by Ruth Snowden
c) Dreams occur when the conscious mind is at its most unguarded
d) Each night’s dreams merely replay our conscious concerns from the previous day
3. What kind of content does the analyst seek to uncover during dream analysis?
a) Manifest
b) Sexual
c) Traumatic
d) Latent
4. Which of the following is not a mechanism of dream distortion?
a) Condensation
b) Disassociation
c) Symbolization
d) Resistance
5. Which of the following describe(s) Freud’s approach to dream analysis?
a) Literal
b) Collaborative
c) Symbolic
d) Attentive
6. What is the preconscious, according to Freud?
a) The hidden, repressed part of the psyche
b) A stage in early childhood before we are fully aware
c) An accessible but temporarily stored-away part of the psyche
d) None of the above
7. What name did Freud give to the two main drives that operate in the unconscious?
a) Eros and Anteros
b) Eros and Thanatos
c) Eros and Hypnos
d) Eros and Phobos
8. The reality principle enables us…
a) To see our situation as clearly as possible
b) To fulfil our desires as quickly as possible
c) To delay gratification of our drives so that we can get along with day-to-day life
d) All of the above
9. For what is the libido another name?
a) The unconscious
b) The life instinct
c) The death instinct
d) The sexual drive
10. Which of the following is not a possible example of parapraxis?
a) Crashing a friend’s car
b) Having an argument
c) Forgetting someone’s name
d) Losing your house keys
Today we will look at the central role played by sex and sexuality in Freud’s ideas and his understanding of what these words encompassed. Theories about sexual development became important in psychoanalysis from an early stage and Freud extended the concept of what was considered to be ‘sexual’. He did this in order to support his theory that neuroses were caused by sexual problems and that neurotic symptoms therefore had sexual meaning.
Freud studied what he saw as being sexual deviations and drew the conclusion that the sexual instinct is a lot more complex than people had previously assumed, and that it has to struggle against various mental resistances. He decided that the sexuality of neurotics has usually remained in, or been brought back to, an infantile state.
The popular view in Freud’s day was that sexuality lay dormant until puberty. Freud challenged this view, saying that sexual impulses are present from birth, but are soon overcome by a progressive process of repression. Childhood and puberty are fraught with sexual pitfalls which can lead to any number of problems in later life.
FREUD ATTACKS CURRENT THINKING
Freud published his book Three Essays on Sexuality in 1905. In it he explained that it was difficult to define exactly what was meant by the word ‘sexual’. 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. Furthermore, to say that it meant 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.
The acceptable view of sex during Freud’s time was that it involved bringing the genitals into contact with those of somebody of the opposite sex, and that this naturally entailed kissing, looking at and touching the other person. This behaviour was concerned only with reproduction, and did not surface until puberty when the body became sexually mature. Freud caused uproar when he suggested that people needed to take a much broader view in order to study sex scientifically. He pointed out the following:
• Homosexual people are often attracted sexually only 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 excited 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 a particular furore.
What Freud was really doing was to extend the concept of what was ‘sexual’. 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. 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
Freud defines various types of sexual deviation, which he divides into two groups:
1 deviations in respect of the ‘sexual object’, i.e. the person, or thing, from which the sexual attraction comes
2 deviations in respect of the ‘sexual aim’, i.e. the sexual act that a person is driven towards.
This division seems rather artificial and even Freud seems to get muddled about it, saying, for example, that fetishism could go into either category.
INVERSION
This is the word Freud uses for homosexuality. He recognizes different types of behaviour in this category:
• Some people are attracted exclusively to their own sex.
• Some are attracted to both sexes.
• 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 us to the same object. In fact, it is surprisingly common for deviations to occur.
ORAL AND ANAL SEX
Oral and anal sex were considered as perversions by Freud. He said that a feeling of disgust prevents most people from indulging in either perversion. This is one of the natural repressive mechanisms that make people develop in the direction of ‘normal’ sexuality. However, the repression can be so forceful that the genitals of the opposite sex seem totally disgusting too. Freud found this to be a common reaction among hysterics.
FETISHISM
Fetishism occurs when the normal sexual object becomes replaced by an object that bears some relation to it. The fetish object is usually non-sexual. For example, it might be a different part of the body such as the hair or the feet; or it could be 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, and a symbolic train of thought later connects the fetish to the sexual urge.
TOUCHING AND LOOKING
Freud regarded tactile and visual stimulation between sexual partners as perfectly normal. They constituted a perversion only 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.
