All posts tagged defence mechanism

Freud on religion

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motivation of human behaviour and thought, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian, bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

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‘God is at bottom nothing but a projection of the father.’

The influence of Darwin

In his later writings, in the 1870s, Charles Darwin hinted at the implications of his theory of evolution by natural selection for human psychology. In the 1890s Sigmund Freud, like many other scientists and psychologists of his generation, picked up on these hints by developing a theory of human nature which aimed to be entirely materialistic, secular and biological.

But in Freud’s writings this project became closely linked to his lifelong, systematic and remorseless attack on religion, specifically Roman Catholic Christianity – leading to a lifelong obsession with rewriting Christianity’s history, concepts and present-day appeal in purely secular, materialist, psychological terms.

Freud takes Darwin’s insights into the natural world (i.e. that all life evolved from less organised to more organised forms via countless trillions of variations, with no divine intervention or plan) and applies them to the life of the mind. He aimed to show that the mind, as much a part of the natural world as our legs or eyes, also evolved by a process of natural selection, by trial and error, from below, rather than being divinely created from above.

Freud’s theory of the mind

Building on this foundation Freud went on to claim, and try to prove, that the mind is a complex overlay of different strategies, instincts and forces which are frequently in conflict with each other. It is the conflicts between different instincts in the mind which account for much of our unhappiness, our sense of being at odds with ourselves or with the world.

Freud divides the mind into different compartments or functions which engage in the struggle for survival among themselves: predominantly this is a battle between the unconscious, instinctive part of the mind, the ‘id’, and the rational, strategic, forward-looking ‘ego’.

Freud developed a technique, the so-called talking cure, whereby patients were helped to express these unconscious conflicts in order to become fully conscious of them and so cope with them better. The technique and the theory together came to be called psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis has been used differently in the hands of different practitioners, but with Freud it went hand-in-hand with Darwin’s idea that religion, ethics and so on are to be dealt with naturalistically, as products of the developing human species, rather than as supernatural gifts from God.

The roots of Freud’s anti-religion

Freud’s lifelong animus against religious belief was:

partly a product of the antisemitism he encountered from childhood onwards in the Austrian capital, Vienna
partly due to the fierce anti-clericalism of the German, rationalist, materialist tradition which he imbibed at school and while studying science at university

Both these sources were further confirmed by the hypocritical and hysterical attacks made on him by churchmen of all denominations as he published the results of his new discoveries of the mind throughout the early 1900s. As with Darwin, the stupidity and ignorance of the Christian attacks on him confirmed Freud in his low opinion of Christian authorities and ‘thinkers’.

Freud’s critique of religion

Freud critiques religion in a number of ways, approaching the issue from various angles, which this blog post will describe in the following order:

by providing an alternative, purely secular psychological account of religious experience
by demonstrating that religious feeling is at bottom wish-fulfilment, to which we are all susceptible
by drawing an analogy between religious rituals and neurotic obsessions
by analysing specific religious phenomena in secular terms
by rewriting religious history (of Judaism in particular) in purely psychological terms
by showing how harmful religious belief is in modern life, both to the individual and to society as a whole

1. The psychoanalysis of religious experience

Religion, Freud claims, is the fulfilment of mankind’s oldest, deepest wishes, namely:

to have a coherent explanation of why we’re here
to have our path through the world watched over by a benevolent Providence
to have clear-cut guidelines as to how to behave and the promise of reward if we behave well
to live forever
to be loved unconditionally

Religion answers all of these wishes by creating an all-powerful God:

who made the world
who watches over and protects all of us so that not even the falling of a sparrow goes unnoticed
who created us free to choose, and planted a knowledge of morality in us and a little watchdog in our brains – our ‘conscience’
who will reward us for obeying its promptings with eternal life

But for Freud individual religious belief is an illusion because none of the above is true. Very obviously all the qualities attributed to ‘God’ are based on the child’s view of their all-powerful father, or are designed to address the anxieties and uncertainties we all face as adults.

As for society as a whole, society-wide religious belief is a type of mass delusion and, at its most extreme, actually takes the form of mass delusions, from the group weddings of the Moonies to the religious hysteria of entire nations e.g. the Iranians in the aftermath of their revolution, or periodic outbreaks of ‘end-of-the-world’ hysterias.

You don’t have to delve far back into European history to uncover evidence of mass, society-wide outbreaks of madness, many of them centred around hysterical religious fervour, not least the 130 years of social turmoil and civil war which came to be called the Wars of Religion (roughly 1520 to 1648).

In addition to the, as it were, ‘rational’ or sympathetic wishes listed above (the wish to be looked after, protected, comforted etc), religion offers a range of other satisfactions:

by teaching you to turn away from relying on the outside world and concentrate on ‘spiritual affairs’, religion helps in the avoidance of the pain inevitably caused by the outside world; for example, the inevitable ageing and death of ourselves and those we love
religion helps you sublimate your basic instincts into socially acceptable routes; for example, a powerful sexual drive can become sublimated into a love of all humanity, or into exhausting works of ‘charity’; aggression can be practiced as long as it’s against acceptable objects, like ‘heretics’, ‘the infidel’, Jews etc
religion helps you feel part of a gang, of a large organisation which you can devote yourself to, and so helps you to forget your personal difficulties, or submerge them into working for a higher cause
religion offers the pleasure of feeling superior to outsiders – ‘I’m saved. You’re damned’ – which has been such a feature in Christian theology

2. Religion as wish-fulfilment

When we turn our attention to the psychical origin of religious ideas we see that they are not the precipitates of experience or the end-results of thinking; they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. The infant’s terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood arouses the need for the protection provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life makes it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one.

Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fears of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfilment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilisation; and the prolongation of a earthly life in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfilments shall take place… It is an enormous relief to the individual psyche if the conflicts of its childhood arising from the father complex – conflicts which it has never wholly overcome – are removed from it and brought to a solution which is universally accepted.

When I say these things are illusions I must define the meaning of the word. An illusion is not the same as an error; nor is it necessarily an error. Aristotle’s belief that vermin arose out of dung was an error. On the other hand it was an illusion of Christopher Columbus’s that he had discovered a new sea route to the Indies. The part played by Columbus’s wish in the illusion is obvious. He wanted to discover a new route to the Indies. And so on the slightest evidence he thought he had.

Thus what is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. Illusions need not necessarily be false – that is to say, unrealisable, or in contradiction with reality. For example, a middle class girl may have the illusion that a prince will come and marry her. This is possible and a few such cases have occurred. But that the Messiah will come and institute a golden age is much less likely, that is, it includes a larger proportion of pure wish-fulfilment… And so we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation.

(The Future of an Illusion, section 6, Pelican Freud volume 12: pages 212 to 213)

Thus, at the heart of religious belief – or religious illusion – there is a real truth, the truth of our infantile, helpless dependence on our parents and our experience of the unconditional love they showed us. And religious belief arises from a long-suppressed wish to return to such a state of unconditional belovedness.

Submission to an organised religious creed, with its offers of punishment as well as reward, amounts to a compromise between a) the Pleasure Principle’s bottomless need for love and b) the Reality Principle, the rational ego’s knowledge that endless love is difficult if not impossible to attain in this hazardous world. Between optimism and pessimism.

This explains why religious ‘conversion’ is commonly experienced as a breakthrough into a realm of radical happiness, happiness such as we thought we could never have again because it is the re-experiencing of childhood simplicities.

Freud’s theory says that the sense of ‘victory over death’ described by converts is a purely internal, psychological victory of the love-wanting, wishful part of our mind over the mature, realistic, pessimistic part. It is thus a ‘real’ experience, just that it has no reference to events outside our minds.

Christians’ mistake is the elementary one of thinking that this breakthrough inside their own heads is reflective of an objective reality; is fed by, or part of, a great cosmic struggle between good and evil. It is the same mistake made by drug-users, drunks and psychotics of projecting their inner experience onto the universe.

Thus, on Freud’s theory, the success and endurance of religion is its ability to fit the individual’s powerful libidinal wishes into an acceptable, nay, an eminently respectable social structure, the form and hierarchies of the church. In the church the most personal and private, semi-conscious, infantile fantasy-wishes are united with eminently grown-up, sophisticated, objective realities. Are approved.

Where else outside the Church could ordinary, boring, middle-aged men dress up in purple skirts, be adored and worshipped by pretty young boys, move solemnly through an atmosphere rich in incense and gold, and play-act that they have infinite power of judgement, of the forgiveness of sins?

Where else could their rather mediocre opinions and ideas about life be listened to, soaked up and debated with fervour by a large, devout congregation? The power of that experience must be intoxicating. And, since all enjoyment is suspect in Christianity, the very thrill of power and control itself might make the subject think he is being tempted by to the Devil’s sin of Pride. Which explains, in Freud’s view, why so many Christians go around and around in a self-confirming cycle of hyper-self-awareness, doubt, spiritual agonies, religious breakthrough etc etc, all the time convincing themselves that they are not boring, insignificant cyphers who will grow old, grow ill and die – but are at the centre of a great cosmic battle between good and evil.

How boring non-believers’ mundane lives seem in comparison. How lost and unfocused they seem.

3. Religious rituals as forms of neurotic obsession

Freud was the first to draw attention to the similarity in psychological structure between the religious believer’s performance of religious rituals and the array of bizarre obsessions displayed by some mental patients:

It is easy to see where the resemblance lies between neurotic ceremonials and the sacred acts of religious ritual; in the qualms of conscience brought on by their neglect, in their complete isolation from all other actions, and in the conscientiousness with which they are carried out in every detail.

(Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices, 1907)

On the face of it, though, obsessive compulsions – like not walking in cracks in the pavement in case the Devil snatches at your feet, or closing all the doors in a house in a certain fixed order – are meaningless, whereas religious ritual is charged with the highest meaning.

No. This has been psychoanalysis’s greatest achievement: revealing that even the silliest behaviour, the kind of deviant behaviour that in previous ages resulted in witches being burned and lunatics locked up in Bedlam or dismissed as ‘hysterics’, is in fact supercharged with meaning for the subject.

This meaning may be either historical (the compulsive repeating of a real trauma) or symbolical (i.e. a disguised defence mechanism against a perceived threat, where the threat – for example, of a long-dead father’s punishment – no longer exists in the outside world, but is still a terrifying reality in the patient’s mind).

A good deal of Freud’s work consisted in listing compulsive behaviours which seem weird in isolation and showing their origin and root in real unhappiness experienced in a patient’s life. And Freud’s distinctive contribution was to show that often this unhappiness was caused by the repression of an instinctual need.

At the bottom of every obsessional neurosis is the repression of an instinctual impulse which was present in the subject’s constitution and which was allowed to find expression for a while during his childhood but later succumbed to repression. In the course of the repression of this instinct a special conscientiousness is created which is directed against the instinct’s aims; but this psychical reaction-formation feels insecure and constantly threatened by the instinct which is lurking in the unconscious.

Analysis of obsessive actions shows us that the sufferer from compulsions and prohibitions behaves as if he were dominated by a sense of guilt. This sense of guilt has its source in certain early mental events but is constantly being revived by renewed temptation…. This sense of guilt of obsessional neurotics finds its counterpart in the protestations of pious people that they are miserable sinners and the pious observations (such as prayers, etc) with which pious people preface every daily act.

