From birth to puberty the sexual
development of children is already
beginning, which was countered to the
prevailing thought at the time that
puberty was the beginning of sexual
development. For Freud at the late 19th
century and its repressions led to all
kinds of psychological problems in the
early 20th century, especially ignorance
of infantile sexuality.
He said...
Freud follows this line of
reasoning based on pleasure found early
in the infant's life with feeding. He
says that...
This first phase of infantile sexuality,
the oral phase, is broken down into two
parts for Freud. The beginning of the
oral phase is characterized by the child
having no ambivalence related to the
object, in this case the mother's breast.
Freud called it "cannibalistic pregenital sexual organization."
An oral incorporation which is a form of early identification. Incorporation in
psychoanalysis involves attempts to take
in external objects inside oneself to
master them, and thereby destroy the
power external objects have over oneself,
and consume them. These phases can be
forms of regression in later periods, and
one predictable example is self-soothing
with thumb sucking.
Here the thumb is a replacement for the
breast
where "the sexual activity is detached
from the nutritive activity and has
substituted for the extraneous object
once situated in the subjects own body."
One can get the sense that kissing and
oral sex as an adult is connected with
this first phase. Freud elaborates on the
motivation to find a substitute for the
breast.
The second stage involves
this regression, and other activities as
the mother is becoming frustrating with
"time lapses between feedings and
eventual weaning." It leads to ambivalence
with the mother and with the arising of
first teeth the child can bite and
animate the mouth as a defense against
the challenging environment. As children
grow older, this addictive tendency can
manifest in a myriad number of addictive
habits like biting pencils, nails, smoking,
overeating, and making sarcastic comments.
This later phase coincides with the
beginning of the next phase. Freud says
"at a second level the sadistic and anal
impulses come to the fore undoubtedly in
connection with the appearance of the
teeth, the strengthening of the muscular
apparatus, and the control of the
sphincter functions."
Following the oral phase, the anal phase
emerges based on the anus being able to
gain pleasure. Another erogenous zone.
Freud originally called it the "sadistic anal
phase" connecting it with the oral sadism
of the prior phase. Both are the early
developments of Freud's later aggressive
drive. In Character and Anal Eroticism, 1908, Freud goes into detail on how this
pleasure can arise.
This is where the term anal-retentive
comes from. Naturally these behaviors
lead to chastisement from the parents
during toilet training.
Freud references Lou Andreas-Salomé (1916)
who shows...
Freud also says...
This leads to three characteristics of anal people
that Freud calls orderliness, stinginess,
and stubbornness. Orderly behaviors are a
reaction formation, or a repressive
change of attitude to its opposite.
Reaction formations are a defense
mechanism against criticism stinginess
involves greed, and stubbornness with
rage and revengefulness related to
controlling what is pleasurable. These
behaviors to Freud are a sublimation, or
a replacement of anal eroticism. Freud
even connects anal behaviors to the old
superstition of finding treasure with
defecation. Money can be dirty and
valuable at the same time. He uses an
obscure symbol for today's times of the
figure of the Dukatenscheißer,
or the "shitter of ducats", to connect
it to the adult interests in money.
Freud also makes a connection between
bedwetting and the chastisement of
weakness, leading to another reaction formation
of a burning ambition for success
in adulthood.
Even if these examples are too
simplistic there is a tendency for
children to avoid behaviors they like
for fear of punishment and abandonment
by parents. These fears and reaction
formations can form lifelong habits of
the opposite behavior and given enough
repetition. During these early phases,
there is less complication related to
sexual differentiation, but they can be
distinguished by their active or passive
character. The distinction between sexes
happens next in the phallic phase.
During the phallic phase the leading
erogenous zone becomes the genitals.
Children attempt masturbation during
this time but are often suppressed in
doing so by their parents. This can
manifest in a castration complex in boys
when parents threaten to damage the
penis if masturbation doesn't stop. Boys
are also shocked at seeing their sister,
mother, or other girls missing a penis,
and begin to have infantile theories of
mutilation, and fear of losing their
penis. Freud painstakingly fleshes out
childhood theories that confuse children
about sexuality including stories of the
stork providing a baby, or how babies can
come out of the stomach. He also
describes confusion that children have
when they happen on their parents having
sex and equating it to sadism and masochism.
All are early influences that children
take into their adult opinions. He also
describes how some boys devalue the
genitalia of women or find them
horrifying and can over value the penis
leading to homosexuality. You can see in
"Part One: The Aberrations" for more on
Freud's views on homosexuality.
