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On the sexual theories of children (1908)5 2 страница




 

¹ The games that are most significant for subsequent neuroses are playing at ‘doctor’ and at ‘father and mother’.7

 

In about their tenth or eleventh year, children get to hear about sexual matters. A child who has grown up in a comparatively uninhibited social atmosphere, or who has found better opportunities for observation, tells other children what he knows, because this makes him feel mature and superior. What children learn in this way is mostly correct - that is, the existence of the vagina and its purpose is revealed to them; but otherwise the explanations they get from one another are not infrequently mixed with false ideas and burdened with remains of the older infantile sexual theories. They are scarcely ever complete or sufficient to solve the primordial problem. Just as formerly it was ignorance of the vagina which prevented the whole process from being understood, so now is it ignorance of the semen. The child cannot guess that another substance besides urine is excreted from the male sexual organ, and occasionally an ‘innocent’ girl on her wedding night is still indignant at her husband ‘urinating into her’. This information acquired in the years of pre-puberty is followed by a new access of sexual researches by the child. But the theories which he now produces no longer have the typical and original stamp which was characteristic of the primary theories of early childhood as long as the infantile sexual components could find expression in theories in an uninhibited and unmodified fashion. The child’s later intellectual efforts at solving the puzzles of sex have not seemed to me worth collecting, nor can they have much claim to a pathogenic significance. Their multiplicity is of course mainly dependent on the nature of the enlightenment which a child receives; but their significance consists rather in the fact that they re-awaken the traces, which have since become unconscious, of his first period of sexual interest; so that it is not infrequent for masturbatory sexual activity and some degree of emotional detachment from his parents to be linked up with them. Hence the condemnatory judgement of teachers that enlightenment of such a kind at this age ‘corrupts’ children.

 

Let me give a few examples to show what elements often enter into these late speculations by children about sexual life. A girl had heard from her schoolmates that the husband gives his wife an egg, which she hatches out in her body. A boy, who had also heard of the egg, identified it with the testicle, which [in German] is vulgarly called by the same word [Ei]; and he racked his brains to make out how the contents of the scrotum could be constantly renewed. The information given seldom goes far enough to prevent important uncertainties about sexual events. Thus a girl may arrive at an expectation that intercourse occurs on one occasion only, but that it lasts a very long time - twenty-four hours - and that all the successive babies come from this single occasion. One would suppose that this child had got her knowledge of the reproductive process from certain insects; but it turned out that this was not so and that the theory emerged as a spontaneous creation. Other girls are ignorant of the period of gestation, the life in the womb, and assume that the baby appears immediately after the first night of intercourse. Marcel Prevost has turned this girlhood mistake into an amusing story in one of his ‘Lettres de femmes’. These later sexual researches of children, or of adolescents who have been retarded at the stage of childhood, offer an almost inexhaustible theme and one which is perhaps not uninteresting in general; but it is more remote from my present interest. I must only lay stress on the fact that in this field children produce many incorrect ideas in order to contradict older and better knowledge which has become unconscious and is repressed.

 

The way in which children react to the information they are given also has its significance. In some, sexual repression has gone so far that they will not listen to anything; and these succeed in remaining ignorant even in later life - apparently ignorant, at least - until, in the psycho-analysis of neurotics, the knowledge that originated in early childhood comes to light. I also know of two boys between ten and thirteen years old who, though it is true that they listened to the sexual information, rejected it with the words: ‘ Your father and other people may do something like that, but I know for certain my father never would.’ But however widely children’s later reactions to the satisfaction of their sexual curiosity may vary, we may assume that in the first years of childhood their attitude was absolutely uniform, and we may feel certain that at that time all of them tried most eagerly to discover what it was that their parents did with each other so as to produce babies.

 


SOME GENERAL REMARKS ON HYSTERICAL ATTACKS (1909)

 

A

 

When one carries out the psycho-analysis of a hysterical woman patient whose complaint is manifested in attacks, one soon becomes convinced that these attacks are nothing else but phantasies translated into the motor sphere, projected on to motility and portrayed in pantomime. It is true that the phantasies are unconscious; but apart from this they are of the same nature as the phantasies which can be observed directly in day-dreams or which can be elicited by interpretation from dreams at night. Often a dream takes the place of an attack, and still more often it explains it, since the same phantasy finds a different expression in a dream and in an attack. We might expect then that by observing an attack we should be able to get to know the phantasy represented in it; but this is seldom possible. As a rule, owing to the influence of the censorship, the pantomimic portrayal of the phantasy has undergone distortions which are completely analogous to the hallucinatory distortions of a dream, so that both of them have, in the first resort, become unintelligible to the subject’s own consciousness as well as to the observer’s comprehension. A hysterical attack, therefore, needs to be subjected to the same interpretative revision as we employ for night-dreams. But not only are the forces from which the distortion proceeds and the purpose of the distortion the same as those we have come to know through the interpretation of dreams; the technique employed in the distortion is the same too.