As the mental protection slips, crumbles, the subject – threatened with a return of the repressed and forbidden instinctual wish, and warned of the return by symptoms of anxiety or hysteria – erects ever more frantic mental barriers against its inadmissible return into consciousness, actions which will ward off the unacceptable truth by, as it were, magic.

The same psychic mechanism thus underlies superstitious belief (not walking under ladders), obsessive behaviour (washing of hands, not walking on cracks in the pavement), the games of children with arbitrary but crucial rules (hopscotch), the propitiatory behaviour of primitive peoples towards their gods (for fear that omission of one aspect invalidates the entire ritual and thus will call down the anger of the gods), and the propitiatory behaviour of Christians towards their God (saying three Hail Marys, crossing yourself as you pass in front of the altar in a Church etc).

The formation of a religion, too, seems to be based on the suppression, the renunciation, of certain instinctual impulses. These impulses, however, are not, as in the neuroses, exclusively components of the sexual instinct; they are self-seeking, socially harmful instincts, though, even so, they are usually not without a sexual component.

A sense of guilt following upon continual temptation and an expectant anxiety in the form of fear of divine punishment have, after all, been familiar to us in the field of religion longer than in that of neurosis.

For some reason the suppression of instinct proves to be an inadequate and interminable process in religious life also. Indeed, complete backslidings into sin are more common among pious people than among neurotics and these give rise to a new form of religious activity, namely acts of penance, which have their counterpart in obsessional neurosis.

4. Aspects of organised religion explained in psychoanalytical terms

Communion

A reversion to the primitive oral phase of childhood when we try to control the environment, to assimilate the outside world, by eating it: watch any two-year-old.

Conscience

‘Conscience’ is the superego, the absorption into your psyche of the instructions and demands of your parents from your earliest years, a function of the mind then expanded by later teachers and other authority figures. It hurts to disobey them but we do, and guilt is the result. Guilt is no proof of Man’s uniquely moral nature, as some Christians argue. It is the purely mechanical result of transgressing our early training. Think of dogs who disobey their masters, and then look sheepish.

Conversion

Being ‘born again’ is the result of returning, after a detour, to the sense of being loved by, and of loving, the God-like figures of our parents as they appeared to us in our childhood. Most ‘born-again’ Christians are in fact returning to the religion of their childhood which they had rejected at some stage. Two examples I know of are W.H. Auden and C.S. Lewis who were both brought up in Anglican households, underwent student and early manhood years of light-hearted atheism, and then returned to the religion of their boyhoods with an overwhelming sense of relief and illumination, which went on to underpin all their writings from the moment of their (re)conversions until they died.

God

God is a projection onto the universe of the demanding, caring, loving, all-powerful father as we experienced him in our earliest infancy, in the first couple of years of life.

The devil

The devil is an equal and opposite projection of the father in his bad, punishing aspect. In the Old Testament the two are mixed together in the figure of Yahweh, the demanding, violent jealous god. The achievement of Christianity was to extract and focus on the figure of the God of Love implicit in the Old Testament. Unfortunately, this psychological or theological development also had the effect of bringing into greater clarity the image of the anti-God, the figure of pure malice and evil, the Devil. This explains why there is little mention of the devil in the Old Testament but why he comes to play such a central role in the New Testament.

Immortality

Immortality is everyone’s deepest wish, for death does not exist in the unconscious mind. It is a creation of the conscious mind which we can never quite fully believe. Everyone else might die, but not me.

Morality

Morality is a system of approved behaviour worked out by society, instilled in a child by its parents, and reinforced by later authority figures. Some Christians use the alleged existence of a moral sense in human beings as proof that there is a moral God. But:

the so-called moral sense boils down to a person’s accumulated training in how to behave and not behave
it is, to put it mildly, extremely variable, in content and effectiveness, across individuals, societies, and cultures
it is entirely absent in some people, so God demonstrably did not implant the moral sense in some people – why not?

Guilt

Guilt is an internal psychological response to the act of disobedience to the rules and regulations which have been so strongly inculcated by your parents and other authority figures. It is a purely psychological reaction, a form of fear that punishment will be inflicted if we do something wrong. Inflicted by whom? By our parents, even if they’re dead, because their image and prolonged training live on in our minds, whether they are alive or dead, present or absent. It is the legacy of our earliest, deepest training, which is almost impossible to shake off.

Spiritual feelings

Spiritual feelings are reawakenings of the earliest narcissistic phase of childhood when the child hadn’t yet differentiated between its feelings and the reality of the outside world. These feelings, just like the earliest infantile feeling of fear or abandonment, can be revived in later life. This is the explanation of all forms of religious feelings of the sublime or ‘oneness with the universe’.

Original sin

Original sin combines two emotions:

1. The deeply held feeling all of us have of having been in some way expelled from a paradise of love and physical bliss. Freud says this was the experience of babyhood at the mother’s breast, the immensely powerful, pre-linguistic, pre-conscious experience of inhabiting a wonderland of union and fulfilment.

2. Along with obscure feelings of punishment at the hands of our parents.

Each of these can be experienced individually. What’s interesting is that some individuals, and even entire cultures, fail to combine the two into ‘original sin’ as Christians wish them to.

The two main sources of ‘original sin’ can be explained as the inevitable result of the natural processes of human growth and development, with no supernatural overtones whatever.

Prayer

Prayer is a relic of ‘magic’, a reversion to the child’s primitive belief in ‘the omnipotence of its thoughts’, the childish conviction that the universe revolves around us and can be altered by our wishes and commands. It can’t.

We are taught to pray to ‘our Father’ to make things right, look after us and our loved ones. What could be more transparent?

Superstition

Superstition amounts to relics of animism and primitive (i.e. childish-neurotic) beliefs which have been discarded by religion under the modernising influence of the rational Enlightenment (for example, burning witches, epileptics are possessed by devils, evil omens and unlucky days).

But these primitive psychological formations, anxieties and fears, still threaten to grip the ignorant, the simple, or the extremely repressed. or any of us when we’re in a stressful situation.

5. A psychoanalytical history of Judaism and Christianity

Central to Freud’s theory is the Oedipus Complex. Each of us is born into the world with the problem of how to grow beyond the boundaries of our parents’ care into autonomous individuals. To put it another way, how to overthrow the sometimes terrifying authority of our Father and build on the love and nurturing of our Mother.

In our unconscious minds, swarming with uncontrollable feelings, we act out countless inchoate scenarios of revenge and possession. How effectively we repress these earliest fantasies determines our later character.

Freud (who was, of course, himself Jewish, although a non-believing, atheist Jew) thought that Judaism is the religion of the Oedipus Complex par excellence.

He believed the Jews stood out in the ancient world due to their more advanced ethical code but that this was intimately connected with their greater fear and reverence of a demanding Father-God.

Freud thought that the Jews’ especial devoutness stemmed from an actual historical event when they actually played out an Oedipal scenario. He thought that the Israelites actually rose up and killed their obstinate leader, Moses, who tried to impose his version of monotheism onto the Jews’ primitive worship of the thunder god Yahweh – and were forever afterward guilty about this murder.

Slowly, over the following centuries, the primitive belief in Yahweh was spiritualised by the higher ethical and intellectual content of Moses’ monotheism. A belief grew among the spiritual elite that the Israelites were the chosen people because Moses, the prophet of the One God, had quite literally chosen them.

The Old Testament records a succession of prophets rising up to recall this stubborn, backsliding people (the Israelites) back to the high spiritual requirements of Moses’ idol-less, afterlife-less faith.

Sometime around the fifth century BC priests compiled the various stories handed down by tradition into a coherent and chronological account of:

the creation of the world
the era of the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob etc)
the era of the Kings (Solomon, David)
the era of the Prophets (Ezekial, Isaiah, Jeremiah)

Central to the entire religion are the ‘covenants’ or promises made between the Chosen People and God. Because the Israelites are constantly falling away from God’s detailed and demanding law, they are in continual need of forgiveness.

This process – adoption of pure monotheism and the sorting out of their holy writings – was substantially complete, and the Jewish religion formalised, by about the fifth century BC.

The Jews’ survival was due, paradoxically, to the fact that they were repeatedly conquered and hauled off into bondage, first to Egypt, then Babylon and finally, after the failed wars with Rome, in 70 and 135 AD, expelled from Palestine altogether.

These experiences left the Jews no land or capital or buildings, nothing but a written tradition requiring the highest ethical standards, which both produced a tremendous ethnic cohesion, confidence and success, but also triggered suspicion and resentment of them wherever they went.

Saul of Tarsus was a deeply religious Jew, a Pharisee, steeped in the Orthodox tradition. When he heard about the crucifixion of an obscure wandering preacher in Judea he set about persecuting his blasphemous followers.

But then Paul had a literally blinding insight which changed his life and the course of history. For a thousand years Judaism has been a guilty Father-religion, the purest form of the social memory of the struggle all human beings undergo to wriggle free of their parents’ domination.

Judaism was saturated in the sense of letting the Father down. According to Jewish scripture and tradition, again and again and again the Chosen People fell away from the laws and purity demanded by their God and Father, which resulted in a permanent sense of guilt and unworthiness.

It was Saint Paul who realised that the death of this man who called himself the Son of God had the potential to bring a millennium of crushing guilt to an end. From now on Christians could openly acknowledge the importance of Original Sin, an idea only vaguely formed in official Judaism, because they have been relieved of it. The execution of the Son relieves us of the guilty memory of being the Father-hating children we all were in childhood. In the ultimate sacrifice of the crucified Son, all true believers are freed from their primal guilt and so experience the wonderful psychological liberation of being ‘born again’, of starting a new, guilt-free, sin-free life.

In the decades after Jesus’ execution it quickly became clear that Christianity and Judaism were incompatible. The Jews doubled down on their religion of guilt while the Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire swiftly fell for the new religion of liberation, especially as it proved capable – unlike the racially and geographically restricted religion of the Jews – of claiming to be universal, of welcoming everyone, rich or poor, man or women, free or slave, of any ethnicity.

Christianity also had the advantage of being flexible. In its early inchoate form it had the ability to assimilate a lot of the fringe beliefs which were floating around the Mediterranean during the Roman Empire. For example, Christianity easily assimilated:

doctrines based on the oriental Mother goddess
the idea of a family of Gods (Father, Son and Holy Spirit, plus the Holy Mother)
the idea of a terrifyingly powerful Evil Spirit who came to be called Satan, derived, ultimately from Zoroastrianism
a sky full of angels
a complicated system of punishment and reward in a place called ‘hell’, only vaguely hinted at in Jewish scripture but worked out by Christians in terrifying detail

In this sense (in Freud’s view), although a step forward psychologically (insofar as it presents a solution to the perennial Oedipus problem), Christianity actually operates at a much lower intellectual level than the rigid monotheism of the Jews. It leads to much more florid and bizarre behaviour (as history, indeed, records: monks, stylites, self-castrators, martyrs, miracles).

The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still more humiliating to discover how large a number of people living today, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions.

Christianity triumphed because of its ability to combine Jewish high ethical standards with pagan superstition, thus providing a comprehensive home for most people’s deepest fantasies and wishes – of salvation, of punishment, of eternal life.