The biggest influence for Freud in this
phase is the Oedipus Complex and Female
Oedipus Complex. Motivated by wanting to
keep the mother to himself the boy comes
in conflict with the father over the
attention of the mother. The hostility
aimed at the father leads to a valuing
of women and a devaluing of men, and
eventually a surrender of desire for the
mother, and makes the father a model of
behavior, in the dissolution of the
Oedipus Complex for boys. Also some of
the dissolution can come from seeing
that the mother has moved her attention
to a new arrival, with a new baby. For
girls it becomes more complex for Freud.
They go through a similar shock with the
difference boys have to them and feel
cheated at not having a penis that Freud
famously called
Penis Envy. This can manifest as wishes to be a
boy, to desire to have a man, and also a
wish to have a baby. The girl can hold
her mother responsible for not giving
her a penis. The solution for the girl
then is to aim her sexual desire to her
father to give her a baby, to satisfy her.
This leads to a similar competition, as
in the Oedipus complex for the boy, but
instead of competition with the mother,
and a consequent valuing of men. Then
eventually there's a surrender of the
father and emulation of the mother, in
the dissolution of the Female Oedipus
Complex. The dissolution can also come
from the non-response of the father to
her daughter's desires. There's a feeling
for both that boy and girl that they
need to find new objects of desire.
As suppression of sexuality by parents,
continues, plus the direction of their
child's energy towards school, friends
and hobbies, the latency period begins.
Freud says of a latency period...
This is a kind of precursor in psychology to emotional incest where the boundaries of the child are violated,
especially when parents treat their
children as a friend or a surrogate mate.
Finding a proper balance of love and
discipline can be tricky for parents
during this period. Here Freud warns...
When the child reaches puberty, a major
shift occurs, when the complete sense of
male and female emerge. Freud says...
Yet there is a psychological obstacle. Freud says...
This parental influence is very strong and
can pose a problem for the adolescent.
Freud says that the detachment from
parental authority...
At this point Freud moves to his famous
prediction that children look for their
parents in their choice of partner.
A lot of the reason why Freud felt that
early experiences in childhood were
important to the overall personality of
the adult was how society educated
children about sex. By looking at sex as
bad, and keeping it a mystery,
children would piece together theories
that would affect how they view their
sexuality, and that of the opposite sex.
Seeing parents engaging in sex can make
children think it was a violent sadistic
operation, and color their views on
relationships with men and women.
Not understanding the value of female
genitalia could lead to a devaluation of
female sexuality. Repression could lead
to conversion symptoms that at the time
could be diagnosed as Neurasthenia, which
is a fatigue and irritability, or
Hysteria where patients have
neurological problems and emotional
problems related to the repression.
The only way forward for Freud is a form of
sex education that people take for
granted today.
For Freud, all these mistakes in upbringing
can transform an inherently positive
energy of libido into anxiety like wine
into vinegar. The excessive shaming,
spoiling, ignorance of sexuality in
parenting and schooling, leads to the
neuroticism of adolescence and adulthood.
What can also be found from these
deviations of libido, is the component
instincts which become particularly
prominent when there are perversions. In
The Claims of Psychoanalysis to
Scientific Interest, 1913, Freud says...
Examples would be an "oral sadistic
component instinct" or an "anal sadistic
component instinct" For example, they can
have an aim to incorporate and consume
and therefore destroy objects of desire,
in an oral sadistic phase or to
sadistically master objects in the anal
phase.
Erotogenic zones and component instincts want to independently,
pursue pleasure, and reduce unpleasure, and they eventually fuse together into a genital primacy,
where the genitals are the main source
of pleasure during the phallic phase, and
especially during puberty. When there is
regression, the subject may have an
excessive amount of pleasure in these
early phases and/or autogenic zones, or
they may have a trauma or repression
that influences the subject to return to
a prior stage in their sexual
development or to choose partners that
are comfortable and remind them of their
parents. The need to avoid pain and to
pursue pleasure makes it easy to regress
to early comfortable stages in Freud's
theories. This can lead to addictions,
impotence, a sadistic need to master,
masochistic dependency needs, and disgust towards the opposite sex. Then with the
automatic push in the patient's mind to
repress their thoughts for fear of
embarrassment over these problems,
compounded by childhood sexual
seductions, and Oedipal wishes, the work
is cut out for the psychoanalyst.
