Wittgenstein and Freud

In his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud claims that children are polymorphously perverse. What does this deliberately provocative statement mean? Freud argues that the sexual instinct (or more accurately, drive (Trieb)) is active in human beings from the very start of life. He acknowledges that infants and children are not physically capable of experiencing the pleasures associated with genital intercourse, but he claims nonetheless that they experience sexual pleasure from a range of different parts of their bodies. Since he reserves the word “normal” for the sexual pleasures of genital intercourse, he concludes that children are polymorphously perverse in their pursuit of sexual pleasure.

Freud’s starting point is his belief that the sexual drive plays a central role in human life and that problems with it lead both to sexual perversions and to neuroses. It is not surprising, therefore, that he assumes that this drive starts to play a role in childhood. The Essays offer support for this claim, but it seems so obviously true to Freud that he often resorts to pure assertion. For example, noting that there have been frequent reports of sexual impulses in childhood and that psychoanalysis has uncovered unconscious childhood memories in neurotics, he claims that it is clear “that the germs of sexual impulses are already present in the new-born child and that these continue to develop for a time, but are then overtaken by a progressive process of suppression” (pg 176, Standard Edition, 2001).

The first infantile sexual activity that Freud discusses is thumb-sucking (or sensual sucking). He describes this as a rhythmic repetition of a sucking contact by the mouth or the lips, and he says it may be accompanied by a grasping drive (“GreifTrieb”) that manifests itself as a rhythmic tugging at the lobes of the ears or the catching hold of some part of another person. He adds that it is often combined with rubbing some sensitive part of the body such as the breast or the external genitalia. He notes that this activity is not about taking nourishment (so is not caused by the drive to eat) and implies that it must be caused by the other main drive, the sexual drive. He does raise the question of what general characteristic enables us to recognise sexual manifestations in children, but rather than answering this question, he simply asserts that the insights of psycho-analytical investigation justify us in regarding thumb-sucking as a sexual manifestation.

Freud claims that the behaviour of the thumb-sucking child is driven by the search for a pleasure that has already been experienced, and he identifies this pleasure as that experienced by the infant at the breast. He claims that the warm flow of milk causes a pleasurable sensation that leads the child’s lips to behave like (indeed become) an erotogenic zone. He justifies the claim that the baby experiences sexual pleasure by arguing that the image of the satiated baby is “the prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life” (pg 182, ibid). But this is hardly conclusive. One could argue that it simply shows the similarity between states of complete drive satisfaction, whichever drive is involved. Similarly, one could accept that the infant experiences sensual or bodily pleasure at the breast without accepting that this pleasure is sexual.

The role played by the breast in adult sexual activity offers support to Freud’s claim, but this link can also be treated differently. For example, one could argue that the infant finds the experience of being fed at the breast deeply reassuring and that the search for a similar (real or imagined) state of satisfaction comes into play in adult sexual activities. So, there would be a link between sucking at the breast and adult sexual activity not because the baby experienced sexual pleasure at the breast, but because sexual activity in adults is not purely drive-based but is influenced by a range of psychological factors. On this account, children would be seen as deriving pleasure from sucking their thumbs but it would not be sexual pleasure, and the appropriate explanation for their engaging in this activity would be psychological rather than drive-based.

Building on the idea that the sexual drive in children achieves satisfaction by stimulating an erotogenic zone that has been involved in the fulfilment of another drive, Freud looks for other zones that may be used in the same way as the mouth and lips are in thumb-sucking. The first area he considers is the anal zone, where he suggests that children hold back their stool until its accumulation is sufficient to have a powerful effect on the mucous membrane of the anus as it passes through. He suggests that this involves painful but also highly pleasurable sensations (ibid pg186). He then moves on to the genital area and mentions infantile masturbation, although perhaps surprisingly he does not dwell on this activity, which would seem to provide the most obvious evidence for the claim that children enjoy sexual pleasure. Even here, however, it would be possible to argue that what the child experiences is bodily pleasure rather than sexual pleasure, since infantile and childhood masturbation (unlike adult masturbation) generally does not involve fantasies of sexual intercourse.

Freud emphasises that the infantile sexual activity involving erotogenic zones is autoerotic, but he also claims that the sexual drive in children exhibits components which involve other people as sexual objects. These include: scopophilia (the drive to look); exhibitionism (the drive to show); the drive to cruelty; and the drive to mastery. These drives all have strong psychological elements, but Freud ignores this point. Indeed, in his exploration of the sex life of human beings, he ignores the impact on our sexual lives of the fact that we are conscious. More broadly, he shows no interest in the differences between the sex lives of human beings and the sex lives of other animals. For example, while fetishism may seem a surprising phenomenon, it reflects many other aspects of the way the human mind works. By contrast, as far as I am aware it is not something that commonly occurs in animals. It is highly ironic that, while Freud’s work paved the way for a massive increase in the sophistication of our psychological explanations, he plays down this type of explanation in The Essays (and in many of his other works). The reason he does this is because (particularly at this stage of his career) his main aim is to demonstrate that human behaviour is drive-based and that our conscious experiences are simply products or reflections of these biological causal mechanisms.

The advantage of Freud’s focus on drives and, in particular, on the sexual drive is that it underlines the non-rational aspects of human behaviour. But there is a risk we forget that our minds have both a conscious and an unconscious dimension. In fact, the supposedly biological sexual drive ends up absorbing many of the psychological aspects of human action. Rather than simply being a drive to seek sexual pleasure, it is treated as including: our desire for control (the drive for mastery); our desire to assert ourselves over others (the drive to show/exhibitionism); our desire to intrude on others (the drive to look/voyeurism); and our desire to take out our negative feelings on other people (drive to cruelty). Bringing in these other elements underlines the fact that, in contrast with the sex lives of animals, the sex lives of human beings is not just about sexual pleasure. For us, everything sexual has a symbolic or psychological dimension. Take the phenomenon of men touching their crotch. This is an irrational action but, unlike masturbation, it is not about sexual pleasure. If we want to explain why men do this, we should look not for biological explanations but for psychological explanations including psychological explanations that have an unconscious dimension.

So, where does this leave the claim that children are polymorphously perverse? I think Freud is right to challenge the idealised picture of childhood as a period of purity and innocence. Children do get a lot of pleasure from their bodies and they tend to do so in a less inhibited way than adults. As Freud points out, we spend a lot of time encouraging them to distinguish between bodily pleasures that are acceptable and those that are not. Freud is also surely right to claim that adult sexual activity brings together aspects of human behaviour that are separate in childhood. But his claim that all these aspects involve or relate to sexual pleasure is much less convincing. Even if children get lots of pleasure from their bodies, it is not clear that these pleasures are sexual. So, there is no reason to see them as “polymorphously perverse”. Similarly, while the childhood impulses towards cruelty, self-aggrandisement and prying/intruding are reflected in adult sexual activities (and in many other aspects of adult life), this does not prove that they come to form one unified drive. On the contrary, what The Essays (and Freud’s work in general) demonstrates is how complicated our explanations need to be if we are understand the behaviour of animals whose possession of a sophisticated language has allowed them to develop a complex inner world of thoughts and feelings.