The notion of an all-powerful all-seeing God who nonetheless allowed His Creation to be wrecked by evil, pain and suffering is a logical nonsense but who cares? It is a bold and imaginative attempt to explain and justify, in mythological terms, the fundamental psychological need of human beings to reconcile the childish experience of our all-powerful, all-seeing parents with the traumas of adult life – and then to project this fantastical narrative onto the (in reality, blank and uncaring) universe.

We need to be helped. We want to be protected. We want to be loved. If something’s gone wrong it must be our fault. ‘I’m sorry, Daddy, say you forgive me.’

So we try to reconcile this deep need for there to be an all-powerful, all-seeing father guiding the universe, with the evidence before our noses that the world is harsh and arbitrary, amoral and terrifyingly indifferent to our little lives.

The doctrine of Original Sin is a mythological way of reconciling these opposite desires. The fact that it makes no sense to those outside the cult is a matter of indifference to those inside the cult; for them it is vital because the deeper ‘Original Sin’ has plunged us into the depths of misery and guilt, then the more intense the feeling of liberation, of being ‘born again’ through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus, becomes. The longer the foreplay, the more intense the feeling of release.

So, in Freud’s view, the psychological mechanism at the heart of Christianity is extremely effective in channelling and resolving very real psychological feelings which we all experience, but it comes at a price: the price being that you accept a good deal of weird, often deeply irrational, beliefs, superstitions and legends.

But even this problem has long ago been worked through and resolved by Christianity’s many, very brilliant, apologists: ‘God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform,’ as the 18th century poet William Cowper wrote i.e. don’t think about any of this too hard or the illogicality and irrationality will undermine your faith. Just accept it.

Jesus himself said: ‘You must become as a little child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ (St Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 18, verse 3). Exactly. Just as Freud said, almost all of our problems, our anxieties, our achievements, our characters, stem from our earliest childhood experiences. One difference between Freud and Christianity is that the latter calls us to relinquish adult intelligence, and adopt a sentimentalised, simplified version of childhood, all submission and innocence. Whereas Freud knew what anyone who can remember their childhood knows, that those years are far from being paradise but often full of dread and anxiety, awash with uncontrollable emotions, and sometimes the scene of terrible experiences which we spend the rest of our lives trying to come to grips with.

6. Religion’s harmful effects

Christianity imposes impossible ethical requirements on people, which result in failure and a crippling sense of guilt (for example, the impossible requirement to ‘love your enemy as yourself’). Imposing these impossible commandments on young children warps their personalities and leads to neurotic illness in later life.

Christianity’s forbidding of open-ended debate, and limiting the spirit of scientific enquiry, damages the prospects of creating a better society.

Christianity suppresses perfectly natural sexuality in a way calculated to produce the maximum number of neurotics and perverts. By restricting sexual activity to heterosexual, adult, married, genital-focused copulation, exclusively for the purposes of procreation, Christian teaching drives people into illness or the arms of prostitutes, makes them choose between madness or immorality; or, more simply, makes them disobedient to their teachers and moral leaders and so habituates them to a life of lies and hypocrisy.

Relying on religion to underpin morality is dangerous because, since religious belief is visibly crumbling away (Freud wrote in the 1920s), so will the foundations of our social morality. Quite obviously, morality needs to be put on a firm, secure, secular basis in order to survive the coming social changes.

Conclusion

In his more optimistic moments Freud thought that organised religion would wither away in a new world shaped by reason and technology – but this turned out to be misplaced optimism.

Indeed, the whole tenor of his work undermines and disproves his own hope. The whole point of his work was to establish the existence of the vast, unconscious, irrational aspects of the mind – primitive, inexpressible urges whose attempts to enter the conscious mind can only be controlled at the expense of a variety of compulsions and obsessions, personal rituals and beliefs.

Precisely the penetrating nature of his critique of religion as an appeasement of so many of our deeply irrational instincts should have alerted Freud to the fact that religious belief will continue as long as human nature continues to be what it is, because – although irrational in form and content – religion does, often very effectively, alleviate many of the anxieties and fears which all human beings will always be prey to.

Therefore, it was childish of Freud to imagine that organised religion and religious belief would die out. They will quite clearly be around as long as there are anxious irrational humans i.e. forever. And in times of stress and uncertainty they will revive and flourish and there is nothing the hyper-rational psychoanalyst can do about it.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. All the works cited here were translated into English as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, published throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s. My quotes are taken from the versions included in the relevant volumes of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1980s.

Freud and religion reading list

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)
Totem and Taboo (1913)
On Transience (1915)
A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis (1923)
The Future of An Illusion (1927)
Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930)
Group Psychology (1930)
Question of a Weltanschauung (1933)
Moses and Monotheism (1939)
Freud, A Life For Our Times by Peter Gay (1988)

More Freud reviews

More Freud reviews

Three Essays on Sexuality by Sigmund Freud (1905)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

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Introduction and overview

Freud’s aim was to show the ubiquity and the strangeness of sex and use the sex instinct, massively expanded and redefined, as the basis of an entire new theory of human psychology.

According to historian of psychoanalysis Frank Sulloway, Freud found the sex instinct most suitable as the central vehicle or basis for the new and emphatically physiological type of psychology he wanted to devise, because it is a) so strong and b) so flexible.

In these three ground-breaking essays on sexuality, Freud set out to widen the concepts of sexuality, the sex instinct, libido, so as to encompass a much broader sphere of activity than ever previously imagined in order to make them underpin almost every aspect of human nature.

In Freud’s psychology people’s characters are like complicated family trees, all descended from the same one huge fountain of libido which is channelled and rechannelled into ever-smaller rivers and streams.

It is these rechannellings, the repressions and redirections and reaction-formations and sublimations and so on which come to make up your character – a collection of habits based on infantile pleasures, of disgust or shame (reaction-formations) or heroic ambition (sublimation) or guilts and anxieties (the neuroses).

Thus the Three Essays On The Theory of Sexuality (1905) is Freud’s second most important book after The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

Essay 1 begins with a detailed look at the state of Victorian knowledge about homosexuality and perversions, because they reveal:

the infinite malleability of the sex instinct
how easily the sex instinct can be rerouted away from its ‘proper’ channel of ‘normal’ sexuality
how even ‘normal’ sexuality is in fact built up of a network of pretty weird behaviour (Freud’s most striking example is kissing, which doesn’t make any sense the more you look at it)

In Essay 2 Freud shows that sexuality is not only present but vitally important in the life of infants and children. This idea was the biggest single cause of opposition to Freud’s theories in his lifetime, from Church and State, from commentators and populist politicians, and from decent people everywhere. It still is.

Freud is not very much interested in ‘love’. Love is the psychological effect of the ‘overvaluation of the sexual object common to almost all manifestations of the libido’:

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

For Freud sex and love are interchangeable terms. He contrasts the overvaluation of the love-object found in the Western tradition with the more relaxed approach of the ancient world:

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The Greeks held Bacchic orgies and had a god, Priapus, dedicated to the male organ; by contrast we in our time appear to fear the penis more than ever and instead reverence the idealised object of libido, the dream partner of the opposite sex (or the same sex), and the institution of Marriage.

And despite all the rhetoric from feminists and LGBTQ+ activists about interrogating and subverting this, that or the other stereotype and convention, we still appear to be in thrall to the narrow concept of finding ‘love’ in a faithful, monogamous, committed relationship, every bit as much as our Victorian forebears – very narrow and limited compared to the polymorphous, open and pluralistic attitudes of the 30 or so ancient Roman authors I read last year.

THREE ESSAYS ON THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY (1905)

This long work sets out to show the importance of sexuality in all human achievements, to establish a wider-than-usual definition of sexuality, and to prove the existence of infantile sexuality.

Freud’s recurring tactic is to make the ordinary, the everyday, look strange; to look again without conventional blinkers at things we think we know, and to show that our attitudes are complacent, superficial and contradictory.

1. The sexual aberrations

Popular opinion credits two universal instincts, Hunger and Sexuality. Sex is supposed to set in at the time of puberty and manifest itself in irresistible attractions between adults of the opposite sex with the ultimate end of genital sex, itself with the purpose of reproduction (as taught in Christianity and most of the other world religions).

Let us call the desired one the sexual object, the act towards which the instinct tends, the sexual aim.

(1) Deviations in respect of the sexual object

If popular opinion is true and God made sex solely for reproduction, how do we account for homosexuals?

(A) Inversion

Behaviour of ‘inverts’. For a start there are different types:

a) absolute inverts, totally repelled by the opposite sex
b) amphigenic inverts i.e. bisexuals
c) contingent inverts, depending on circumstances

Some inverts accept their condition as natural; others feel it a torment. Some were gay as far back as they remember; for others, homosexuality cropped up at puberty; others only ‘come out’ as adults, sometimes after they’ve followed a straight career with wife and kids.

Nature of Inversion

The first observers thought inversion the result of nervous degeneracy because it was first found among mental patients studied in asylums.

Degeneracy

But then it was late-Victorian fashion to blame anything you didn’t understand on ‘degeneracy’: criminals are degenerate, the working class is degenerate, Africans are degenerate etc.

Freud defines degeneracy in rigorous Darwinian terms as the actual impairment of an organism’s efficiency and survival probability. In these, practical, terms inversion is not degenerate. Not only is it found in people otherwise perfectly normal, but it is found in people ‘who are indeed distinguished by specially high intellectual development and ethical culture.’

Innate character

Some gays insist homosexuality is absolutely innate. But the existence of the late-developers or of contingent homosexuals argues against this. Far from being innate, much evidence suggests that homosexuality is acquired:

the case of many ‘inverts’ in whom an early impression left a permanent gay after-effect
later influences and life experiences which have fixed contingent gayness e.g. the army, prison, monastery etc

Almost all ‘inverts’ will be found to have been subjected to some experience like this (for example, public school). But on the other hand, so were many people who went on to be perfectly hetero. So it remains hard to say whether homosexuality is acquired or innate.

Bisexuality

Havelock Ellis says a clue might be that homosexuality is a form of psychical hermaphroditism, a mental equivalent of having the organs of both sexes.

Richard von Kraft-Ebing says that the brain contains female and male brain centres which are activated by a ‘sex gland’. (It wasn’t only Freud who was having batty, speculative ideas at this time.)

Whoever is right, it seems that most authorities accept the idea of an innate bisexuality in everyone, and that ‘inversion’ owes something to early disruption of development.

Later, Freud would write:

It is well known that at all times there have been, as there still are, human beings who can take as their sexual objects persons of either sex without the one trend interfering with the other. We call these people bisexual and accept the fact of their existence without wondering much at it … But we [psychoanalysts] have come to know that all human beings are bisexual in this sense and their libido is distributed between objects of both sexes, either in a manifest or a latent form.

Sexual object of inverts

Popular opinion holds that ‘inverts’ simply desire the qualities of the opposite sex. An inverted man is like a woman in desiring the qualities of the opposite sex, of masculinity, in his sex object.

But what about gays who love pretty boys, boys who demonstrate all the qualities of a girl, being beautiful, hairless, young and coquettish?

What about transvestites who do a good trade dressing up as women for gay clients? In ancient Greece older men regularly looked after shy, young, girlish boys.

