[Introductory paper to the Anna Freud Centre's 33rd International Scientific Colloquium, 4th November 2011]
Sexuality is an embarrassing subject and at the time of Freud, scientific discussion about it tied it firmly to reproductive functions. As Sigmund Freud said, in his Outline of Psychoanalysis, the popular view - insofar as one ever thought about sex - was that “human sexual life consists essentially in an endeavour to bring one’s own genitals into contact with those of someone of the opposite sex”…”This endeavour is supposed to make its appearance at puberty- that is at the age of sexual maturity- and to serve the purposes of reproduction” (Freud, 1938). His own separation of sexuality from reproduction and from the post-pubescent individual provoked shock and dismay.
Freud pointed out that “sexual life does not begin only at puberty but starts with plain manifestations soon after birth”. An example he used in his Three Essays is thumb sucking or “sensual sucking” as he called it (1908) “The instinct is not directed towards other people but obtains satisfaction from the subject’s own body. It is “auto-erotic”… It is this idea of instinct - or drive - that becomes important in psychoanalysis - and what exactly is it? According to Freud: “the forces which we assume to exist behind the tensions caused by the needs of the id are called instincts… They represent the somatic demands upon the mind”. He continues “furthermore, it is clear that the behaviour of a child who indulges in thumb sucking is determined by a search for some pleasure which has already been experienced and is now remembered … it was the child’s first and most vital activity, his sucking at his mother’s breast, or at substitutes for it that must have familiarized him with this pleasure”.
Freud did not have access to modern technology and it is likely that if he had he would have re-edited his views. We can now observe babies before they are born. The recording of ultrasound scans show in particular foetuses sucking their thumbs. A particularly interesting example of this activity can be found on the website Youtube[2]. In that video we see an unborn baby sucking its thumb with energy. The activity is not reflex, it is voluntary, repeated and maintained. This creates some fundamental theoretical questions. This unborn baby has never experienced hunger, being fed by his mother’s blood stream. It has never used its mouth to feed and if reflex swallowing of the amniotic fluid happens, it is not linked to the satisfaction of any need. Thumb sucking before birth does not imply the memory of an experience. This thumb sucking disproves Freud’s view that it is “determined by a search for some pleasure which has already been experienced and is now remembered”. It is not the hallucination of a lost object and plays no part in reducing tension (hunger); if anything, as we will see, it creates tension. In addition, the activity plays no part in self-preservation.
So how can we understand these babies without throwing Freud’s ideas out with the bathwater? The answers might be in Freud’s own work on the development of the psyche - and there are three statements in particular that point the way. Talking about the topology of the mind, he says: “Under the influence of the real external world, one portion of the id has undergone a special development… equipped with the organs for receiving stimuli… [it] acts as an intermediary between the id and the external world. To this region of our mind we have given the name ego” [ich]. The second statement is that “In consequence of the pre-established connections between sense perceptions and muscular action, the ego has voluntary movements at his command.” And then that this ego “ has the task of self-preservation”. But the observation of unborn babies tells us that before being occupied with self-preservation, they did simply enjoy sensations provided by the body. The suggestion in the first of Freud’s statements is that the ego is created through the reception by the brain of stimuli coming from the sense organs; the stimuli could come from without or within. From the embryo to the foetus and the newborn the neurological structures and in particular the organs of the senses, mature and what was silence becomes signal, noise. The brain structure has inbuilt reflexivity and picks on the signals in a system of feedback which, in functioning, leads to the apparition of consciousness. An aspect of this phenomena had been noted by Winnicott who called it indwelling of the psyche in the soma. He suggested that the basis for this indwelling : “is a linkage of motor and sensory and functional experiences with the infant’s new state of being a person” (Winnicott, 1960). To summarise my point, the feedback mechanism between brain and soma is geared towards consciousness production (ego creation) and the process of ego formation continues as it is invested with libido/drives.
The example of the unborn baby sucking its thumb exemplifies the clinically observable fact that human beings enjoy using their body, enjoy making it function. I have just used the word “enjoy” and should here introduce a first, useful, concept developed by Jacques Lacan: that of jouissance or Enjoyment. Enjoyment is not pleasure. The word is used in the sense of its legal usage. It is the action or state of deriving gratification from an object. The Oxford English Dictionary provides the following example: “he would protect the Established Church in the enjoyment of her legal rights”. Enjoyment is therefore not to be equated solely with pleasure, it designates the satisfaction procured by the use of objects even if sometimes the consequence is pain or destruction; enjoyment is located 'beyond the pleasure principle' as illustrated clearly by addictions, eating disorders or some forms of self-harm.
The reflexive sensorial experiences derived from the functioning of body functions are experienced as enjoyable and are then repeated by the subject who does not want the enjoyment to stop. Enjoyment is the lure used by the soma to make the subject function and thus not only produces the ego but makes it engage in all sorts of life preserving activities contributing eventually to the survival of the species.