SADISM AND MASOCHISM
Sadism means the desire to inflict pain on the sexual object. Masochism is the desire to receive pain 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. (He does not seem to explain how this would account for sadism in women.) Masochism seemed rather further removed from the normal sexual aim. Freud said that it was probably caused primarily through guilt and fear. He saw it as a kind of extension of sadism, turned in upon the self. He added that there was definitely a connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct, but he was not able to explain why.
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 the range of what is considered to be ‘normal’.
• Some perversions are complex in their origin. This shows that the sexual instinct is a lot 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. It was improper to mention sex much at all, so to imply that children thought about it was the ultimate horror. Once again, Freud stuck his neck out. He suggested two main reasons for the silence about infant sexuality:
1 Sex was a taboo subject.
2 Most people tend to forget what happens to them in early life until they reach the age of six to eight years.
Freud thought that this second aspect was strange because small children show plenty of evidence of awareness and insight. However, early recollections could be brought to light under hypnosis. Freud therefore proposed that there was a special process of ‘infantile amnesia’ that went into action to repress thoughts about sexual experiences.
He claimed that 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 concerned not only with the genital region. It 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’. (This is an area of the body where certain stimuli, especially rubbing, produce feelings of pleasure.) After a while, at about age six to eight, this early sexual activity goes dormant until puberty. This is known as the ‘latency period’.
INFANT EXPLORATION OF SEXUALITY
Children are naturally curious about sex. Freud says that they explore sexuality in various ways – for example, they want to know where babies come from. Many of them are dissatisfied by nursery explanations such as the stork fetching 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.
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 what Freud termed a ‘castration complex’, in which, having observed that the little girl had no penis, the boy was terrified that he would somehow lose his own. For girls it led to a terrible ‘penis envy’, in which the little girl was overcome with jealousy at the male organ and started wanting to be a boy.
Freud also claimed that if children witnessed adults having sex, they invariably thought that they were fighting. Glimpses of menstrual blood on sheets or underwear only served to confirm this horrid suspicion.
THE STRUGGLES OF PUBERTY
According to Freud, the sexual focus goes through various different stages during childhood. Sexual changes in the physical body begin to occur at puberty and change the whole pattern of infantile sexuality.
• 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 comes 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.
• At puberty the child begins to be attracted to members of the opposite sex. A new sexual object now has to be discovered.
• At this point the two sexes diverge because different functions emerge for their sexual aims. According to Freud, the development of inhibitions of sexuality appears earlier in little girls. Obscurely, he views the early autoerotic and masturbatory activity of the infant as being ‘wholly masculine’ in both sexes. He explains that in little girls the erotogenic zone is the clitoris, which is homologous (fundamentally similar in structure and development) to the tip of the penis.
• At puberty the sexual organs grow and get into working order. This causes new sexual tensions. Freud says that in boys there is a great increase in libido, and this is fairly straightforward. But 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 is a frequent cause of neurosis, especially hysteria.
Freud’s theories of female sexuality and development now seem highly dubious and misinformed. However, it is important to remember that he developed these theories a century or more ago, when female sexuality was very poorly understood. Astoundingly, the true structure and function of the clitoris has only been very recently revealed.
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:
• 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.
• The child can get stuck at any stage in the sexual development process. This is called ‘fixation’.
• Repression of sexual urges may lead to psychoneurotic illness, such as perversions.
• Very often the libido finds an outlet in another, non-sexual field. This is called ‘sublimation’.
Freud suggests that neurotic people may have a greater tendency to be affected by early sexual experiences, and 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, such as:
• a compliant constitution and/or precocity
• increased susceptibility to early sexual experiences
• chance stimulation of the sexual instinct by external influences.
SUMMARY
We have seen today how extraordinarily daring Freud’s exploration of sexuality was, given the puritanical attitudes that still held sway in the early twentieth century – in public discourse at least. We should remember, however, that some of his contemporaries were also engaged in a parallel project – we have only to think, for example, of the erotic paintings of the Viennese artist Gustav Klimt or the plays and stories of Ar
thur Schnitzler. Perhaps most courageous of all was Freud’s extension of his researches into areas previously hidden – female and infantile sexuality, for example.
We have also seen, nonetheless, how Freud’s ideas were shaped, not to say limited, by the prejudices and intolerances of his times. His ideas about women’s sexuality and homosexuality have quite rightly been much criticized. In this respect, Freud’s ideas – because of the very reach of their influence – can be argued to have played a negative, even oppressive, role in the lives of women and sexual minorities through the twentieth century.
FACT-CHECK (ANSWERS AT THE BACK)
1. Which one of the following best describes Freud’s understanding of sexuality?
a) Restricted
b) Broad
c) Tolerant
d) Permissive
2. Which sexual behaviours did Freud describe as ‘inverted’?
a) Fetishes
b) Oral