So the sex object is a compromise between an impulse that seeks for a man and one for a woman (in the same way that a symptom is a compromise between a wish and reality).

Psychoanalysis’s explanation is thus: in his childhood the future ‘invert’ passes through a brief but intense attachment to a woman (normally his mother). After leaving this behind he identifies himself with this woman and take himself as his sexual object. Invoking infantile narcissism, ‘inverts’ identify themselves with a woman and set out to find a boy whom they can mother and love as their mother loved them.

The situation will be exacerbated by the absence of a strong father. Think of Oscar Wilde and his imperious mother; of W.H. Auden’s father away at the Front while his mother dressed him in girl’s clothing; of the plays of Joe Orton.

So, says Freud, being gay is being in endless flight from women.

But, Freud emphasises, this isn’t weird. Psychoanalysis has established that everyone makes homosexual object choices in their unconscious mind; that the freedom to range wide over male or female objects is found in childhood, in primitive societies, in early history and in the ancient world, and is the original basis of sexuality.

It is only as a result of later, Victorian social restrictions that people are forced into one fixed, standardised and regimented mould, heterosexual or homosexual, or their modern equivalent which demands that people be in monogamous committed couple relationships.

In reality a person’s final sexual orientation is not decided until after puberty, and then only as the result of innumerable obscure influences. That there is a multiplicity of determining factors is indicated by the extraordinary range of sexual practices and attitudes to be found in mankind.

Thus psychoanalysis regards so-called ‘normal’ sexuality as achieved only under intense pressure and great restriction of the original wider options for pleasure. In fact it’s so-called ‘normal’ sexuality, the genital attraction between man and woman, which is historically problematic and just as much in need of explanation as any other form.

Sexual aim of ‘inverts’

No one single aim can be laid down for the sexuality of ‘inverts’, as it can for the ‘normal’ behaviour of straights; there is too great a variety.

Conclusion

We have been in the habit of regarding the link between the sexual aim and the sexual object as more solid than it is. In fact the object appears to be no more than soldered onto the instinct, and which aim takes which object is a great deal more problematical than previously thought, because the sexual instinct is more free-flowing and independent than we previously suspected.

(B) Sexually immature person and animals as sexual objects

Light is thrown on the sexual instinct by the fact that it permits of so much variation in its objects and such a cheapening of them.

That children can be the objects of sex, or even animals, tells us about the vicissitudes of the sex instinct (along with rapes, sexual assaults and perverse murders). It seems as if the sex instinct will do almost anything to achieve satisfaction.

The impulses of sexual life are among those which, even normally, are the least controlled by the higher activities of the mind… In the process of human cultural development, sexuality is the weak spot.

(2) Deviations in respect of the sexual aim i.e. perversions

Popular opinion says the sexual aim is the union of the genitals in copulation which leads to the release of sexual tension. But a moment’s reflection tells you that, even in ‘normal’ sexuality, people kiss – bringing together two parts of the digestive system – for pleasure. And most people linger to some extent over intermediate stages, such as looking and touching. So the seeds of ‘perversity’ are all around us.

Perversions are sexual activities which either:

extend in an anatomical sense beyond the parts of the body designed for sexual union
linger or halt at the intermediate stages on the path to sexual union

(A) Anatomical extensions

Overvaluation of the sexual object

The first and prime perversion of sex from its object is the overvaluation of the object i.e. ‘love’. For all practical purposes ‘love’, for Freud, is this (potentially pathological) overvaluation of the love object.

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated with (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

This sexual overvaluation is something that cannot easily be reconciled with [society’s] restriction of the sexual aim to union of the actual genitals and it helps to turn activities connected with other parts of the body into sexual aims.

Once a sexual object has been chosen, the ordinarily effective higher activities of the mind – judgment and civilised restraint – all too often go out of the window. In most people this results in crushes, infatuations, sometimes in grands amours: once the libido sees an opening, it tends to pour forth like a flood.

How the subject (carried away by powerful libido) and the (perhaps reluctant) object cope with the situation is the theme of most of Western literature from Hero and Leander to Madame Bovary.

(I can see an evolutionary explanation for all this which Freud doesn’t mention, which is that: having made a sexual choice, overvaluation follows from a) opening the floodgates of an instinct otherwise fiercely repressed b) to ensure a strong libidinal attachment to the woman who you’re planning to impregnate – so it is a blind Darwinian instinct designed to make the impregnator bond with their mate and remain to look after their offspring; but, as all of human history tells us, this often clashes with the other biological imperative affecting men which is impregnating as many women as possible, hence the many men who eat, shoot and leave.)

Sexual use of the mucous membrane of the lips and mouth

Freud proceeds with his agenda of making everything about sex and love look strange and uncanny.

The use of the mouth as a sexual organ is regarded as a perversion if the lips (or tongue) of one person are brought into contact with the genitals of another, but not if the mucous membranes of the lips of both of them come together.

Why do people find kissing acceptable and cunnilingus or fellatio disgusting? Freud here points to the purely conventional, culturally-determined nature of our feelings.

Has ‘disgust’ (a powerful reaction-formation) played a large part in forming our cultural conventions – or is it simply a product of the increasing self-repression which characterises us in the West (unlike other contemporary civilisations, primitive cultures and the cultures of the ancient world, which were and are much more liberal in their sexual practices)?

Freud seems to think the ancients were more honest in this, as in so much else.

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The progress of civilisation seems to require a steadily increasing restriction of the sexual instinct, bought at the price of a growing sense of disgust. Hence the genitals of men and women, worshipped by the Greeks as holy, are now banned as dangerously corrupting.

There is no doubt that the genitals of the opposite sex can in themselves be an object of disgust and that such an attitude is one of the characteristics of all hysterics.

One thinks of John Ruskin (allegedly) driven into paroxysms by the discovery on his wedding night that, unlike the Greek statues which he adored, his wife had pubic hair. Or, more up to date:

Indecent exposure, sometimes known as ‘flashing’, is a serious sexual criminal offence, which carries a custodial sentence of up to 2-years at its most severe. (Old Bailey solicitors)

Does ‘disgust’ drive the repression of sexuality i.e. is disgust natural, a ‘God-given’ reaction of the ‘God-given’ conscience to the spectacle of fallen sexuality? A question related to: is conscience ‘God-given’ and so universal? Or is ‘conscience’ created by culture and therefore morally relative across different cultures? Morality and disgust on the one side, pragmatism and sexual libertarianism on the other.

Or is disgust an entirely material, biological reaction-formation to the compulsory repression of sexuality enforced by a coercive society, no God or morality required?

Sexual use of the anal orifice

People who think sodomy is disgusting because we defecate through the anus are as correct as women who say the penis is disgusting because men urinate through it or men who think the vulva is disgusting because women menstruate through it.

Which is to say, all these opinions are correct in their own terms, but missing the point. These organs can (clearly) be put to various uses. Should they be? Or should they be restricted to their ‘God-given’ purposes? But then who is to say what their correct usage is? A bunch of old men wearing purple dresses in the House of Lords? Imams and rabbis? Agony aunts? TV shows. Gender studies lecturers? Where is the authority for this?

Significance of other regions of the body

What seems to be common to all human sexuality is:

overvaluation of the sexual object
a versatile ability on the part of the sexual aim to use any part of the body as the sexual object for gratification

Unsuitable substitutes for the sexual object: fetishism

In fetishism the sexual instinct replaces the primary object (the genitals) and the overvalued secondary object (the person attached to the genitals) with unlikely tertiary objects – parts of the body, locks of hair, feet – or linked objects, such as underwear or other items of clothing.

A certain amount of fetishism is habitually present in normal love, especially of those stages of it in which the normal sexual aim seems unattainable or its fulfilment prevented.

A lock of your true love’s hair. Or as Goethe put it in Faust:

‘Get me a kerchief from her breast,
A garter that her knee has pressed.’

These objects can justifiably be likened to the fetishes of primitive peoples. Inscribed in fetishes is a primitive symbology, comparable with the symbolism of dreams. For example, the foot is an age-old symbol for the penis. Fur is linked to the hair of the mons Veneris. The shoe or slipper is a symbol of the female genitals (as in Cinderella) into which the male foot neatly slips, and so on.

(B) Fixations of preliminary sexual aims

Appearance of new aims

External factors (danger, unavailability of a sexual object, risk of disease) tend to fix libido at the preparatory activities. Truly, every normal aspect of ‘love’ carries the seeds of a perversion.

Touching and looking

Seeing is an evolutionary derivative of touching. A look can be as exciting as a touch.

Both seeing and touching are ‘ordinary’ parts of ‘normal’ sexual activity – unless lingered over, or unless they become ends in themselves, in which case we have voyeurism/exhibitionism and various types of masturbation.

Freud thought exhibitionism the result of either wishing for a reciprocal showing of the other person’s genitals; or a triumphant assertion against the Castration Complex: ‘Look, I’ve still got my willy!’

He doesn’t seem to take into account the sadistic urge to offend or scare women, a kind of sublimated form of rape, visual rather than physical rape.

The power of vision is shown by just how upset some women can feel, how physically defiled, just because a strange man showed them his penis. I’m not downplaying the offence or upset caused.

The concealment and revelation of the sexual parts of the body go hand in hand with the rise of civilisation and progressive sexual repression. It is unlikely that the Greeks had strip clubs; instead they had orgies, the real thing. We have strip clubs because of the immense repression to which our sexuality has been subjected.

For Freud the concept of ‘beauty’ itself originates in sexual excitement but is sublimated away from the genitals onto the body as a whole, which is perceived as ‘beautiful’, a concept or feeling which can then be transferred onto other types of object, and then onto objects created and enjoyed for their ‘beauty’ alone i.e. works of art.

This explains why women are more often the object of art than men – even in women painter’s paintings – because men are more sexually predatory than women. And why the sight of the genitals themselves is rarely ‘beautiful’; all pleasure has been sublimated out of them leaving only the reaction-formation of ‘disgust’.

Sadism and masochism

These were given their names by Richard von Kraft-Ebing (Viennese) in the 1890s, after the Marquis de Sade (French) and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (Viennese) As with the other perversions, a moderate amount of sado-masochism is generally regarded as ‘normal’:

The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness – a desire to subjugate. The biological significance of it seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing. Thus sadism would correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated and, by displacement, has usurped the leading position.

Many types of sexual relationship which are regarded as ‘normal’ contain a high amount of aggression; sadism becomes an actual perversion when pleasure is derived from violence alone.

Masochism is sexual excitement aroused purely by receiving pain or humiliation. Later in his career, after he’d outlined the new theory of the superego, Freud distinguished between purely physical masochism and moral masochism, the desire to be found guilty of sins, to be punished for them and so on, an internal submission of the ego to the overbearing superego which plays such a large part in religious life.

Freud thinks masochism is secondary, a deflection of primary sadism – which the subject is too weak to inflict onto others – back onto the self. Masochism is for weaklings; or for the weakling part of even strong people.

The history of human civilisation shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct.

But nobody really knows why. Some people think aggression is a development of the primal desire to eat, to master objects by putting them in the mouth – an instinct seen in children and in the holy meals at the centre of many religions. Others think there is some intimate biochemical link between pleasure and pain.