 

(1) The attack becomes unintelligible through the fact that it represents several phantasies in the same material simultaneously - that is to say through condensation. The elements common to the two (or more) phantasies constitute the nucleus of the representation, as they do in dreams. The phantasies which are thus made to coincide are often of quite a different nature. They may, for instance, be a recent wish and the re-activation of an infantile impression. The same innervations are in that case made to serve both purposes, often in a most ingenious way. Hysterical patients who make a very extensive use of condensation may find a single form of attack sufficient; others express their numerous pathogenic phantasies by a multiplication of the forms of attack.

 

(2) The attack becomes obscured through the fact that the patient attempts to carry out the activities of both the figures who appear in the phantasy, that is to say, through multiple identification. Compare, for instance, the example I mentioned in my paper on ‘Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality’ (1908a), in which the patient tore off her dress with one hand (as the man) while she pressed it to her body with the other (as the woman).

 

(3) A particularly extensive distortion is effected by an antagonistic inversion of the innervations. This is analogous to the transformation of an element into its opposite, which commonly happens in the dream-work. For instance, an embrace may be represented in the attack by drawing back the arms convulsively till the hands meet over the spinal column. It is possible that the well-known arc de cercle which occurs during attacks in major hysteria is nothing else than an energetic repudiation like this, through antagonistic innervation, of a posture of the body that is suitable for sexual intercourse.

 

(4) Scarcely less confusing and misleading is a reversal of the chronological order within the phantasy that is portrayed, which once more has its complete counterpart in a number of dreams which begin with the end of the action and end with its beginning. Supposing, for instance, that a hysterical woman has a phantasy of seduction in which she is sitting reading in a park with her skirt slightly lifted so that her foot is visible; a gentleman approaches and speaks to her; they then go somewhere and make love to one another. This phantasy is acted out in the attack by her beginning with the convulsive stage, which corresponds to the coitus, by her then getting up, going into another room, sitting down and reading and presently answering an imaginary remark addressed to her.

 

The two last-mentioned forms of distortion give us some idea of the intensity of the resistances which the repressed material must take into account even when it breaks through in a hysterical attack.3

 

B

 

The onset of hysterical attacks follows laws that are easily understandable. Since the repressed complex consists of a libidinal cathexis and an ideational content (the phantasy), the attack can be evoked (1) associatively, when the content of the complex (if sufficiently cathected) is touched on by something connected with it in conscious life; (2) organically, when, for internal somatic reasons and as a result of psychical influences from outside, the libidinal cathexis rises above a certain degree; (3) in the service of the primary purpose - as an expression of a ‘flight into illness’, when reality becomes distressing or frightening - that is, as a consolation; (4) in the service of the secondary purposes, with which the illness allies itself, as soon as, by producing an attack, the patient can achieve an aim that is useful to him. In the last case the attack is directed at particular individuals; it can be put off till they are present, and it gives an impression of being consciously simulated.C

 

Investigation of the childhood history of hysterical patients shows that the hysterical attack is designed to take the place of an auto-erotic satisfaction previously practised and since given up. In a great number of cases this satisfaction (masturbation by contact or by pressure of the thighs, or, again, by movements of the tongue, and so on) recurs during the attack itself, while the subject’s consciousness is deflected. Moreover, the onset of an attack that is due to an increase of libido and is in the service of the primary purpose - as a consolation - exactly repeats the conditions under which, at the earlier time, the patient had intentionally sought this auto-erotic satisfaction. The anamnesis of the patient shows the following stages: (a) auto-erotic satisfaction, without ideational content; (b) the same satisfaction, connected with a phantasy which leads to the act of satisfaction; (c) renunciation of the act, with retention of the phantasy; (d) repression of the phantasy, which then comes into effect as a hysterical attack, either in an unchanged form, or in a modified one and adapted to new environmental impressions. Furthermore, (e) the phantasy may even reinstate the act of satisfaction belonging to it which had ostensibly been given up. This is a typical cycle of infantile sexual activity: repression, failure of repression, and return of the repressed.

