerable extent by sublimation and other constructions that keep perverse impulses under control.
Freud suggests that neurotic people may have a greater tendency to be affected by early sexual experiences, and a greater tendency to become fixated. He saw one of the main causes of fixation to be the early seduction of the child by another child or an adult. He suggested that sexual deviations could arise through a combination of several causes:
a compliant constitution and/or precocity
increased susceptibility to early sexual experiences
chance stimulation of the sexual instinct by external influences, such as a foot fetish brought about by an early encounter with velvet slippers.
However, it is not easy to sort out the extent to which constitutional or external factors are responsible for sexual deviations. Freud said that in exploring the theory of sexuality people are always liable to overestimate the former, whereas in clinical practice the latter tend to be given more emphasis.
Although Freud continued to explore sexual disturbances all his life, he was frustrated by his lack of knowledge about the biological processes underlying sexual behaviour. He claimed that this lack of knowledge prevented him from ever being able to formulate a really adequate theory about how normal sexuality developed and pathological conditions arose. But he maintained that one of the most important results of his psychoanalytic research was the discovery that neurotic anxiety arises out
of the transformation of unacceptable libidinal urges.
* * *
THINGS TO REMEMBER
Freud’s views on sexuality, particularly that of infants, caused great uproar amongst his contemporaries.
Freud said that:
The sexual instinct was a lot more complicated than people had previously maintained.
Sexual impulses are present from birth, but are soon overcome by a progressive process of repression.
The sexuality of neurotics and deviants has usually remained in, or been brought back to, an infantile state.
Childhood and puberty are fraught with sexual pitfalls and development can go wrong or get stuck at any stage. This is called fixation.
One of the main causes of fixation is early seduction by another child or by an adult.
* * *
7
Going back to childhood