Suggestive for Freud’s bisexual thesis – the mingling of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ in all of us – is Havelock Ellis and Kraft-Ebing’s agreement that masochism and sadism are often found in the same person.

(3) The perversions in general

Variation and disease

Medical men first identified perversions in the insane and perversion was blamed (like homosexuality) on ‘degeneracy’. What Freud has shown is that the perversions are implicit in even ‘normal’ love.

No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim; and the universality of this finding is enough to show how inappropriate it is to use the word ‘perversion’ as a term of reproach. In the sphere of sexual life we are brought up against peculiar and, indeed, insoluble problems as soon as we try to draw a sharp line to distinguish mere variations within the range of what is physiological from pathological symptoms.

On one side the liberal Freud, on the other a vast army of censorious Christians, trying to draw precisely that line, trying to tell people exactly just which type and forms of ‘love’ are permissible and which aren’t, from the Pope to Mary Whitehouse.

For the Moral Majority it is always other people who are degenerate, other people who are the helpless prey of, for example, homosexual men in the homosexual age of consent debate.

Freud is saying, if you only look at the acts themselves you may be tempted to define them as unchristian or degenerate, pathological or perverted etc. But if you look at the instinct which carries so many people to such lengths, it is the same instinct and it is in all of us – it is what our minds are made of.

The mental factor in perversions

Despite the sometimes disgusting ends to which the love instinct is put, all these behaviours are to some extent idealisations of the libido, in the sense of abstractions of it away from its normal role.

The omnipotence of love is perhaps never more strongly proved than in such of its aberrations as these. The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality.

Two conclusions

Every individual plays a double existential role:

to reproduce, to pass on its genes and preserve the species
to preserve itself while it does this

Sometimes the two purposes clash and this is the basis of Freud’s psychology, the clash between the unconscious libidinal drive to have sex, all the time, with everyone and everything; and the rational ego’s struggle to redirect this blind drive into socially acceptable forms which help the individual survive and help it be at peace with itself. So the origins of any person’s sexuality must be looked for in two places: in the history of the species and the accidents of the individual.

Our study of the perversions has shown us that the sexual instinct has to struggle against certain mental forces which act as resistances, and of which shame and disgust are the most prominent. It is permissible to suppose that these forces play a part in restraining that instinct within the limits that are regarded as normal; and if they develop within the individual before the sexual instinct has reached its full strength, no doubt they then determine the course of its development.

These forces, which act like dams upon sexual development – disgust, shame and morality – must also be regarded as historical precipitates of the external inhibitions to which the sexual instinct has been subjected during the psychogenesis of the human race. We can observe the way in which, in the development of individuals, they arise at the appropriate moment, as though spontaneously, when upbringing and external influence give the signal.

In the second place we have found that some of the perversions are only made intelligible if we assume the convergence of several motive forces. If such perversions admit of analysis, that is, if they can be taken to pieces, then they must be of a composite nature. This gives us a hint that perhaps the sexual instinct itself is no simple thing but put together from components which have come apart again in the perversions.

(4) The sexual instincts in neurotics

Psychoanalysis

Here Freud reiterates his belief that all the psychoneuroses are based on sexual instinctual forces and that the psychoneuroses can only be investigated using the method perfected by Josef Breuer and himself – psychoanalysis. He gives a useful summary of the famous cathartic method:

By this I do not merely mean that the energy of the sexual instinct makes a contribution to the forces that maintain the pathological manifestations (the symptoms). I mean expressly to assert that that contribution is the most important and only constant source of energy of the neurosis and that in consequence the sexual life of the persons in question is expressed in these symptoms. The symptoms constitute the sexual activity of the patient!

The removal of the symptoms of hysterical patients by psychoanalysis proceeds on the supposition that those symptoms are substitutes – transcriptions, as it were – for a number of emotionally cathected mental processes, wishes and desires which, by the operation of a special psychical procedure (repression) have been prevented from obtaining discharge in psychical activity that is admissible to consciousness.

These mental processes, being held back in a state of unconsciousness, strive to obtain an expression that shall be appropriate to their emotional importance – to obtain discharge; and in the case of hysteria they find such an expression (by means of the process called conversion) in somatic or bodily phenomena, that is, in hysterical symptoms [cf Anna O’s inability to drink water, choking sensation etc].

By systematically turning those symptoms back (with the help of psychoanalysis) into emotionally cathected ideas – ideas that can now become conscious – it is possible to obtain the most accurate knowledge of the nature and origin of these formerly unconscious psychical structures.

Findings of psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis has shown that:

Symptoms represent a substitute for impulses the source of whose strength is derived from the sexual instinct… The character of hysterics shows a degree of sexual repression in excess of the normal quantity, an intensification of resistance against the sexual instinct (which we have already met with in the form of shame, disgust and morality), and what seems like an instinctive aversion on their part to any intellectual consideration of sexual problems.

In the case of someone predisposed to hysteria, the onset of his illness is precipitated when, either as a result of his own progressive maturity or of the external circumstances of his life, he finds himself faced by the demands of a real sexual situations. Between the pressure of the instinct and his antagonism to sexuality, illness offers him a way of escape. It does not solve his conflict but seeks to evade it by transforming his libidinal impulses into symptoms.

(See Jensen’s Gradiva, written two years later, which is a textbook example of hysteria as the self-deluding flight into illness. The archaeologist Norbert’s escape from the reality of an emotionally demanding sexual situation – his awakening love for Zoe – into delusions about the light-tripping woman on the antique frieze whom he names ‘Gradiva’, and then Norbert’s actual fleeing to Italy, to Pompeii, to escape the sexual situation, only to meet Zoe magically transformed into the woman in the frieze –– from the heart of the reaction-formation returns the repressed. In the novel Norbert is then cured through love, by the redirecting of his libido – unhealthily cathected onto the Gradiva-delusion – back to the reality of his flesh-and-blood love, Zoe, by the love object herself.)

Neurosis and perversion

Moreover, neurotics’ symptoms, upon psychoanalysis, often turn out to be conversions not just of ‘normal’ sexuality, but to include what are called the perversions i.e. neurotics’ unconsciousnesses are often raging with perverse wishes deflected into symptoms. Hence Dora’s persistent cough is a (transmuted) wish for oral sex with Herr K.

a) The unconscious life of all neurotics shows inverted impulses, fixation of the libido on persons of their own sex.

b) The unconsciouses of neurotics show tendencies to every kind of anatomical extension of sexual activity, particularly oral and anal.

c) An especially prominent part is played by the fact that the instincts involved are component instincts. Thus the perversions often come in opposing pairs: exhibitionism and voyeurism; the active and passive forms of the instinct for cruelty.

It is through such an opposition, a component tying together of libido and cruelty, that the transformation from love into hate takes place, the transformation from affectionate into hostile impulses.

(You can see here the embryonic shape of Freud’s later division of all the instincts into Sex instincts and Death instincts, Eros and Thanatos which would formulate nearly 20 years late, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.)

(5) Component instincts and erotogenic zones

If we trace back the positive and negative aspects of the perversions (masochism/sadism, voyeurism/exhibitionism) they appear to derive from component instincts which themselves admit of further analysis.

When sexual excitement derives from a particular organ or area of the body we refer to that as the erotogenic zone.

Thus, under the right circumstances, the anus or the mouth can become an erotogenic zone. Or the surface of the skin in touching. Or the eye itself in voyeurism where, through the eye alone is felt excitement comparable to that of sex in a ‘normal’ person.

(6) Reasons for the apparent preponderance of perverse sexuality in the psychoneuroses

But just because neurotic symptoms often contain a perverse wish doesn’t mean that neurotics are closer to perverts than to ‘normal’ people. Neurotics are normal people whose libido, either because of innate predisposition or due to accident, has been dammed up.

Most psychoneurotics fall ill after the age of puberty as a result of the demands made upon them by normal sexual life. Or else illnesses of this kind set in later, when the libido fails to obtain satisfaction along normal lines. In both these cases the libido behaves like a stream whose main bed has become blocked. It proceeds to fill up collateral channels which may hitherto have been empty.

Where the constitution is predisposed to illness maybe no external factor will be required. On the other hand, a great shock in real life may tip a robust constitution into neurotic illness.

Might there be a link between the perversions wished for by the neurotic’s unconscious, between the erotogenic zone it highlights, and innate constitution?

In a word, can you define personality types by predisposition to a particular perversion/erotogenic zone? (This is what Freud does in the following essay, about childhood sexuality, defining and describing the oral, anal types and so on.)

(7) Intimations of the infantile character of sexuality

“By demonstrating the part played by perverse impulses in the formation of symptoms in the psychoneuroses, we have quite remarkably increased the number of people who might be regarded as perverts. It is not only that neurotics in themselves constitute a very numerous class, but it must also be considered that an unbroken chain bridges the gap between the neuroses in all their manifestations and ‘normality’….

Thus the extraordinarily wide dissemination of the perversions forces us to suppose that the disposition to perversions is itself of no great rarity but must form a part of what passes as the ‘normal’ constitution…

There is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but it is something innate in everyone, though as a disposition it may vary in its intensity and may be increased by the influences of actual life. What is in question are the innate constitutional roots of the sexual instinct. In one class of cases (the perversions) these roots may grow into the actual vehicles of sexual activity; in others they may be submitted to an insufficient suppression (repression) and thus be able in a roundabout way to attract a considerable portion of sexual energy to themselves as neurotic symptoms; while in the most favourable cases, which lie between these two extremes, they may by means of effective restriction and other kinds of modification bring about what is known as ‘normal’ sexual life.

Thus the germs of our character, the way our sexual instincts will be channelled, are probably laid down in childhood. In the next essay Freud looks at the play of influences which govern the evolution of infantile sexuality until its outcome in perversion, neurosis or normal sexual life.

Essay 2. Infantile sexuality

Neglect of the infantile factor

In Essay 2 Freud sets out to smash the popular opinion that children have no sexual feelings; that sexual feelings only set in with puberty. On the contrary, all the literature, and a chat with any nurse, will tell you that many babies play with their willies or fannies and suck various bits of themselves, but these stories are generally only mentioned as exceptions and monstrosities.

Why do we not remember our sexual feelings from our own childhood years?

Infantile amnesia

We definitely behave lively in every respect during childhood, giving every evidence of feeling joy, love, rage, delight. Why do we forget so much of this? Freud says that under analysis patients often remember events from their earliest years. Therefore the memories are stored somewhere – but are repressed from everyday access. Why? Nobody knows.

(1) The period of sexual latency in childhood and its interruptions

Based on a) scattered reports of the so-called exceptional behaviour of infants in the literature and b) the memories of neurotics revealed by psychoanalysis, Freud will sketch out a theory of infantile sexuality.

Freud thinks of the sex instinct as being innate in the child; that it grows as the child grows; that it is overtaken by suppression at the age of 5 or 6; then it revives and develops further at puberty, developing in a pattern of fits and starts. Childhood sexuality only emerges into the light of observable day in the third or fourth year of life.

Sexual inhibitions

It is during this same period that the mental forces are built up which are later to impede and block the flow of the sexual instinct – feelings of disgust (at an object), feelings of shame (at oneself) and moral and aesthetic ideals (as it were, objective guidelines we build for ourselves).

