While infant and childhood masturbation may in fact be among the most universal of human experiences, the meanings and consequences of such activity are varied. Like most of the dimensions of infantile sexuality, the understanding of the content of inf fantile and childhood masturbation rests upon borrowed words and thoughts, words and thoughts borrowed from an as-yet-unlived future. The difference between infant and child masturbation and adolescent masturbation from Freud’s view was not new content but heightened hormone — based imperatives and additional mandates for the reworking of these initial issues. Such reworking involved the partial repression of all that had flowered during pregenital stages, in order that entry into the social as well as the sexual relationships of “responsible” adulthood become possible. In other words, the past, with its lingering dreams of unreasoned desires, and the future, marked by the near final consolidation of renunciations, totally obscure the experience of adolescence itself, seemingly obscuring the experience of adolescence for all except the adolescent.
The complicated role that masturbation plays during adolescence is something Freud understood. He viewed it as a way of having access to a half-way region interpolated between life in accordance with the pleasure principle and life in accordance with the reality principle. However, while masturbation made it possible to bring about sexual developments and sublimations in fantasy, these were also seen not as advances but as “injurious compromises”. Though, as Stekel noted, these same compromises render severe perverse inclinations harmless and avert the worst consequences of abstinence (1912:252). The absence of visible indicators of adolescent turmoil (Offer 1982), often described as a normal aspect of adolescent development, may be partly explained by this early version of a lightning-rod approach to masturbation. From this perspective, turmoil is acted out safely (at least for the moment) within the arena of fantasy, acted out passionately, excessively and, for the moment, with finality. This latter concern should cue us to the more contemporary meanings and uses of renewed sadomasochistic fantasies.
Despite its autoerotic appearance, the post-childhood masturbatory act is an intensely sociosexual act. The deceptively obvious link between masturbation and narcissism is supported by the image of the individual seeking pleasure in a manner that appears independent of social life, as if it were possible to describe the individual in any but a relative sense as being independent of social life. Masturbation’s more significant link with narcissism may rest in its command of intrapsychically generated idealizations of the self in social life.
Post-coital tristesse, like post-coital jouissance, is known only to the human animal and occurs as orgasm most often signals the end of immediate sexual excitement, if not the end of the pursuit of further sexual pleasure. At such moments, the pleasures of orgasm may only partially compensate for the probable requirement of the abandonment of the images that generate sexual excitement. Such images have only rarely been examined in social and intellectual realms, realms where the prohibitions regarding talk about the sources of sexual excitement may have signif icantly outlasted the prohibitions surrounding sexual behavior itself. This is particularly true of masturbation.