Faith was the five-year-old subject of a curbside consultation
with a pediatric colleague. She was the eldest of three
daughters in a stable, strongly religious family. The mother
had discovered Faith rubbing her clitoris while bathing.
The
mother was upset and held Faith's hands under very hot
water, saying that she needed to cleanse them from dirty
activity. To the parents' surprise, Faith repeated this performance
at times and in places where she was certain to be discovered.
After spanking her, sending her to her room, and
reading her the Bible, they feared she might be diseased and
sought the counsel of their pediatrician. This little girl had
already transformed a pleasurable act into an expression of
anger at her parents.
Indeed she had found a weapon which
caused them considerable emotional upset and frustration.
The commonest root of the confusion between sex and
anger is child abuse. In the slum, harsh punishment, abandonment
in the hallway, and persecution by peers converge
to make sex a weapon in the battle for existence.
But abuse is by no means limited to the slum. In a "good" neighborhood
an infant who refuses a heaping teaspoonful of pureed string
beans is slapped. A four-year-old who forgets to pick up his
toys is called stupid, lazy, and just like his father.
A sevenyear-
old girl is told to fix lunch and then ruthlessly criticized
because there are too many sandwiches and she forgot the
milk. An eight-year-old boy arriving minutes late for dinner
is restricted to his bedroom for a week.
Angry children grow to become angry adults. (Kempe,
1972) The anger can invade any or all areas of expression,
but especially eroticism. This is because of the importance of
sex, its range and diversity of expression, intrinsic malleability,
and above all the fact that the sex drive evolves within
the early, intense relationship to the mothering one.
Thus
the infant who ardently desires his mother's warmth and is
left alone in his crib for hours, and the toddler who tugs at
his mother's skirt and is roughly pushed away, are seeking
erotic, as well as other, pleasures.
Instead of pleasure, they
receive pain. They feel abandoned and angry. As these
youngsters grow they continue to feel deprived and bitter,
and they expect the same shoddy treatment from others.
They have little left to give to their children, and are more
than likely to repeat the injury.
CATHY
When Cathy was small her mother had beaten her with an
electric cord and locked her out of the house without shoes in
the snow. But the event which she remembered most vividly
was when her mother brought her a kitten for her very own.
She carefully collected scraps to feed this small, warm, furry
being, and slept with it next to her cheek at night. After a
week, the mother decided the kitten was too much trouble
and drowned it in a pail.
When Cathy was a young woman, she still felt helpless
and frightened much of the time. She devoted herself to keeping
other people happy. She cleaned the house, cared for her
younger brothers and sisters, and worked as a nurse's aide.
She dressed plainly, and never flirted. She shyly refused
when a quiet young man who lived nearby invited her to a
dance. She had decided that she was too clumsy to dance.