Reaction formation and sublimation

These are the two methods by which these dams are erected to prevent the return of repressed material into the conscious mind.

Sublimation is a widely reported phenomenon, the diverting of instinctual sexual energies into ‘higher’, more socially acceptable ones.

A reaction formation is:

a defence mechanism in which emotions and impulses which are anxiety-producing or perceived to be unacceptable are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency

Freud thinks that reaction formations are the result of a series of unpleasurable experiences, either of internal unpleasure (excessive playing with the genitals leads to unpleasure) or external tellings-off, which create, as it were, a psychological allergic reaction to the erotogenic zone and experiences in question. Told off for touching his winkle enough times and the small boy genuinely come to believe it is dirty and disgusting.

[A digression on Freud’s final theory of sexual development

A lot later, Freud was to elaborate and fine-tune the notion that the human infants evolve through a set number of stages, namely:

polymorphous perversity – undifferentiated pleasure in the whole body
oral phase (0 to 1 year) – the infant gets most of their pleasure from their mouth, for example eating and thumb-sucking: if an infant’s oral needs aren’t met it can develop an develop oral fixation which continues into adult life
anal phase (1 to 3 years) – controlling bladder and bowel movements, potty training, when successfully accomplished leads to praise from parents and a sense of achievement and independence; but if parents take an approach that is too lenient, Freud suggested that an ‘anal-expulsive personality‘ – could develop whereby the adult has a messy, wasteful, or destructive personality, while if parents are too strict, he believed this could lead to an ‘anal-retentive‘ personality which is over-strict, rigid, and obsessive.
phallic stage (3 to 5 years) – focus of the libido is on the genitals and children begin to discover the difference between boys and girls
- in boys this gives rise to the Oedipus complex as boys view their fathers as a rival for the mother’s affections: the Oedipus complex describes these feelings of wanting to possess the mother and replace the father. But at the same time the little boy worries that his father will punish him for having these feelings, a fear Freud termed castration anxiety
- other Freudians suggested the term Electra complex to describe a similar but mirror set of feelings experienced by small girls, namely the wish to be possessed by their father and rid of their mother, accompanied by parallel feelings of guilt and anxiety
- Freud, however, believed that instead of the Electra complex, girls experience what he notoriously called penis envy i.e. the wish to be a boy, the lack of a penis forever leaving girls feeling inadequate. Even in Freud’s own day female psychoanalysts deplored this idea, and female followers have denied it and overwritten it ever since]
latency phase (6 to puberty) – the superego or conscience gains in power, the libido and memories of all those early physical pleasures are suppressed; instead boys or girls enter school and become more concerned with peer relationships, hobbies, and other interests; a time of exploration in which the sexual energy repressed or dormant, still present but sublimated into other areas such as intellectual pursuits and social interactions
genital stage (11, 12, 13 onwards) – at puberty the libido becomes active again and teens develop a strong sexual interest in the opposite sex: if all the previous stages have been successfully navigated, the person becomes a rounded, balanced individual]

Freud therefore thinks that the development through the oral, anal and phallic stages is partly achieved by the erection of these reaction formations which act as ‘dams’ or road blocks saying ‘No Going Back’.

That this may be the origin of feelings of ‘shame’ and ‘disgust’ is an interesting theory to ponder; that this process is the basis of all civilised morality, as Freud claims, was clearly a provocative thing to say, and which sparked much outraged opposition to him and his theories.

Interruptions of the latency period

Not all children’s sexuality goes underground at about five years old. There may be all sorts of exceptions, single strands of sexual pleasure continuing into the latent period.

(2) The manifestations of infantile sexuality

Thumb-sucking

This emerges early and often persists into adolescence. Sometimes accompanied by the rubbing of an erotogenic zone it can act as an introduction to masturbation. Because it is accompanied by pleasurable rubbing, and sometimes even by orgasm-type physical reactions, Freud makes thumb-sucking the prototype of infantile sexuality.

Auto-erotism (coined by Havelock Ellis in 1898)

Infants initially derive pleasure from their own bodies. Sucking thumbs or lips or any other part of the body is a repetition of the initial oral activity, sucking at the breast.

No-one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as the prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.

As the child grows it experiments with enacting the sexual pleasure of sucking when the breast is absent: sucking any part of its own body, taking itself as a source of pleasure. In later life the pleasures of lingering kissing re-enact this primal sexual experience. In some children there is a constitutional intensification of the labial region (lips):

If that significance persists, these same children will grow up to become epicures in kissing, will be inclined to perverse kissing or, if males, will have a powerful motive for drinking and smoking. If, however, repression ensues, they will feel disgust at food and will produce hysterical vomiting.

Thus, for Freud, entire character types and types of adult behaviour can be traced right back to earliest childhood behaviour.

(3) The sexual aim of infantile sexuality

Characteristics of erotogenic zones

Erotogenic zones are a moveable feast. Particular parts of the body seem predisposed to resonate with sexual pleasure (the genitals, lips, nipples, anus, the surface of the skin generally) and if an infant, in its auto-erotic stage, chances on one of these to suck or play with, that part easily becomes the model of sexual pleasure, of reassurance etc in later life.

Any part of the body can acquire the same susceptibility to stimulation as is possessed by the genitals and can become an erotogenic zone.

It is hard to think of a view more contrary to the popular, conventional view that a) infants have no sex life and that b) sex appears only at puberty and is exclusively confined to the genitals.

The infantile sexual aim

Although all the body is susceptible to sexualisation, certain zones seem predisposed to be especially erotogenic, generally zones which are physiologically designed for other activities and pleasures which the child can then repeat by auto-erotic stimulation: the lips for eating, the penis for peeing, the anus for defecating can all be co-opted by the libido.

(4) Masturbatory sexual manifestations

Activity of the anal zone

Psychoanalysis of patients has revealed the surprising extent to which the anus is not only a source of pleasure in infancy but retains its pleasurable power throughout life.

Children who are making use of the susceptibility to erotogenic stimulation of the anal zone betray themselves by holding back their stool till its accumulation brings about violent muscular contractions and, as it passes through the anus, is able to produce powerful stimulation of the mucous membrane. In so doing it must no doubt cause not only painful but highly pleasurable sensations.

One of the clearest signs of subsequent eccentricity or nervousness is to be seen when a baby obstinately refuses to empty its bowels when he is put on the pot and holds back that function till he himself chooses to exercise it. He is naturally not concerned with dirtying the bed, he is only anxious not to miss the subsidiary pleasure attached to defecating.

Faeces come to have another important meaning for the child.

They are clearly treated as part of the infant’s own body and represent his first ‘gift’: by producing them he can express his active compliance with his environment and, by withholding them, his disobedience…

The retention of the faecal mass, which is thus carried out by the child intentionally to begin with, in order to serve, as it were, a masturbatory stimulus upon the anal zone or to be employed as a weapon in his relation to the people looking after him, is also one of the roots of the constipation which is so common among neuropaths.

Activity of the genital zone

The glans of the penis in boys and the clitoris in girls:

The anatomical situation of this region, the secretions in which it is bathed, the washing and rubbing to which it is subjected in the course of a child’s toilet, as well as accidental stimulation, make it inevitable that the pleasurable feeling which this part of the body is capable of producing should be noticed by children even during their earliest infancy, and should give rise to a need for its repetition.

Girls often masturbate simply by rubbing their thighs together. Boys tend to use hands.

The preference for the hand which is shown by boys is already evidence of the important contribution which the instinct for mastery is destined to make to masculine sexual activity.

Second phase of infantile masturbation

In this early essay Freud posits three periods of sexual activity: a first phase of infantile sexuality; a second phase flourishing around the fourth year; then the eruptions of puberty.

The second phase of infantile sexual activity may assume a variety of different forms which can only be determined by a precise analysis of individual cases. But all its details leave behind the deepest unconscious impressions in the subject’s memory, determine the development of his later character, if he is to remain healthy, and the symptomatology of his neurosis, if he is to fall ill after puberty.

Return of early infantile masturbation

The return of infantile sexuality at around 4 and 5 years is determined by all sorts of factors, internal and external. But Freud is careful to mention the external factor of infantile seduction (or child abuse, as we would say) as a way many of his patients recall being jolted, as it were, into sexual life, and made aware of the erotogenicity of the genitals.

Polymorphously perverse disposition

In and as a result of sexual abuse, children can be induced to all manner of perversions thus revealing, for Freud, an innate disposition to polymorphous perversion.

The same, he asserts, is true of many women, as witness the large number of prostitutes who can accommodate any type of sexual taste for their clients.

It becomes impossible not to recognise that this same disposition to perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic.

[At one and the same time this notion is typical of Freud’s throwaway sexism, but also of the immense tolerance and acceptance of a huge variety of sexual predilections implicit in his theory.]

Component instincts

Exhibitionism, voyeurism and cruelty are all apparent as perversions in potentia in children. Small boys proudly display the thing which gives them so much pleasure and which they pee through, their penis, which thus symbolises at least two types of infantile ‘mastery’.

Looking is the child’s earliest way of relating to the world. Once it has established its own erotogenic zones it is curious to see them in others: voyeurism.

Cruelty comes relatively easily to the childish nature, since the obstacle that brings the instinct for mastery to a halt at other people’s pain – namely a capacity for pity – is developed relatively late…

It may be assumed that the impulse of cruelty arises from the instinct for mastery and appears at a period of sexual life at which the genitals have not yet taken over their later role…

Children who distinguish themselves by special cruelty towards animals and playmates usually give rise to a just suspicion of an intense and precocious sexual activity arising from erotogenic zones…

The absence of the barrier of pity brings with it a danger that the connection between the cruel and the erotogenic instincts, thus established in childhood, may prove unbreakable in later life.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions show that early beating on the buttocks can easily be linked with erotogenic pleasure and form the basis of a fusion of the instincts of sex and cruelty in later life.

(5) The sexual researches of childhood

The instinct for knowledge

At the same time as children reach an early peak of sexuality (3 to 5 years) they display an instinct for knowledge. For Freud this is a sublimated form of the instincts for mastery and of seeing, voyeurism.

Psychoanalysis has shown that the first problem to awaken the childish thirst for knowledge are sexual problems, where do I come from? why does my wee-wee make give me pleasure?

The Riddle of the Sphinx

Freud gave this typically grandiose title to the core question of infancy: where do babies come from?

Sex differences aren’t important at this stage since boys assume all babies have penises.

Castration complex and penis envy [this section was added in 1915]

Only painfully do boys realise there’s a whole category of person who doesn’t have a penis and become petrified that they too might lose their mighty weapon. This he calls the castration complex.

The discovery that girls don’t have one gives many boys an enduringly low opinion of girls. For girls, the discovery that boys have this toy which they can play with induces in them penis envy and an enduring sense of being second-rate. Penis envy culminates in the girl’s wish to be a boy.

[The whole concept of ‘penis envy’ is probably the single most outrageous example of Freud, despite being a revolutionary on one level, nonetheless often reinscribing the sexist prejudices of his Victorian times in a new language.]

Theories of birth

All children speculate about where babies come from, especially if their mother is pregnant again. The central feature of most theories is that the baby is got by eating something (as in many fairy tales) and delivered through the anus.

