Normal sexuality had been defined as the occasional insertion of a husband's penis within his wife's vagina in order to procreate-never recreate. Even Freud taught that masturbation sapped strength and produced a debilitating disease: "neurasthenia." He echoed Tissot, who had proclaimed a century before that the loss of one ounce of semen sapped as much strength as forty ounces of blood. Yet Freud was a liberal. He refused to resort to the accepted treatments for self-abuse, such as the application of a white-hot iron to the clitoris. Instead, he recommended persuasion and surveillance around the clock.
He identified sexual deviants
such as the exhibitionist and Peeping Tom as childlike rather
than the carriers of a loathsome disease. He removed sexuality
from the Calvinists' bailiwick of evil and stated simply
that sex is a natural and necessary developmental force. He
emphasized that children perceive eroticism differently from
adults.
Freud provoked immediate furor in 1903 when he presented
his treatise on infantile sexuality. The concepts that
infants are erotic and that normal sexual development is
essential for health shocked and angered Victorian Vienna.
Freud was ridiculed and his theory soundly rejected.
Freud describes the child's sexual development in narrowly
defined stages: oral, anal, genital, and latency.
Although these concepts are laced with profound insight,
they are also somewhat misleading. He assigned the mouth
as the sexual organ of infancy and the anus as the sexual
organ of the toddler. Genital sensations don't arise until
about the fourth year, only to be submerged in "latency" a
few years later. Genital pleasures are not experienced again
until puberty. (Freud, 1953) We know now that any area of
the body can become an erotic focus at any time. In "latency"
there is a steady increase in sexual interest and activity. In
spite of these discrepancies, Freud stands correct in his basic
assumption: Sex begins in infancy.
Freud elucidates a number of defenses, techniques we use
to avoid anxiety. An idea may be accepted intellectually
while it remains rejected emotionally. We know that death is
inevitable, but cannot really accept our own demise. We may
say that sex is a healthy, normal function and yet feel uneasy
with a child's erotic experiments. A mother who certainly
wishes her little girl to become a sexually competent adult is
"worried sick" when she discovers her five-year-old daughter
poking at the family pooch to "make his wienie come out."
Freud was reared in the philosophy of "Kinder, Kuche, und
Kirche." After dinner, women were excluded as men retired
together to the library for brandy, cigars, and good conversation.
Freud proclaimed that "anatomy is destiny," and intimated
that the clitoris was but a damaged penis. They were
expected to stand in awe and envy as they viewed the magnificent
male. Sexually inadequate, passive, and socially
inferior, women possessed "the charm of a child." Irrational,
emotional, and dependent, they could compensate in part by
bagging a husband and bearing his child. Men, of course,
were aggressive, analytical, independent, and confident.
(Gould, 1975)
Today many women still feel inferior to men both in business
and in bed. They accept lesser sexual pleasure much as
they accept a lesser salary and more menial labor. Tasks
such as changing smelly diapers or scrubbing floors remain
"woman's work." But women, too, need to feel potent in order
to seek, ask for, and occasionally insist on what they need in
business or in bed. (Fischer, 1973) Building a sense of self-
worth in sexually dysfunctional women is a goal at the sex
clinic; building a sense of potency in young girls is a task for
the parent.