Affectional-sexual development, in comparison with other aspects of development-motor and language, for example-has been more often repressed than encouraged in the majority of families in the United States and throughout most of the western world. A traditional taboo surrounds the subject of infant sexuality despite the fact that healthy human offspring are endowed from birth with sensory and affectional impulses. In the United States sex is seldom treated as a strong and healthy force in the positive development of personality. (Ribble, 1955).
Infant sexual behavior, in the eyes of many, is negative, perverse,
and destructive. Some see infant sexual-affectional potential as
related to excesses-addictions that control the individual and weaken
his reason. That infants have erotic capacity has been pointedly ignored
or overlooked. After an asexual infancy and childhood, sex is
supposed to burst out full bloom at puberty or, hopefully, later. Sexual
innocence has been assumed to be the normal and appropriate infant
posture. Still earlier, infants were considered as depraved if they
masturbated, asked sex-related questions, or showed any sexual interest
or curiosity.
Ignorance was and is deemed best to keep dormant any
precocious sexual feelings. It has been taken for granted that other
aspects of physical and mental growth would proceed in a gradual way
from birth to full maturity, but knowledge about sexual capacity and
interest has been either consciously or unconsciously suppressed even
in the community of social and behavioral scientists. This is an
enigma, for as early as the turn of the century Bell (1902), Freud
(1905), and Moll (1909) were reporting that in infants of suckling age
various parts of the body could give pleasurable sensation and romances
did develop in childhood, and it was known that "unscrupulous
nurses" had found that they could calm crying babies by stroking their
genitals.
Freud observed that sexual behavior of the infant and child
not only was ignored but "the educators consider all sexual manifestations
of the child as an 'evil' in the face of which little can be accomplished."
(Freud, 1962, p. 41). To find sexuality suppressed in the
schools is perhaps understandable; to find it largely overlooked in behavioral
and social science is more difficult to understand and to accept.
What would be the outcome of a concerted effort to give infants the
opportunity to fully develop their capacity for sensory and affectional
response? We do not know because we have not apparently wanted
to know. Those who argue that the individual, to be fully human, must
have the opportunities to develop all his capacities argue that this
principle should apply to his sexual capacity as well as to the capacity
of his intellect and motor skills. Those who argue for discipline,
self control, and the curbing of harmful or socially disruptive human
tendencies, argue that only the minimum of stimulation and no erotic
experience should characterize the personal encounters of infants.
Those who opt for restriction of erotic expression in infancy and
childhood are in the majority in the United States at the present time.
In a recent survey of sex attitudes, for instance, 90 percent of the
general public judged sexual activities between an adult and a child to
be "always wrong." (Levitt and Klassen, 1973).
Of one thing we are certain, empirical behavioral and social science,
given the present state of theory, research and accumulated findings
on infant sexuality, is in no position to give definitive counsel
to parents, to the school, or to society in general.
Is it even correct to speak of infant sexuality? That depends in
part upon our definition of sexuality.