Sadistic view of sexual intercourse

Many children see or overhear their parents making love. Children feel intense curiosity about it. It seems to have to do with some joint activity involving peeing or defecating. But many children pick up on the apparent violence involved (hard physical movements, screaming) and this is another way in which cruelty may attach itself to a child’s fantasy world and resurface in a person’s adult attitudes to sex.

Typical failure of infantile sexual researches

No matter how subtle the sexual theories of children they are invariably wrong; for how could they know about semen and ovaries? But the whole attempt is important to Freud as a symbol of the growing independence of the child. These researches:

constitute a first step towards taking an independent attitude in the world, and they imply a high degree of alienation of the child from the people in his environment who formerly enjoyed his complete confidence.

(6) The phases of development of the sexual organisation

Infantile sexual pleasure is the opposite in every way of ‘normal’ adult sexuality. It is essentially auto-erotic, and its component instincts are generally disconnected and scattered over all manner of activities: this is the meaning of polymorphous perversity.

Compare and contrast with adult sexuality aims at genital contact with some external object.

Pregenital organisations

I.e. sexual patterns before the instinct settles on the genitals:

1. The oral or cannibalistic phase: the aim is the incorporation of the sexual object, to eat it, to master it by ingesting it and stimulating the mucous membranes of the lips at the same time.

This is the origin of cannibalism in primitive peoples; of the primitive relic of a holy meal found in most religions; and of the higher intellectual activity of identification with a hero figure.

The primitive and intellectual functions are brought together in the Eucharist where we eat the body of Christ at the same time as we acknowledge Him lord and master.

2. The sadistic-anal phase: it is at this early stage that the sex instinct can be seen dividing into the active-passive division which characterises all later sexuality: the masculine drive to mastery, of defecating at our own time and pleasure; and the feminine pleasure derived from the anus; a sadistic and a passive pleasure intermingle.

Ambivalence

This duality is the basis of later ambivalence, a word coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler (Bleuler was a prolific coiner of neologisms; he also invented the terms ‘schizophrenia’, ‘schizoid’ and ‘autism’).

Ambivalence became central to Freudian theory. It describes the holding of contradictory feelings, classically love and hate, towards the same object. Thus the child can both love but be terrified by their father.

Phallic phase

Freud distinguishes one last phase of infantile sexuality, where a love-object has emerged but the instinct in both boys and girls focuses on the penis alone, when boys develop pride in their penis and girls develop a painful sense of lack of penis, giving rise to penis envy (see comments above).

Diphasic choice of object

To summarise, Freud can claim that, completely contrary to the popular view, the distinctive thing about human sexuality is:

that it is present, in various forms, in infants from the earliest time
that it develops through a series of stages
that each of these stages carries the risk of arrest or error which deforms the child’s feelings and emotions around libido
that infantile sexual choices and activity are progressively repressed by reaction-formations (guilt, shame) by the age of about 5
that the entire set of experiences goes underground during the latency period (5 or 6 to puberty), is repressed and forgotten
that it resurfaces in a more explicitly sexual mode at puberty but with shapes and flavours conditioned by those earliest experiences

These infantile longings become the basis of later ‘affectionate’ feelings:

Their sexual aims have become mitigated and they now represent what may be described as the ‘affectionate current’ of sexual life. Only psychoanalytic investigation can show that behind this affection, admiration and respect there lie concealed the old sexual longings of the infantile component instincts which have now become unserviceable.

(7) The sources of infantile sexuality

These conclusions have been reached by the psychoanalysis of adult patients and the observation of children. Sexual excitation in children seems to arise from:

a) repetition of satisfaction achieved in normal organic processes (sucking, defecating)
b) through external stimulation of erotogenic zones
c) as the expression of fundamental instincts

Mechanical excitations

Children love swinging and being thrown and caught. Psychoanalysis has shown the recurrence of these sensations in adult dreams i.e. that they lay down patterns of the earliest pleasures, for example, fantasies of flying, air blowing against the skin and genitals.

It is well known that rocking is habitually used to induce sleep in restless children. The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway travel exercises such a fascinating effect upon older children that every boy, at any rate, has at one time or another in his life wanted to be an engine driver.

It is a puzzling fact that boys take such an extraordinarily intense interest in things connected with railways and, at the age at which the production of fantasies is most active (shortly before puberty), use those things as the nucleus of a symbolism that is peculiarly sexual. A compulsive link of this kind between railway travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensations of movement.

In the event of repression, which turns so many childish preferences into their opposite, these same individuals, when they are adolescents or adults, will react to rocking or swinging with a feeling of nausea, will be terribly exhausted by a railway journey, or will be subject to attacks of anxiety on the journey.

Muscular activity

Many patients report their first memories of sexual excitation when romping, fighting and playing with playmates. Organised games are done at school to keep the body healthy and divert adolescent attention away from sexuality: Freud says what this is doing is channel sexuality back into one of its specific components.

Affective process

Powerful emotions have sexual effects. Terrified or anxious children may touch their genitals for reassurance. The erotic aspect of terror, fright and so on may become intimately associated with sexuality so that adults find fear and terror thrilling; either in real life, in fantasies of rape or masochistic punishment; or in imaginary worlds of books or the cinema.

Pathways of mutual influence

If the taking in of food gives rise to sexual pleasure then the reverse may be true. If healthy sexuality accompanies healthy eating, then disturbance of sexuality may lead to disturbance of nourishment. Thus a sexually disturbed hysteric may cease eating.

We can speculate about a whole network of pathways by which sexual instincts may be channeled both towards basic organic functions (for example, eating) and also rerouted towards higher functions (that is, sublimated, into thinking, planning, deciding).

Essay 3. The transformations of puberty

Infantile sexuality is polymorphously perverse and auto-erotic, finding pleasure as it learns to control and play with its own body.

The latency period sees the repression of sexuality in the name of various reaction-formations and sexuality’s sublimation into all kinds of games and fantasies.

With puberty the genitals become active and the subject actively seeks a love object outside itself. The new sexual aim of genital union appears and all the scattered erotogenic zones with their sex impulses become focused on, and subordinate to, genital union. Hopefully.

‘Normal’ sexuality consists of the uniting of the affectionate current (the sublimated remains of childhood sexuality) and the sensual current (mainstream libido).

So proper human sexual development is the coming together of affection/love and sex/pleasure, focussed on the genitals, to produce the ‘normal’ healthy adult. But, as always, there can be all kinds of hiccups along the way.

(1) The primacy of the genital zones and fore-pleasure

At puberty the sex organs grow and become ready for use. They can be excited in three ways:

excitation of the erotogenic zones from outside
from the organic interior
from mental life, the storehouse of impressions and ideas

Sexual excitement is felt in two ways:

perception of a mental tension of an extremely compelling type
physical preparation: erection of the penis, lubrication of the vagina

Sexual tension

How come sexual excitation is perceived as both pleasurable but also as an unpleasurable tension?

The mechanism of fore-pleasure

Touching or seeing clearly give rise to a) pleasure in themselves b) a perceived raising of sexual tension.

It is as if the fore-pleasure derived from stimulating the erotogenic zones is designed to increase the incentive to move onto the act of sexual union.

Initial pleasure thus disguises increasing tension (unpleasure) so you are led relentlessly on towards copulation, the aim of the entire organism.

The whole pattern leads up to orgasm and the release of the appropriate sexual substances. It would seem that orgasms are designed to extinguish libido, if only temporarily. They are the height of pleasure, the abrupt release of tension by the blood thronging the penis or clitoris rushing back into the body as the scrotum or vagina undergoes a series of muscular contractions perceived as pleasurable.

And this release of tension takes you right the way back to square one i.e. normal bodily function; the overwhelming compulsion towards sex evaporates, the rational mind returns to full control.

Freud divides the two stages into fore-pleasure and end-pleasure.

A distinction similar to the fore-pleasure offered by the telling of jokes which prepare you for the greater release of libidinal pressure (laughing).

[He uses the same division in his essay Creative Writers and Daydreaming to describe the fore-pleasure afforded by aesthetic or formal literary techniques which prepare the way for the deeper pleasure of sharing unconscious fantasies (tales of damnation and salvation, risk and adventure, Ian Fleming and Barbara Cartland).]

Dangers of fore-pleasure

But fore-pleasures are clearly yet another balancing act; the incentive of pleasure must be balanced by an increase of tension which successfully propels you towards sex. If the yield of orgasmic pleasure doesn’t live up to the growth in tension, you may become stuck at the fore-pleasure stage.

Obviously enough, you may be predisposed to this through any number of accidents which emerge in infancy. Extreme attachment to various types of fore-pleasure, to a particular erotogenic zone or to the mental equivalents of them (stimulation of the anus – masochism/inversion) may develop into full-blown perversion.

But these very complex combinations will have some influence over the shape of even the most healthy adult sexuality.

Not only the deviations from normal sexual life but its normal form as well are determined by the infantile manifestations of sexuality.

Again, if this is an accurate account of the growth of sexuality, it shows that it will be very hard to police, to draw a hard and fast line between ‘normal’ and perverse.

Freud is making the controversial claim that ‘the normal’ is built on ‘the perverse’ and most of its activities contain the seeds of perversity.

(2) The problem of sexual excitation

Part played by the sexual substances

Maybe sexual tension is produced, in men, by the accumulation of semen in the testicles? Kraft-Ebing thought so. But if so, how can this account for sexual excitation in children and women?

Importance of the internal sexual organs

Arguing against that theory, observation of castrated men shows that sexual excitement continues to operate with no semen at all.

Chemical theory

Freud speculates that the key role is played by substances released by the sex glands. In his day there was no convincing biological theory of sex.

The discovery of the class of chemicals called ‘hormones’ (at around this time, 1905, in England) paved the way to our present understanding of how sex works.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that even today one of the great mysteries is: Why Sex? And, as Steve Jones says, If Sex, why only two sexes?

(3) The libido theory

Libido is:

a quantitively variable force which serves as a measure of processes and transformations occurring in the field of sexual excitation

A kind of electricity. Freud imagines that libido is distinguished from the other main instinct, hunger, chemically. Libido is a chemically unique force. Psychoanalysis has shown that libido is derived not just from the genitals but from all sorts of organs, including the skin.

We thus reach the idea of a quantity of libido, to the mental representation of which we give the name of ego-libido, and whose production, increase or diminution, distribution and displacement should afford us possibilities for explaining the psychosexual phenomena observed.

Psychoanalysis can only observe ego-libido as it becomes attached to objects i.e. becomes object-libido, as it is attached to, detached from, swapped around various objects (for example, images, fixations, words and ideas) directing the subject’s activity towards sex. For the act of sex, in particular orgasm, results in the temporary extinction of libido.

Psychoanalysis observes the outflowing of libido from the ego and its return thereto.

The ego acts as a psychic reservoir for libido.

In the earliest phases every ego is narcissistic, that is, focusses libido on itself (during the auro-erotic stages of infantile sexuality). Only later does the ego develop the ability to project energy onto external objects and Freud (or his English translators) label these object-cathexes.

The slightest damage to the organism (for example, illness) results in a return to infantile narcissism, as do psychic wounds.

Narcissism is also evoked by particularly self-contained objects, by aloof women, by cats, and by babies (see Freud’s 1914 essay On Narcissism).