With this in mind, the status of genital excitement (for example erection in boys) and of masturbation in small children can be seen in a different light. They do masturbate because they derive gratification from it - but the act is no more connected to sexual phantasies than thumb sucking in our unborn baby was connected to feeding phantasies. However, adults witnessing the child’s activity are going to react in a very particular way. Peter Fonagy (1998) did look into parental marking of children’s behaviours - looking at how parents respond to what their children do, and found that most of the time, parents don’t mark sexual behaviour in young children. Then do clearly react to other expressions of enjoyment but when a child touches their own genitals they blank it out. In my opinion, this is healthiest response. What else could the parent do? Tell off the child and create serious inhibitions (or excessive interest)? Encourage them to continue, putting the child on social collision course with other adults? Or engage in a lecture about the moral aspects of sexual gratification, which is beside the point and obviously beyond the child’s ken? The non-marking underlines the fact that the adult has an unconscious knowledge of the danger that he/she could expose the child to with an inappropriate answer. However, I would also suggest that parents don’t mark sexual behaviour in obvious ways - but they do mark it somehow, even if it is by avoiding mentioning it. The aversion of the gaze, the quietly removed hand… all these things send subtle signals without resolving by speech the child’s experience into anything the child think about - leaving space for the child to create fantasmatic theories, which he/she does using the limited knowledge it has. In the absence of adult input by way of explanations etc, the child’s interest in the genitals decreases and he/she invests her drives elsewhere. The absence of marking also shows that the adult is almost unable to see infantile sexuality without painting it in the colours of adult sexuality and this is likely to trigger shame, guilt, disgust and eventually inhibition. Infantile genital activity happens in a child whose theories about adult sexuality are still quite foggy, whose system of object relations is still completely focused on their primary object of love and whose body is immature.
By not encouraging genital activity in children the adult also show an understanding that he child needs its libido for other purposes. Freud writes that educators know that “sexual activity makes a child ineducable” and also about the role of reaction- formation and sublimation in personal and social development. Furthermore, he states that it is “necessary to distinguish sharply between the concept of ‘sexual’ and of ‘genital’. The former is the wider concept and includes many activities that have nothing to do with the genitals” (Freud, 1938) This distinction is also found in Ferenczi, in his rather misunderstood paper: Confusion of the Tongues Between the Adults and the Child that he subtitled The Language of Tenderness and of Passion (Ferenczi,1949). Ferenczi suggest that the nature of infantile sexuality is underlined by tenderness, the sensuality of the body and love phantasies marked by the wish to please their primary love objects when adult genital activity is marked by ‘erotic passion’. The term Tenderness, aimed at distinguishing between sensuality and lust unfortunately seems to exclude the fact that infantile sexuality also involves aggressive aspects, although the attributions of sadism that are often made also require an adult understanding of self and other that an infant may not have.
Genital investment and the seeking of lust start to weave their way through sexual behaviours and sensual experiences when the child develops cognitively and emotionally, and this may come about largely through the deciphering of adults’ sexual projections. It is the progressive realisation of what adult sexuality is about and what it means to adults, which leads to repression of sexual memories by introducing a dimension of guilt, shame and anxiety that was not present in the simple enjoyment of the baby or the toddler - a phenomena known these days as après coup. This repression explains the amnesia of childhood sexuality. “There can therefore be no question of a real abolition of the impressions of childhood” wrote Freud “ but rather of an amnesia similar to that which neurotics exhibit for later events, and of which the essence consists in a simple withholding of these impressions from consciousness, viz., in their repression”. (1905)
Freud sees in the “manipulations of the penis” in the little boy one of the factors that are going to lead to the Oedipus phase when he starts “having phantasies of carrying out some activity with it in relation to his mother”. The “threat of castration and the sight of the absence of penis in females” is going to lead to what Freud calls “the greatest trauma in his life”. These are even today controversial views, but there is another version of this fundamental crisis, developed by Jacques Lacan, that for me describes the Oedipal crisis in a more ‘modern’ way. It begins far earlier than in the Freud’s chronology, within the first year of life.
