Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

Freud opens his second essay by repeating one of the key opening statements of his first essay: childhood is crucial to human sexual development, but a lack of research makes the subject difficult and obscure to parse. He attributes the lack of general awareness about infantile sexuality to what he calls infantile amnesia, his term to explain the fact that adults have virtually no memory of their earliest years of life. Freud argues that even though these years are shrouded in the mists of time, they are nevertheless hugely influential for the later sexual life of the adult. Over the course of childhood, factors such as loathing and shame help to condition the child in socially respectable ways, subduing and shaping their sexual instincts and their childlike shamelessness, and producing repressions and inhibitions of the sexual instinct. This “progressive process of suppression” occurs in a number of stages (42), culminating in the latency period of childhood. Freud argues that this is necessary for normal and civilized persons to emerge. He also suggests that these suppressions of the sexual instinct are not only the result of cultural forces and upbringing but emerge from something innate in the organism.

He explains sublimation as the process by which an individual’s sexual instincts are redirected away from a sexual object to other, nonsexual ones, such that the energy of the sexual libido continues to flow, only now sustaining nonsexual interest in the new object. The process of sublimation is critical to normal development.

Childhood sexuality has no procreative use, evolutionarily speaking. Therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised to find that it is almost entirely autoerotic in nature, not involving anyone or anything else. Freud presents thumb-sucking as an example. The act recreates the experience of breastfeeding and is apparently pleasurable for the infant or child who indulges in it. Freud emphasizes the role of memory and the desire to achieve anew some lost or missing experience, a common theme in Freud’s discussion of how we choose sexual objects. In fact, he writes that the sexual aim of infantile sexuality is always some sort of stimulation of an erotogenic zone (mouth, anus, genitals) seeking to recreate some previous pleasurable experience connected to vital functions in the same zone. In the case of thumb-sucking, which Freud finally categorizes as a masturbatory practice involving the erotogenic zone of the lips and mouth, the previous pleasurable experience is obviously suckling the breast of the mother.

Children can and do experience pleasurable genital sensation, the third erotogenic zone that Freud discusses, but he also emphasizes that genital-centric sexual activity is characteristic of adult sexuality, and he reiterates that the earliest sexual experiences involve the mouth and the anus. The genitals can be used for childhood masturbation, certainly, but he writes that they are at this stage still only “destined for great things in the future” (53).

Freud gives many examples showing how childhood predilections can result in different sexual proclivities, including sexual perversions, in adults. Adults may exhibit some form of arrested development in their sexual impulses, and these different pathways or diversions of instinct lead to different formations. He writes that sadomasochism, for example, arises from expressions of childhood cruelty that are repressed or sublimated in normal development.

Further, Freud posits that fundamental features of human experience that we would not categorize as sexual in fact derive from the sexual instinct. He connects the desire for research or knowledge to sexual curiosity that arises in early childhood. As a result of the “sexual researches” of children (60), meaning their inquisitiveness about the bodies of others, boys learn that girls lack penises and vice versa. Freud introduces castration anxiety and penis envy in this regard.