While masturbation by adolescents is now routinely acknowledged as a common, “phase-appropriate behavior”, curiously it is rarely scrutinized for either its contents or its dynamics. Where masturbation has been directly addressed, as in Blos (1962), Laufer (1976) or Kaplan (1988), it is viewed as necessary, useful, and risk-laden. It is necessary, as Laufer points out, because it serves “as a way of testing which sexual thoughts, feelings, or gratifications are acceptable to the superego, and which of these are unacceptable and therefore must not be allowed to participate in the establishment of the final sexual organization” (Laufer 1976:30).
The major risk to proper development, as traditional psychoanalytic theory views it, is that the substantive images and associated emotions of masturbatory behavior are preponderantly regressive. Kaplan, who is more responsive to the thoroughly gendered nature of individuals than most psychoanalytically oriented theorists, still finds the adolescent encounter burdened with developmental responsibilities and threats.
A chance phrase, a fleeting odor, might overcome her resistance to masturbating. Such unpredictable upsurges of desire are totally devastating to the adolescent’s self-esteem, because they represent a challenge to her sense of control over her body and her destiny.
(Kaplan 1988:186)
This negative idea of regression and threat to development is largely sustained by unexamined assumptions about the sexual history of infancy and childhood and an absence of information about masturbatory experiences of non-clinical adolescents and adults.
A notable exception to the general narrowness of the theorizing about masturbation is the work of James Hillman (1975), a neo-Jungian. Aside from providing a broad and informing history of the masturbation prohibition, Hillman offers a singular conceptualization of the nature of masturbation and its role in both specifically sexual and more general forms of psychological development. His essay is one of the very few in the relevant literatures that consider the role of masturbation in the sexual life of the adult. Of special importance is Hillman’s suggestion that masturbation by adolescents and adults is not merely substitutive but has a line of development and developmental correlates of its own. This is a concept given heightened credibility by the finding of a recent major study (Lauman et al. 1994) that those who tended to be among the sexually most active also tended to be among those who currently were masturbating most often.
Hillman suggests that an aspect of the masturbatory experience is linked to the development of creative imagination, as it provides occasions for learning to invest symbols with emotional significance and deriving gratification from the imaginative manipulation of symbols. However, competencies in manipulating and responding to symbolic representation may vary as other aspects of psychological development vary. One significant dimension along which such variations commonly occur is socioeconomic status. What comes to mind is Bernstein’s distinction between developing a capacity for “elaborative coding”, as against the more limited and limiting capacity for “restrictive coding”, which describes social class differences in language socialization, with obvious implications for other aspects of cognitive and affective development (Bernstein 1972).
Masturbation may represent an illustration of the ability of sexual experience to differentially characterize specific categories of persons and patterns of developmental outcomes. This is suggested in the differential patterns of masturbatory behavior among individuals at different social class levels, with higher masturbation levels at all stages of the life course positively relating to socioeconomic status. Similarly, females who engage in adolescent masturbation at any level beyond the minimal tend to be more sexually focused, more orgasmically competent. They also tend to be more academically and career oriented. In that sense, their sexual atypicality is associated with other aspects of gender atypicality in ways that are probably significantly interactive (Gagnon and Simon 1973; Lauman et al. 1994).
Masturbation, Hillman notes, serves moral development by occasioning an urgency for elaborating effective rationalizations. The enactment of sexual behavior within the theater of the mind, either in masturbatory activity or quite commonly in association with sociosexual activities, is no less circumscribed by moral constraint than it is in overt behavior (Simon and Simon 1958). The difference is merely that the organization of psychic realities allows for a complexity of rationalization that is rarely afforded by “real life” experience.
My most critical quarrel with Hillman involves his uncritical acceptance of drive theory and, consistent with his Jungian perspectives, his tendency to universalize the meanings of behavior. As a result, he postulates an endopsychological emergence of both the impulse to masturbate and an inhibitory predisposition, a process that gives rise to “secrecy, guilt, and fantasy” or, in other words, “a sexual impetus to psychological or internal culture” (Hillman 1975:116). I would argue the reverse: that it is the experiences of the individual in social life that create the impetus for the development of a capacity for secrecy, guilt, and fantasy, the impetus for the creation of an enlarged and empowered intrapsychic domain, and that it is this development, when or for whom it occurs, that creates a compelling source of sexual desire for which masturbation represents a very special mode of expression.