According to Freud, sexuality begins as something vague, distributed
all over the child’s body, and gradually concentrating in the sexual
organs. The first vague sexual act is suckling. The child not only
experiences the pleasure of food, but also of an act that has rhythm in
it, the rhythm of the mouth working with the nipple. It soon discovers
that it can produce this rhythm by itself. It works its thumb into
its mouth and sucks it. Here begins a pleasure, separated from the
food-pleasure, which is dependent on rhythm, and includes the mouth and
hand.
The hand, having learned this trick, now begins to rub various parts of
the body in a rhythmical manner. In a vague sort of way auto-erotism
sets in.
Along with this comes a growing interest in its own body, and a love of
displaying it; the stage of exhibitionism. And naturally this leads to
curiosity about other bodies, especially bodies like its own.
But, finally, interest is aroused in the opposite sex, and with the
awakening of genuine sexual desire in puberty, the child is prepared
to step over to normal sexuality.
According to this, every child who develops steadily will finally
come to normal sexuality. Yet it is obvious that the world is full of
people who have sexual trouble. There are men suffering from partial
or complete impotence; there are women with whom desire centers upon
the lips; there are others terrified at the sexual act; there are
homosexuals, and those who cannot break the auto-erotic habit. Finally,
there are those whose only pleasure consists in cruelty to others,
or having cruelty practiced upon themselves--the sadists and the
masochists.
These troubles, according to Freud, can be traced back to the child’s
original love-attachment to the mother or father. It is the Oedipus
complex, named after the Greek king who innocently and unknowingly
married his own mother, had children by her, and when the truth was
revealed to him, put out his own eyes and wandered homeless about the
land. This is the crime of incest, tabooed almost universally by every
race.
In other words, Freud thinks it natural that the child’s first love
should have a sexual coloring; that the boy desires the mother, and
the girl the father; but that the deep taboo, felt by the child though
not understood by him, produces a fear that drives him finally to take
some substitute for the mother, another woman (how often men seek women
who are like their mothers!), or may make it impossible for him ever to
have normal sexuality.
In other words, the child, in fear of going any further toward the goal
of his love, the mother, may become fixed at some point of childish
expression: one boy may never go further than auto-erotism; another
may remain all his life at the homosexual phase. In this way the
perversions are accounted for; they are infantile expressions, due to
fear.
The cure, according to Freud, is two-fold: the patient must come to
understand that the cause of the trouble is his love for the parent,
and that this love must be sacrificed, and the attachment broken, in
order that the desire for normal sexuality may be cultivated.
The other solution is _sublimation_. That is to say, express your
abnormal desire, but on a higher level and in a different form. In
fact, Freud traces many of the glories of our civilization to this
technic, employed unconsciously as a rule. For instance, a man may be a
sadist; his desire is to cut other people with a knife. Let him, then,
become a surgeon, and cut people creatively instead of destructively.
Another man is an exhibitionist. He wants to display himself publicly.
Let him become an actor.
A third has intense curiosity; he would, if he expressed this desire
unsublimated, become a Peeping Tom. Let him become a scientist, intent
on looking into the unknown.
Against this viewpoint of Freud’s, Dr. Jung, the psychologist of
Zurich, brings a barrage of criticism. He says, first, that while these
expressions of the child have every appearance of sexuality, they
cannot be sexual, because as a rule true sexuality does not awaken in
a child until puberty. And he says, second, that the desire for incest
is relatively rare: since, naturally, when it comes to sexuality, a man
desires a young woman and not an old.
While these criticisms seem to me well-founded, great credit must
nevertheless go to Freud for having shown us that these sexual
manifestations are not necessarily rooted in innate depravity and
sinfulness, but appear as natural expressions in the development of
everyone. For while it is true that not many children have sexual
feeling before puberty, on the other hand in the cases of men and women
who practice perversions it is usually found that the habit originated
in childhood, and was not broken when puberty dawned.