 

The involuntary passing of urine is certainly not to be regarded as incompatible with the diagnosis of a hysterical attack; it is merely repeating the infantile form of a violent pollution. Moreover, biting the tongue may also be met with in undoubted cases of hysteria. It is no more inconsistent with hysteria than it is with love-making. It occurs more readily in attacks if the patient’s attention had been drawn by the doctor’s questions to the difficulties of making a differential diagnosis. Self-injury may occur in hysterical attacks (more frequently in the case of men) where it repeats an accident in childhood - as, for instance, the result of a romp.

 

The loss of consciousness, the ‘absence’¹, in a hysterical attack is derived from the fleeting but unmistakable lapse of consciousness which is observable at the climax of every intense sexual satisfaction, including auto-erotic ones. This course of development can be traced with most certainty where hysterical absences arise from the onset of pollutions in young people of the female sex. The so-called ‘hypnoid states’ - absences during day-dreaming -, which are so common in hysterical subjects, show the same origin. The mechanism of these absences is comparatively simple. All the subject’s attention is concentrated to begin with on the course of the process of satisfaction; with the occurrence of the satisfaction, the whole of this cathexis of attention is suddenly removed, so that there ensues a momentary void in her consciousness. This gap in consciousness, which might be termed a physiological one, is then widened in the service of repression, till it can swallow up everything that the repressing agency rejects.D

 

What points the way for the motor discharge of the repressed libido in a hysterical attack is the reflex mechanism of the act of coition - a mechanism which is ready to hand in everybody, including women, and which we see coming into manifest operation when an unrestrained surrender is made to sexual activity. Already in ancient times coition was described as a ‘minor epilepsy’. We might alter this and say that a convulsive hysterical attack is an equivalent of coition. The analogy with an epileptic fit helps us little, since its genesis is even less understood than that of hysterical attacks.

 

Speaking as a whole, hysterical attacks, like hysteria in general, revive a piece of sexual activity in women which existed during their childhood and at that time revealed an essentially masculine character. It can often be observed that girls who have shown a boyish nature and inclinations up to the years before puberty are precisely those who become hysterical from puberty onwards. In a whole number of cases the hysterical neurosis merely represents an excessive accentuation of the typical wave of repression which, by doing away with her masculine sexuality, allows the woman to emerge.²

 

¹ [The French term.]

² Cf. my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d).5

 


FAMILY ROMANCES (1909)

 

The liberation of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one of the most necessary though one of the most painful results brought about by the course of his development. It is quite essential that that liberation should occur and it may be presumed that it has been to some extent achieved by everyone who his reached a normal state. Indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations. On the other hand, there is a class of neurotics whose condition is recognizably determined by their having failed in this task.

 

For a small child his parents are at first the only authority and the, source of all belief. The child’s most intense and most momentous wish during these early years is to be like his parents (that is, the parent of his own sex) and to be big like his father and mother. But as intellectual growth increases, the child cannot help discovering by degrees the category to which his parents belong. He gets to know other parents and compares them with his own, and so acquires the right to doubt the incomparable and unique quality which he had attributed to them. Small events in the child’s life which make him feel dissatisfied afford him provocation for beginning to criticize his parents, and for using, in order to support his critical attitude, the knowledge which he has acquired that other parents are in some respects preferable to them. The psychology of the neuroses teaches us that, among other factors, the most intense impulses of sexual rivalry contribute to this result. A feeling of being slighted is obviously what constitutes the subject-matter of such provocations. There are only too many occasions on which a child is slighted, or at least feels he has been slighted, on which he feels he is not receiving the whole of his parents’ love, and, most of all, of which he feels regrets at having to share it with brothers and sisters. His sense that his own affection is not being fully reciprocated then finds a vent in the idea, often consciously recollected later from early childhood, of being a step-child or an adopted child. People who have not developed neuroses very frequently remember such occasions, on which - usually as a result of something they have read - they interpreted and responded to their parent’s hostile behaviour in this fashion. But here the influence of sex is already in evidence, for a boy is far more inclined to feel hostile impulses towards his father than towards his mother and has a far more intense desire to get free from him than from her. In this respect the imagination of girls is apt to show itself much weaker. These consciously remembered mental impulses of childhood embody the factor which enables us to understand the nature of myths.

