Straight to the point

According to an old joke, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are enjoying some pastries in a Viennese coffee shop. The younger analyst hesitantly asks the elder: “Tell me, Herr Professor Freud… vat lies between fear und sex?”. With furrowed brow, Freud thinks for several minutes. Finally comes his triumphant answer: “Fünf!”

The daft incongruity of this answer works — at least for me — because the one thing everybody knows about Freud is how seriously he took sex. According to the canonical interpretation, lascivious urges and impulses buried deep in the unconscious are responsible for large chunks of our behaviour, and indirectly for much of the content of culture generally. If you’ve ever bitten your fingernails at a moment of tension, felt strangely aroused looking at a skyscraper, or wanted to kill your father over a competitive round of minigolf, Freud has an explanation for you. It may not be empirically falsifiable, but you can’t fault it for local colour.

Freud’s foundational insight, that human minds have unconscious aspects, has since proved invaluable — not least as a corrective to Enlightenment fantasies of perfectly rational interactions between participants, each transparently aware of his own beliefs and motivations. When it comes to the self and its patterns of decision-making — perhaps a bit like the government of the United States at the moment — we don’t always know who or what is in charge. Though the real-life Jung took this point and ran with it in his own work, he eventually fell out with Freud, judging the latter’s obsession with sex too dogmatic and itself in need of psychoanalysis. In the memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he recalled: “There was no mistaking the fact that Freud was emotionally involved in his sexual theory to an extraordinary degree. When he spoke of it, his tone became urgent, almost anxious, and all signs of his normally critical and sceptical manner vanished.”

But the recent republication of one of Freud’s most famous works seems to have put the monomania of its author in some doubt. As reported in The Observer last week, in a commentary upon a new edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, analyst and neuropsychiatrist Professor Mark Solms argues that Freud was using the term “sexual” throughout his oeuvre in a way that differed from ordinary usage. Instead, his intended object was “any activity that was pleasure-seeking in its own right — anything that one does for the purposes of pleasure alone, as opposed to practical purposes”. It seems clear that this might well include activities only tangentially connected to the nether regions, if at all: enjoyably attending to music, food, art or sport, for instance. Indeed, Freud apparently described a child kicking a football or swinging on a swing as “sexual’ in this vastly extended sense. And far from being the sort of cultural radical beloved of the avant-garde, Solms underlines that Freud was “a rather conservative gentleman and shared none of their revolutionary social inclinations”.

If this textual interpretation is right, then it too is funny: for it appears bathetically to undercut a century’s worth of edgy academic posturing about the supposed centrality of polymorphous perversity to the human condition. Perhaps poor Bertha Mason, stuck in Rochester’s attic, isn’t Jane Eyre’s sexual alter ego after all. Perhaps Hamlet’s interest in his mother is perfectly healthy. Perhaps Rosebud really is just the name for a sledge.

But there is a serious side to this too. One unfortunate aspect of modern (mis)readings of Freud is the way they have set up shop for the hideous idea of “childhood sexuality”, implicitly justifying perfect relaxation at the sight of young girls twerking in crop tops to Meghan Thee Stallion or cavorting with drag queens at Olympic opening ceremonies. If a reconsideration of what Freud actually meant prompted a reset, it would certainly be welcome.

On the face of it, Solm’s thesis seems to resemble one put forward by the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, commenting in an illuminating book about Freud on his notion of an “erotogenic zone”. In early infancy — as all through life — we seek pleasure as a calming release from tension, pain, and agitation. The baby sucks at the breast or bottle and experiences gratification. Later, it is moved to find substitute objects that simulate or expand upon the original pleasure, investing them with motivational affect instead. As Lear puts Freud’s point: “In infancy we suck at breasts and plastic nipples, then we suck thumbs and blankets, then we suck on ice cream and candies and other delicious foods, then we kiss, and later we again get to suck on breasts and genitals.”

But clearly, this is not to say that children have anything like the sexual desires of adults: they haven’t the concepts, emotional capacities or physical apparatus, for a start. It is only to make the benign point that such feelings are at the very beginning of a developmental continuum which will, if all goes well, result in mature adult erotic experiences much later on. Just as we wouldn’t say a baby making protolinguistic burbling sounds had the capacity to write sonnets, nor is it appropriate to think of children as “sexual” simply because, like the young of many other species, they too seek out basic forms of pleasure to soothe themselves.

One unfortunate aspect of modern (mis)readings of Freud is the way they have set up shop for the hideous idea of “childhood sexuality”

Equally, Freud may have referred to “masturbation” as the “primal addiction”, but a child’s unfocused and exploratory touching is significantly different from what a grown adult knowingly does when clicking on PornHub. And when he talks about Oedipal feelings in infants — whether or not this is a plausible hypothesis, which it probably isn’t — he surely means extremely primitive affects, not yet brought into the realm of language, rather than fully-fledged emotions structured with subjects and objects. Many of us can look back at our former young selves and remember vague stirrings and nascent crushes; but as Freud also points out, memory is frequently unreliable about the meaning of things at the time.

Despite the obviousness of such points on reflection, they seem lost on those hundreds of academics now hellbent on “queering” childhood, complaining about the supposedly egregious social construction of early youth as a non-sexual “innocent” time as if this was the latest civil rights frontier. As one recently published, fairly representative article puts it — in the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law no less —  “the taboo surrounding child sexuality and gender variance can make childhood especially traumatic for queer children whose desires and expression are forcibly suppressed”. In other words, kids are presented as suffering horribly for having to bottle up their sexual urges. This metaphor barely works for adults and is completely inappropriate for children. Like settlers moving further West during the gold rush, researchers desperate to uncover a new and profitable victim class are imposing adult frameworks upon younger groups, and reaping the professional spoils of grants and research outputs accordingly.

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One serious issue here — albeit one that dare not speak its name in academia, for fear of looking embarrassingly déclassé — is that this framing of children as mini-sexual beings works rather conveniently for those adults with illicit designs upon them. But another less dramatic but still reasonable worry is that the constant cultural focus upon youthful “sexuality” may well be changing later adult trajectories. For, as is also highlighted by Lear in his book and by Freud before him, unlike with the sexual behaviours of other species, human sexuality is highly plastic.

Freud observed that what he called “the sexual aim” in humans — roughly, what we want to do — can come apart from “the sexual object” — who or what we want to do it with, or to — partly due to the influence of personal imagination, and partly due to developmental circumstances. In some cases, the aim can get stuck on fetish objects: practically no object, inanimate or animate, seems to be ruled out in advance. And a developing sexuality is also culturally permeable, as the fact of changing erotic proclivities over different historical periods attests. (If you care to be up to the minute, the latest trends apparently include orgasm hypnosis, Japanese rope bondage, and “dipping”. Do keep up.)

Uniquely among animals, humans have the ability to reflect on their own behaviours generally and third-personally, but then to incorporate findings into first-personal narratives about the self: who I am, exactly, and what my life therefore means. It is plausible, then, that the Freudians’ dragging of human sexuality from its formerly tenebrous gloom into a technicolour, over-theorised daylight has significantly changed the significance of sex for post-pubescent brains along the way, giving it disproportionate discursive importance for the ego, at the expense of making it something the id feels like it might be fun to try.

When we look at the falling rates of sexual experimentation in adolescence, coupled with the large numbers of people apparently making some particular sexuality or gender presentation part of their “identity”, the connection looks more than suggestive. Perhaps if we stopped thinking of sex as the root of all interesting human behaviour, we eventually might start having more of it. In the meantime though, we should at least take a different psychological tip from Freud, and avoid using children as the canvas for the projection of contemporary adult dramas.

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