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Freud Sigmund

Sigmund Freud discusses the concept of sexual and homosexuality in unusual terms. In his lecture 'The Sexual Life of Human Beings' he has written that many people regard it as something which combines a reference to the contrast between the sexes to the search for pleasure to the reproductive function and to the characteristic of something that is improper and must be kept secret. By means of careful investigations we have come to know groups of individuals whose sexual life deviates in the most striking way from the usual picture of the average. Some of these 'perverse' people have struck the distinction between the sexes off their programme.Only members of their own sex and especially their sexual parts are not a sexual object for them at all and in extreme cases are objects of disgust.

This implies that they have abandoned any share in reproduction. We call such people homosexuals or inverts. They are men and women who are often though not always irreproachably fashioned in other respects, of high intellectual and ethical development, the victims only of this one fatal deviation. Through the mouth of their scientific spokesmen they represent themselves as a special variety of the human species- a third sex which has a right to stand on an equal footing beside the other two. This class of perverts at any rate behaves to their sexual objects in approximately the same way as normal people do to theirs. But we now come to a long series of abnormal people whose sexual activity diverges more and more widely from what seems desirable to a sensible person.

In their multiplicity and strangeness they can only be compared to the grotesque monsters painted by Breughel for the temptation of St.Anthony which Flaubert leads past, before the eyes of his pious penitent. We accordingly divide them into those in whom like the homosexuals, the sexual object has been changed and others in whom the sexual aim is what has primarily been altered. The first group includes those who have renounced the union of the two genitals and who replace the genitals of one of the couple engaged in the sexual act by some other part or region of the body; in this they disregard the lack of suitable organic arrangements as well as any impediment offered by feelings of disgust. They replace the vulva for instance by the mouth or anus.Others follow who still retain the genitals as an object not on account of their sexual function but of other functions in which the genital plays a part either for anatomical reasons or because of its propinquity. Then come others again who have abandoned the genital as an object altogether and have taken some other part of the body as the object they desire - a woman's breast, a foot or a plait of hair.

After them come others for whom parts of the body are of no importance but whose every wish is satisfied by a piece of clothing ,a shoe, a piece of underclothing -the fetishists. The second group is led by perverts who have made what is normally only an introductory or preparatory act into the aim of their sexual wishes. They are people whose desire it is to look at the other person or to feel him or to watch him in the performance of his intimate actions or who expose parts of their own bodies which should be covered in the obscure expectation that they may be rewarded by a corresponding action in return. Next come the sadists, puzzling people whose tender endeavors have no other aim than to cause pain and torment to their object ranging from humiliation to severe physical injuries and as though to counter balance them their counterparts the masochists whose only pleasure it is to suffer humiliations and torments of every kind from their loved object either symbolically or in reality. There are still others in whom several of these abnormal preconditions are united and intertwined and lastly we must learn that each of these groups is to be found in two forms: along side of those who seek their sexual satisfaction in reality are those who are content merely to imagine that satisfaction who need no real object at all but can replace it by their phantasies.

The claim made by homosexuals or inverts to being exceptions collapses at once when we learn that homosexual impulses are invariably discovered in every single neurotic and that a fair number of symptoms give expression to this latent inversion. Those who call themselves homosexuals are only conscious and manifest inverts whose number is nothing compared to that of the latent homosexuals. Freud says that a particular disease paranoia which is not to be counted among the transference neuroses regularly arises from an attempt to fend off excessively strong homosexual impulses. The hysterical neurosis can produce its symptoms in any system of organs and so disturb any function. All the so-called perverse impulses which seek to replace the genital by some other organ manifest themselves: these organs are then behaving like substitutive genitals. The symptoms of hysteria have actually led us to the view that the bodily organs, besides the functional part they play must be recognized as having a sexual significance and that the execution of the first of these tasks is disturbed if the second of them makes too many claims.

Countless sensations and innervations which come across as symptoms of hysteria in organs that have no apparent connection with sexuality are in this way revealed to us as being in the nature of fulfillments of perverse sexual impulses in relation to which other organs have acquired the significance of the sexual parts. To fall ill of a neurosis as a result of a frustration of normal sexual satisfaction. But when a real frustration like this occurs the need moves over to the abnormal methods of sexual excitation. As a result of this collateral damming-back the perverse impulses must emerge more strongly than they would have if normal sexual satisfaction had met with no obstacle in the real world. In some cases manifest perversions are provoked or made active if the normal satisfaction of the sexual instinct encounters too great difficulties for temporary reasons or because of permanent social regulations.

Sigmund Freud also came up with theory on sexual life of children which he said was because the memories and associations arising during the analysis of symptoms in adults regularly led back to the early years of childhood. The analyses have confirmed that all these inclinations to perversions had their roots in childhood that children have a predisposition to all of them and carry them out to an extent corresponding to their immaturity --- in short that perverse sexuality is nothing else than a magnified infantile sexuality split up into its separate impulses. To suppose that children have no sexual life-sexual excitations and needs and a kind of satisfaction but suddenly acquire it between the ages of 12 and 14 would be as improbable and indeed senseless biologically as to suppose that they brought no genitals with them into the world and only grew them at the time of puberty. What does awaken in them at this time is the reproductive function which makes use for its purposes of physical and mental material already present. Freud introduced concept of libido as the name of force by which the instinct manifests itself. In an infant the first impulses of sexuality make their appearance attached to other vital functions.

His main interest is directed to the intake of nourishment when children fall asleep after being sated at the breast they show an expression of blissful satisfaction which will be repeated later in life after the experience of a sexual orgasm. He also said that an infant will repeat the action of taking in nourishment without making a demand for further food here he is not actuated by hunger but this is sensual sucking and the fact that in doing this he falls asleep once more with a blissful expressions shows that the act of sensual sucking has in itself alone brought him satisfaction. Thus we learn that infants perform actions which have no purpose other than obtaining pleasure. Sucking at the mother's breast is the starting point of the whole of sexual life, the unmatched prototype of every later sexual satisfaction.

What is shown with the intake of nourishment is repeated in part with the excretions. The infants have feelings of pleasure in the process of evacuating urine and faeces and that they soon contrive to arrange those actions in such a way as to bring them the greatest possible yield of pleasure through the corresponding excitations of the erotogenic zones of the mucous membrane. A child's sexual life is made up entirely of the activities of a number of component instincts which seek independently of one another to obtain pleasure in part from the subject's own body and in part already from an external object. Among these organs the genitals come into prominence. Freud in the last part of lecture discusses that infantile sexual researches begin very early sometimes before the third year of life. They do not relate to the distinction between the sexes since children attribute the same male genital to both sexes. If a boy discovers vagina from seeing his sister /friend he tries to disavow the evidence of his senses.

Later on he takes fright with threat if he shows interest in his little organ, produce a deferred effect. He comes under the sway of the castration complex the form taken by which plays a great part in the construction of his character if he remains normal, in his neurosis if he falls ill and in his resistances if he falls ill and in his resistances if he comes into analytic treatment. The little girls feels at disadvantage owing to their lack of a big visible penis ,they develop a wish to be a man- a wish that reemerges later on in any neurosis that may arise if they meet with a mishap in playing a feminine part.