Perhaps more than anyone else, Freud must be given credit for placing sexuality on the intellectual and scientific agendas of the twentieth century. Within the body of his work there are persistent references to sexual motives and meanings, yet there is actually very little direct discussion of overt sexual behavior or the qualities of sexual experience. This is particularly true of discussions of postpubertal behaviors. In the entire body of his work one finds only fourteen references to orgasm and slightly fewer than that number of references to “emissions”. Words like masturbation and intercourse occur with far greater frequency but almost always in a descriptive isolation that suggests a nervous averting of attention from concrete details.
Nervousness in discussing the sexual on the level of existential experience was something of which Freud was very much aware.
People are in general not candid over sexual matters. They do not show their sexuality freely, but to conceal it they wear a heavy overcoat woven of a tissue of lies, as though the weather were bad in the world of sexuality. Nor are they mistaken. It is a fact that sun and wind are not favorable to sexual activity in this civilized world of ours; none of us can reveal his eroticism to others…. Unluckily even doctors are not preferred above other human creatures in their personal relation to questions of sexual life, and many of them are under the spell of the combination of prudery and prurience which governs the attitude of most “civilized people” in matters of sexuality.
(Freud 1898:41, italics added)
To say that Freud was more at home within the context of his historical era than is often realized is to raise the most fundamental questions of the interpretation and understanding of his intellectual legacy The meanings of words and the emotions and associations they evoke are at stake. The language of the sexual, as well as direct sexual experiences, can have many more meanings and associations among present cohorts than among those living at the end of the nineteenth century. The circulating power of the sexual and the power of its representations at opposing ends of this century are so strikingly different that words that seem to be uniformly descriptive of behaviors, such as masturbation or coitus, can only be misleading without self-conscious concerns for contextualizing both individuals and their immediate social landscapes.
Aside from the indication of a curious inattention to development of postpubertal sexual commitments, this almost studied indifference to historical change in patterns of behavior underscores a common amnesia describing adolescent encounters with the sexual and a general lack of concern with the marked degree to which patterns of sexual development and opportunity for Freud’s generation differ from those of contemporary adolescents and youth. Typically, Ernest Jones’s biographer notes that Jones was well into his twenties and a medical school student when he ceased being a virgin (Brome 1983). Similarly, the patient called the Rat Man was a cavalry officer and into his twenties at the time of his initial coital act. How different these experiences from the more common initiating experiences and age of experience that describe the current era. The continuing predominance of ahistorical perspectives in current social science practice suggests just how vulnerable to such an error this practice must be.
Among the potentially most significant twentieth-century changes in patterns of sexual behavior, with possible consequences of enormous proportion, is the collapsing of the period between the beginnings of sexual self-consciousness (social puberty) and entry into a broad range of sociosexual activities. Gone or radically diminished are the years of sexual or near-sexual fantasy and anticipation. With or without accompanying masturbatory behavior, this was a period when sexual scripts could be elaborated in ways that reflected the issues of social life without the effective surveillance of social life.
We might ask, for example, did Freud masturbate? Did he masturbate during his adolescence? During the prolonged period of career development that required the postponement of marriage did he masturbate? Did he frequent brothels? How very little we know about Freud’s sex life; how little he told us. What is clear is that he gives us little reason to be at ease in the presence of the sexual, and gives us even less reason to assume that he himself was ever fully at ease in its presence.
In an early essay, Freud made an appeal for physicians to abandon what was, and for many still is, their reticence to inquire into the sexual lives of their patients. He pointed with typical eloquence to the requirements of his charge:
The resistance of a generation of physicians who can no longer remember their own youth must be broken down; the pride of fathers, who are unwilling to descend to the level of humanity in their children’s eyes, must be overcome; and the unreasonable prudery of mothers must be combated…. But above all, a place must be created in public opinion for the discussions of the problems of sexual life.
(Freud 1898:278, italics added)
A difficult charge to meet. A charge that should alert us to the consequences of failing to meet it fully What, for example, might be the possible consequences of Freud himself having failed his own charge? Not for failing to remember his own youth, but for having repressed his experiences in ways that left them free to return in disguised expressions?