 

The later stage in the development of the neurotic’s estrangement from his parents, begun in this manner, might be described as ‘the neurotic’s family romance’. It is seldom remembered consciously but can almost always be revealed by psycho-analysis. For a quite peculiarly marked imaginative activity is one of the essential characteristics of neurotics and also of all comparatively highly gifted people. This activity emerges first in children’s play, and then, starting roughly from the period before puberty, takes over the topic of family relations. A characteristic example of this peculiar imaginative activity is to be seen in the familiar day-dreaming¹ which persists far beyond puberty. If these day-dreams are carefully examined, they are found to serve as the fulfilment of wishes and as a correction of actual life. They have two principal aims, an erotic and an ambitious one - though an erotic aim is usually concealed behind the latter too. At about the period I have mentioned, then, the child’s imagination becomes engaged in the task of getting free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others, who, as a rule, are of higher social standing. He will make use in this connection of any opportune coincidences from his actual experience, such as his becoming acquainted with the Lord of the Manor or some landed proprietor if he lives in the country or with some member of the aristocracy if he lives in town. Chance occurrences of this kind arouse the child’s envy, which finds expression in a phantasy in which both his parents are replaced by others of better birth. The technique used in developing phantasies like this (which are, of course, conscious at this period) depends upon the ingenuity and the material which the child has at his disposal. There is also the question of whether the phantasies are worked out with greater or less effort to obtain verisimilitude. This state is reached at a time at which the child is still in ignorance of the sexual determinants of procreation.

 

¹ Cf. ’Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality’ (1908a), where a reference will be found to the literature of the subject.9

 

When presently the child comes to know the difference in the parts played by fathers and mothers in their sexual relations, and realizes that ‘pater semper incertus est’, while the mother is ‘certissima’,¹ the family romance undergoes a curious curtailment: it contents itself with exalting the child’s father, but no longer casts any doubts on his maternal origin, which is regarded as something unalterable. This second (sexual) stage of the family romance is actuated by another motive as well, which is absent in the first (asexual) stage. The child, having learnt about sexual processes, tends to picture to himself erotic situations and relations, the motive force behind this being his desire to bring his mother (who is the subject of the most intense sexual curiosity) into situations of secret infidelity and into secret love-affairs. In this way the child’s phantasies, which started by being, as it were, asexual, are brought up to the level of his later knowledge.

 

Moreover the motive of revenge and retaliation, which was in the foreground at the earlier state, is also to be found at the later one. It is, as a rule, precisely these neurotic children who were punished by their parents for sexual naughtiness and who now revenge themselves on their parents by means of phantasies of this kind.

 

¹ [An old legal tag: ‘paternity is always uncertain, maternity is most certain.’]0

 

A younger child is very specially inclined to use imaginative stories such as these in order to rob those born before him of their prerogatives - in a way which reminds one of historical intrigues; and he often has no hesitation in attributing to his mother as many fictitious love-affairs as he himself has competitors. An interesting variant of the family romance may then appear, in which the hero and author returns to legitimacy himself while his brothers and sisters are eliminated by being bastardized. So too if there are any other particular interests at work they can direct the course to be taken by the family romance; for its many-sidedness and its great range of applicability enable it to meet every sort of requirement. In this way, for instance, the young phantasy-builder can get rid of his forbidden degree of kinship with one of his sisters if he finds himself sexually attracted by her.

 

If anyone is inclined to turn away in horror from this depravity of the childish heart or feels tempted, indeed, to dispute the possibility of such things, he should observe that these works of fiction, which seem so full of hostility, are none of them really so badly intended, and that they still preserve, under a slight disguise, the child’s original affection for his parents. The faithlessness and ingratitude are only apparent. If we examine in detail the commonest of these imaginative romances, the replacement of both parents or of the father alone by grander people, we find that these new and aristocratic parents are equipped with attributes that are derived entirely from real recollections of the actual and humble ones; so that in fact the child is not getting rid of his father but exalting him. Indeed the whole effort at replacing the real father by a superior one is only an expression of the child’s longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women. He is turning away from the father whom he knows to-day to the father in whom he believed in the earlier years of his childhood; and his phantasy is no more than the expression of a regret that those happy days have gone. Thus in these phantasies the overvaluation that characterizes a child’s earliest years comes into its own again. An interesting contribution to this subject is afforded by the study of dreams. We learn from their interpretation that even in later years, if the Emperor and Empress appear in dreams, those exalted personages stand for the dreamer’s father and mother.¹ So that the child’s overvaluation of his parents survives as well in the dreams of normal adults.

 

¹ Cf. my Interpretation of Dreams (1900a).1

 




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