Much of the anxiety and guilt that must have permeated the masturbatory act for Freud’s generation, as for members of following generations, may not have been engendered only by fears about masturbation per se, which given the folk psychologies of the day were considerable, but by the still greater anxieties and guilt about what was […]

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 […]

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, […]

The oedipal family was a theoretical necessity for Freud. However, this focus on the family reflected a more general trend in social science discourse, a discourse that emerged in a period when a multitude of disciplinary problems was becoming apparent, problems for which the “nuclear” family, despite its increasing privacy and anonymity, was used as […]

Most of the issues described by Freud as constituting infantile and childhood sexuality appear (or reappear) during adolescence. The issues of masturbation, bisexuality, sadomasochism, castration anxiety, penis envy, and oedipal involvement can all be expected to make their appearance during adolescence. However, unlike their sequential appearance for the infant and child, for the adolescent they […]

Even granting Freud’s questionable assumption that fantasy might reach its peak during adolescence, it can hardly be said to begin with puberty.1 Though new contents and new issues are posed by entry into adolescence, in the evolution of fantasy, as in most aspects of human existence, there are powerful strains toward the preservation of continuities. […]

The sexual possibility is placed upon the agenda of the adolescent by both the concerns of relevant adults and the expectations of significant peers (Miller and Simon 1980). In contemporary society, not all adolescents will be sexually active, but very few will be inattentive. An initial effort at consolidation of a sexual subject during adolescence […]

Almost remembered youth Though the sexual may appear as a universal aspect of all social life, the timing of its formal recognition and consequent influence upon other aspects of individual development is far from being equally universal. On the societal level, some form of heterosexual genital intercourse is virtually universal; while not all members of […]

Where societies provide a tight, coercive, yet seemingly frictionless integration of sexual roles with all other roles, the need for the self-conscious management of a specifically sexual identity, one that accommodates both cultural meanings and intrapsychic response, is minimal. In such relatively stable, well-integrated cultural settings, “sexual habits” can be understood in much the same […]

From Freud we received some of our first insights into how the experiences of infancy and childhood influence all subsequent stages of development. The question raised at this point must be to what degree did Freud’s possible “failure” to come to terms with his own adolescent experience influence his view of childhood sexuality? To what […]