II. The Infantile Sexuality

The Riddle of the Sphinx.—It is not theoretical but practical interests which start the work of the investigation activity in the child. The threat to the conditions of his existence through the actual or expected arrival of a new child, the fear of the loss in care and love which is connected with this event, cause the child to become thoughtful and sagacious. Corresponding with the history of this awakening, the first problem with which it occupies itself is not the question as to the difference between the sexes, but the riddle: from where do children come? In a distorted form, which can easily be unraveled, this is the same riddle which was given by the Theban Sphinx. The fact of the two sexes is usually first accepted by the child without struggle and hesitation. It is quite natural for the male child to presuppose in all persons it knows a genital like his own, and to find it impossible to harmonize the lack of it with his conception of others.

The Castration Complex.—This conviction is energetically adhered to by the boy and tenaciously defended against the contradictions which soon result, and are only given up after severe internal struggles (castration complex). The substitutive formations of this lost penis of the woman play a great part in the formation of many perversions.

The assumption of the same (male) genital in all persons is the first of the remarkable and consequential infantile sexual theories. It is of little help to the child when biological science agrees with his preconceptions and recognizes the feminine clitoris as the real substitute for the penis. The little girl does not react with similar refusals when she sees the differently formed genital of the boy. She is immediately prepared to recognize it, and soon becomes envious of the penis; this envy reaches its highest point in the consequentially important wish that she also should be a boy.

Birth Theories.—Many people can remember distinctly how intensely they interested themselves, in the prepubescent period, in the question where children came from. The anatomical solutions at that time read very differently; the children come out of the breast or are cut out of the body, or the navel opens itself to let them out. Outside of analysis one only seldom remembers the investigation corresponding to the early childhood years; it had long merged into repression but its results were thoroughly uniform. One gets children by eating something special (as in the fairy tale) and they are born through the bowel like a passage. These infantile theories recall the structures in the animal kingdom, especially do they recall the cloaca of the types which stand lower than the mammals.

Sadistic Conception of the Sexual Act.—If children of so delicate an age become spectators of the sexual act between grown-ups, for which an occasion is furnished by the conviction of the grown-ups that little children cannot understand anything sexual, they cannot help conceiving the sexual act as a kind of maltreating or overpowering, that is, it impresses them in a sadistic sense. Psychoanalysis also teaches us that such an early childhood impression contributes much to the disposition for a later sadistic displacement of the sexual aim. Besides this children also occupy themselves with the problem of what the sexual act consists in or, as they grasp it, of what marriage consists, and seek the solution of the mystery mostly in an association to which the functions of urination and defecation give occasion.

The Typical Failure of the Infantile Sexual Investigation.—It can be stated in general about the infantile sexual theories that they are reproductions of the child's own sexual constitution, and that despite their grotesque mistakes they evince more understanding of the sexual processes than is credited to their creators. Children also perceive the pregnancy of the mother and know how to interpret it correctly; the stork fable is very often related before auditors who confront it with a deep, but mostly mute suspicion. But as two elements remain unknown to the infantile sexual investigation, namely, the rôle of the propagating semen and the female genital opening—precisely the same points in which the infantile organization is still backward—the effort of the infantile investigator regularly remains fruitless, and ends in a renunciation which not infrequently leaves a lasting injury to the desire for knowledge. The sexual investigation of these early childhood years is always conducted alone, it signifies the first step towards independent orientation in the world, and causes a marked estrangement between the child and the persons of his environment who formerly enjoyed its full confidence.

The Phases of Development of the Sexual Organization.—As characteristics of the infantile sexuality we have hitherto emphasized the fact that it is essentially autoerotic (it finds its object in its own body), and that its individual partial impulses, which on the whole are unconnected and independent of one another, are striving for the acquisition of pleasure. The end of this development forms the so-called normal sexual life of the adult in which the acquisition of pleasure has been put into the service of the function of propagation, and the partial impulses, under the primacy of one single erogenous zone, have formed a firm organization for the attainment of the sexual aim in a strange sexual object.

Pregenital Organizations.—The study, with the help of psychoanalysis, of the inhibitions and disturbances in this course of development now permits us to recognize additions and primary stages of such organization of the partial impulses which likewise furnish a sort of sexual regime. These phases of the sexual organization normally will pass over smoothly and will only be recognizable by slight indications. Only in pathological cases do they become active and discernible to coarse observation.

Organizations of the sexual life in which the genital zones have not yet assumed the dominating rôle we would call the pregenital phase. So far we have become acquainted with two of them which recall reversions to early animal states.

One of the first of such pregenital sexual organizations is the oral, or if we wish, the cannibalistic. Here the sexual activity is not yet separated from the taking of nourishment, and the contrasts within the same not yet differentiated. The object of the one activity is also that of the other, the sexual aim consists in the incorporating into one's own body of the object, it is the prototype of that which later plays such an important psychic rôle as identification. As a remnant of this fictitious phase of organization forced on us by pathology we can consider thumbsucking. Here the sexual activity became separated from the nourishment activity and the strange object was given up in favor of one from his own body.

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