Via the Mother’s disappearances and reappearances, the baby comes to understand that objects persist even when not within their view. But this creates further questions: Where is she when she’s not with me? Why does she go away? The father is one thing in the baby’s world which might account for Mother’s going away - and proof of it comes when she says to the child: “It’s time to sleep. Mummy and Daddy must have their dinner now”. Father occupies a place in the child’s world as the single biggest distraction for Mummy and therefore the single greatest rival to him/herself. The mother names the father as the one with whom the baby was made and with whom she also wants to be. The hypothesis made by the child to explain Mother’s ‘choice’ of Father is necessarily that ‘Father has something I haven’t got’. But equally, sometimes Mother is with the baby, who might then quite naturally think: whatever it is, maybe I have it too. The baby has now hypothesised the existence of ‘the thing that satisfies Mother’, or in Lacanian terms: the object of Mother’s desire. “What does she want? I'd like it to be me that she wants, but it is clear that it's not just me, there is something else on her mind.” (Lacan, 1998). The object of mother’s desire is beyond the child’s ken: an imaginary object of great power - absolute in the sense that it is what is pitted against the child’s power to retain Mother for himself (Bailly, 2009). Lacan calls this the Phallus, after Freud, but for him it is an entirely imaginary object and not the penis. It is linked to no signifier, but any signifier can become closely linked with it, in the sense of ‘maybe this or that possesses this extraordinary object that so attracts Mother’. The first signifier the child consistently associates with the Phallus is ‘Father’.
Why ‘Father’? - after all, Mother is distracted and taken away by all kinds of other things. But at this very early point, child’s inter-subjectivity operates only on a dyadic level. The child is not able to understand anything as abstract as ‘work’ or the myriad other reasons a mother might be absent - in body or in mind. Toddlers also have to attribute ‘blame’ - things that happen are always caused by someone. In this world-view, ‘father’ is the first apprehensible third party object and the only one of sufficient importance and power to the child to be able to account for mother’s many non-baby-focused meanderings. The introduction of this third party may be experienced as a relief - otherwise, Mother’s ‘bad’ actions towards the baby (abandoning, being unresponsive etc) are experienced as persecutory - they can only be thought about as a product of the dyadic relationship. It is a relief to think that there is an explanation ‘out there’, and that Mother is not just this inexplicable, capricious, persecuting thing. But there is a downside - and it is this that has such a major structuring role in the human psyche.
In order to accept the explanation, the child has to accept that he or she hasn’t got the Phallus - the imaginary object of Mother’s desire. This mental act of acceptance is what Lacan calls the submission to the paternal metaphor, or castration. The phallus is an imaginary object, the unspecified object of mother’s desire and not the penis. The idea of castration is symbolic and not literal, and ‘castration anxiety’ is a fundamental anxiety arising from the shock realisation that one is not perfect. Castration is the symbolic loss of an imaginary object.
To summarise, I could say that it would be more fruitful as clinicians to think less about what is adult in child sexuality, and more about how much of the infantile persists in adult sexuality. We also need to be aware that our adult views of sexuality impair our ability to read children’s sexual behaviour. Infantile sexuality is characterised by the child’s enjoyment of the functioning of the body and his/her keenness to sustain enjoyment. Infantile sexuality involves the sexual - in the sense of a drive as yet unlinked with any particular object - more than the genital and sensuality over lust. Children are extremely interested in sexual differences and gain pleasure from masturbation - but this interest is on par with their interest in thumb-sucking, faeces, food, being held upside down or tickled - anything that provides intense bodily sensation. As they move from babyhood into toddlerhood, they understand that sexual organs are the objects of a particular kind of adult attention, and at times a child may come to take on adult behaviours in an attempt to please or attract attention. But they understand also that the object of their mother’s desire is far more than the male sexual organ. The phallus in their minds is hypothetical - an imaginary object cause of desire. Castration is therefore the symbolic loss of this imaginary object and not due to the real fear that your dad is going to molest you. Genital investment and the seeking of lust start to weave their way through sexual behaviours and sensual experiences as the child develops cognitively and emotionally, and this may come about largely through the deciphering of adults’ sexual projections. It reaches a crisis point with puberty when the body exposes the subject to adult sexual tensions and the phantasised becomes possible. It is the progressive realisation of what adult sexuality is about and what it means to adults, which leads to repression of sexual memories and childhood amnesia. Adults tend to project onto children their adult sexuality. This may lead to the denial of children’s sexuality, abusive attribution to the child of genital intensions, and for professionals, to the misunderstanding of clinical situations.
Dr. Lionel Bailly[1]
[1] Honorary Senior Lecturer UCL Psychoanalysis Unit, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist NEPFT
References
Bailly L. (2009): Lacan, A beginner’s guide , One World Pb.,Oxford.
Ferenczi S. (1949). Confusion of the Tongues Between the Adults and the Child: The Language of Tenderness and of Passion, Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 30:225-230.
Fonagy, P. (2008). A genuinely developmental theory of sexual enjoyment and its implications for psychoanalytic technique. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 56(1), 11-36.
Freud S. (1905) Three essays on the theory of sexuality, SE 7, 125-231.
Freud S. (1938) An Outline of Psycho-analysis, SE 23, 144-205.
Lacan J. (1998) Les formations de l’inconscient, Seminaire V, Seuil, Paris.
Winnicott D.W. (1960) The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship. Int. J. Psyco-Anal., 41: 585-595.
[1] Honorary Senior Lecturer UCL Psychoanalysis Unit, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist NEPFT