In later editions of the Three Essays Freud attacks Jung for watering down libido to make it mean psychical instinctive forces in general.

But the whole point of having a distinct sexual instinct, chemically differentiated from all other instincts, whose special operations can be studied through observation and analysis, in fact all Freud’s efforts and theories, are destroyed if you thus throw out the distinguishing sexual element of libido theory.

(4) The differentiation between men and women

Libido is masculine i.e. active, in character.

In levels of autoerotism and masturbation boys and girls are similar, though girls develop the reaction-formations of shame and disgust more easily than boys (i.e. mental forces which damp down their libido).

Freud suggests three meanings of masculine and feminine:

passive versus active personalities
biological i.e. defined by sex organs
sociological i.e. observing the actual behaviour of men and women

Freud uses masculine and feminine to denote active and passive. To say libido is masculine means it is, in this value system, always active. As to the sociological aspect:

Such observation shows that in human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense. Every individual, on the contrary, displays a mixture of the character-traits belonging to their own and to the opposite sex and shows a combination of activity and passivity…

Without the fundamental idea of innate bisexuality I think it would scarcely be possible to arrive at an understanding of the sexual manifestations that are actually to be observed in men and women.

Leading zones in men and women

The clitoris is what little girls masturbate, as boys the penis. Both become erect i.e. engorged with blood during excitation. But Freud thinks that at puberty, whereas boys receive a fresh wave of sexual excitement, girls undergo a profound sexual repression; this takes the form of moving their chief erotogenic zone from the clitoris to the vagina.

The ‘normal’ woman has thus repressed her masculine active organ (the clitoris) in the name of vaginal excitation designed for sex and procreation:

The fact that women change their leading erotogenic zone in this way, together with the wave of repression at puberty which, as it were, puts away their childish masculinity, are the chief determinants of the greater proneness of women to neurosis and especially to hysteria.

[This is, of course, complete rubbish. Women retain their chief sexual excitation through the clitoris. The rediscovery and widespread publicisation of clitoridal sexuality was one of the great achievements of the feminists in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s I was well aware that many women cannot orgasm through vaginal stimulation alone but need clitoral stimulation as well and I think (I hope) this has now become common knowledge. Thus Freud’s theorising away of the clitoris, along with all his theories about the inevitable inferiority of women, are the grossest example of his simply recasting the patriarchal prejudices of his time in a new language.]

(5) The finding of an object

[Expanded in the 1915 essay On Narcissism.]

A person may love:

1. according to the anaclitic (attachment) type:

the woman who feeds him
the man who protects him

2. according to the narcissistic type:

what he himself is
what he himself was
what he himself would like to be i.e. an idol
someone who was once part of themselves i.e. a baby

Suckling at the breast is the prototype of all pleasure and love.

From 1915 Freud introduces the idea of narcissism into his theory. The physical pleasure of suckling at the breast is now accompanied by the psychic pleasure of self-love, the earliest attachment of libido to the ego, the ego to itself, as it grows and comes to consciousness.

After puberty all love objects will partake of these two earliest loves; all love objects will have an element of narcissism and of attachment (cupboard) love.

The finding of a love-object is always a refinding of this original pleasure. A recapturing of what we once had. Falling in love is always a return to lost happiness.

The sexual object during early infancy

Everyone’s first love is for their mother. Freud goes further to say everyone’s first sexual object is their mother. Mothers stroke and kiss and caress babies, thus awaking the erotogenic zones and sex instincts. There is nothing perverse in this. The mother is only fulfilling her task in teaching the child how to love. Later in life, the former baby will itself stroke and kiss and caress a love object. How else does it learn to do this except by unconscious recall of its own childhood caresses?

Infantile anxiety

Infantile anxiety is caused by the loss of the person the infant loves. They are afraid of the dark because in the dark they cannot see the person they love. An infant who turns his love/libido into anxiety when it cannot be satisfied is behaving exactly like an adult neurotic.

The barrier against incest

‘Normal’ development means the transmutation of the early sexual attachment to the mother into ‘affection’ i.e. aim-inhibited libido. One of life’s great tasks is overcoming this love and learning to reattach it to socially acceptable objects.

This happens partly due to internal psychic development but is hugely reinforced by social and moral pressures. In Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud writes about the fundamental taboo against incest which is, in his view, the beginnings of society and morality.

Nonetheless, incest remains a possibility in the unconscious mind, in dreams and fantasies.

Puberty is particularly rich in fantasies as the adolescent tries out various combinations of object and experiments with its new strong feelings obsessively in the mind, before attempting to put them into practice.

Some fantasies are particularly common: the adolescent’s fantasies of overhearing his parents having sex; of having been seduced in infancy; of having been threatened with castration; fantasies of life in the womb; and the so-called Family Romance, the fantasy of being the abandoned child of rich beautiful parents – a rationalisation of infantile perception of parental omnipotence.

In overcoming renewed childhood sexual fantasies about his parents the adolescent also has to make the crucial break with them; to rebel against parental authority, particularly the father.

Some people never make it and remain in thrall to their parents. Many women never properly escape and remain as loving and passive as they were in childhood. Girls have a tendency to rebel against their sexual destiny, against sexuality itself and to flee into exaggerated affection for siblings or parents. To become virgin carers.

It falls to some men to become the complete rebels against authority which are required by the furtherance of the race.

After-effects of infantile object-choice

These powerful loves of childhood cast a pall over the rest of our lives. Women often look for older, more mature, authoritative husbands who are quite obviously father-substitutes. Men, even more often, are looking for the unconditional love of their mothers.

Prevention of inversion

It seems that the presence in our childhood of the same sex parent as a figure of a) resented authority and b) sexual rivalry, contributes to our early love for the opposite sex parent, all of which is motivated by the hormones at puberty.

But if the family unit is disturbed, if one of the parents is lacking, this is a powerful accidental stimulus to homosexuality (innate predispositions aside).

SUMMARY

* Neuroses are the mirror image of perversions: both represent aberrations from normal sexuality. Neurotic symptoms are generally a reinvoking of infantile perversions, at least in fantasy and transferred symptoms, as libido flees an unbearable sexual situation.

* Perversions are the fixation of the libido onto particular components of sexuality at the expense of normal heterosexual genital union.

A disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour is developed out of it as a result of organic changes and psychical inhibitions occurring in the course of maturation.

* Any departure from established sexuality is therefore an instance of developmental inhibition and infantilism, a regression.

* The sexual instinct is put together from various factors and, in the perversions, these components fall apart.

* ‘Normal’ sexuality integrates these instincts and submits them to socially-condoned genital aims.

* Children bring sexuality into the world with them. After an efflorescence of sexuality from ages 2 to 5 the sex instinct undergoes a repression, entering the latency period. Sexual feelings continue during this period but rerouted:

a) to develop secondary characteristics such as affection and friendship (aim-inhibited libido)
b) into ‘reaction-formations’ to sexual activities, which are now perceived as dirty, shameful, disgusting and so on, into a predisposition to receive moral education. These reaction-formations will be critical in establishing the channels along which libido can flow after puberty; too strong and they will react badly to the arrival of puberty and real sexual situations, causing all sorts of havoc, not least the flight into illness which characterises neurosis.

* Children develop through three phases: oral (breastfeeding), anal-sadistic in which ambivalence emerges, and phallic, part of which is the Oedipus complex. Then it is all buried in the latency period.

* The diphasic onset of sexuality i.e. in two stages, allowing for a latency period during which the socialising process can get going, seems to be a precondition for humanity’s civilised achievements. But, being so long and precarious, the latency period also explains mankind’s predisposition to neurosis and mental illness, and to the various failures and perversions of the sex instinct.

* The perversions of infancy, the finding of pleasure in erotogenic zones, returns with puberty but subordinated, as fore-pleasures, to the great act of copulation itself.

* Children find their first sex object in the opposite sex parent but this lust is repressed and redirected by the primeval psychological taboo against incest.

Factors interfering with development:

Every step on this long path of development can become a point of fixation, every juncture in this involved combination can be an occasion for a dissociation of the sexual instinct.

Constitution and heredity

Nature/nurture, which comes first? Imponderable. Except to say that in families with a predisposition to sexual failure, the men will tend to be perverts, the women, “true to the tendency of their sex to repression”, will become negative perverts i.e. hysterics.

Further modification

Whatever the hereditary predisposition, it is clear the sex instincts undergo further modifications:

Perversion: at puberty the libido may find the genital zone too weak for the tasks asked of it, and so revert to fixation on earlier infantile perverse zones.

Repression: the instincts in question are repressed and travel underground until they can find their expression disguised as hysterical symptoms. They can have perfectly normal sex lives but accompanied by psychological problems.

Sublimation: excessive sexual dispositions can be redirected into socially acceptable fields, thus yielding greater psychic efficiency and providing a strong evolutionary advantage. Maybe this is the reason why sublimation is the basis of much human mental life.

Reaction-formation: the building up during the latency period of strong counter-forces to perverse instincts, abetted by education which is designed to channel sexuality into ‘normal’ ends.

What we describe as a person’s character is built up to a considerable extent from the material of sexual excitations and is composed of instincts that have been fixed since childhood, of constructions achieved by means of sublimation, and of other constructions, employed for effectively holding in check perverse impulses which have been recognised as unutilisable.

Credit

All Freud’s works have complicated histories in translation. The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality were first translated into English in 1953 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. References in this blog are to the revised version, published in 1977 as part of ‘On Sexuality’, Volume 7 of the Pelican Freud Library.

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Three Essays on Sexuality by Sigmund Freud (1905)

Introduction and overview

THREE ESSAYS ON THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY (1905)

1. The sexual aberrations

(1) Deviations in respect of the sexual object

(A) Inversion

Nature of Inversion

Degeneracy

Innate character

Bisexuality

Sexual object of inverts

Sexual aim of ‘inverts’

Conclusion

(B) Sexually immature person and animals as sexual objects

(2) Deviations in respect of the sexual aim i.e. perversions

(A) Anatomical extensions

Overvaluation of the sexual object

Sexual use of the mucous membrane of the lips and mouth

Sexual use of the anal orifice

Significance of other regions of the body

Unsuitable substitutes for the sexual object: fetishism

(B) Fixations of preliminary sexual aims

Appearance of new aims

Touching and looking

Sadism and masochism

(3) The perversions in general

Variation and disease

The mental factor in perversions

Two conclusions

(4) The sexual instincts in neurotics

Psychoanalysis

Findings of psychoanalysis

Neurosis and perversion

(5) Component instincts and erotogenic zones

(6) Reasons for the apparent preponderance of perverse sexuality in the psychoneuroses

(7) Intimations of the infantile character of sexuality

Essay 2. Infantile sexuality

Neglect of the infantile factor

Infantile amnesia

(1) The period of sexual latency in childhood and its interruptions

Sexual inhibitions

Reaction formation and sublimation

[A digression on Freud’s final theory of sexual development

Interruptions of the latency period

(2) The manifestations of infantile sexuality

Thumb-sucking

Auto-erotism (coined by Havelock Ellis in 1898)

(3) The sexual aim of infantile sexuality

Characteristics of erotogenic zones

The infantile sexual aim