In this same early essay, Freud deals with two orders of neuroses. In the case of the first of these, psycho-neuroses, he f ound inquiry into the current sexual practices of patients to be of little value. As early as 1898, Freud believed such psycho-neuroses to be rooted in the experiences of infancy and childhood and repressed beyond recall except for those made accessible through psychoanalytic hermeneutics. The second, however, neurasthenic disorders, he believed was a direct result of current sexual practices.
Neurasthenia [symptoms would include intracranial pressure, proneness to fatigue, dyspepsia, constipation, spinal irritation, etc.] can always be traced back to a condition of the nervous system such as is acquired by excessive masturbation or arises spontaneously from frequent emissions; anxiety neuroses regularly disclose sexual influences which have in common the factor of reservation or of incomplete satisfaction—such as coitus interruptus, abstinence together with a lively libido, so-called unconsummated excitation, and so on…. [A]nxiety is always libido that has been deflected from its [normal] employment.
(Freud 1898:268)
The most common of these “pathogenic” forms of sexual expression was masturbation; masturbation, as Freud viewed it, represented a form of addiction as difficult to treat as narcotic addiction, requiring medical supervision preferably within a hospital setting. Indeed, he viewed masturbation as “the primal form of addiction” (Gay 1989:170). Freud’s negative views of masturbation persisted despite a growing number of colleagues who would set the stage for the subsequent normalization of masturbation. In his remarks concluding the 1912 discussions of masturbation held by the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Freud points to a “positive” contribution of masturbation as a lesser evil:
On the basis of my medical experience, I cannot rule out a permanent reduction in potency as one of the results of masturbation.. This particular result of masturbation, however, cannot be classified unhesitatingly among the injurious ones. Some diminution of male potency and of the brutal aggressiveness involved in it is much to the purpose from the point of view of civilization. It facilitates the practice by civilized men of the virtues of sexual moderation and trustworthiness that are incumbent on them. Virtue accompanied by full potency is usually felt as a hard task.
(Freud 1912:252, italics added)
One can find plausible explanations for why the rhetoric
surrounding masturbatory prohibitions, which reached its height during the latter part of the nineteenth century, was so readily institutionalized as scientific and conventional wisdom. The widespread endorsement and dissemination of antimasturbation beliefs undoubtedly served as powerfully personalized metaphors for the regimes of self-discipline required by the emerging urban-industrial societies of Western capitalism. The prevailing concepts of prudential investment within the realm of the economy necessarily found their counterpart in the prudent managing of the realm of emotional life (Weber 1958; Foucault 1978).
I agree with Foucault that the inhibitory discourses about masturbation, the explicit threats of disease, decay, and uncontrollable perversions, tended to encourage much of the prohibited behavior. However, the potency of such discourses rested upon the larger individuating sociocultural processes, such as those described by Elias (1978) and Trilling (1972), that helped create the modern self and by doing so gave the masturbatory experience meanings not generally known previously. The major condition for this increased significance of masturbation, if not its increased frequency, was the development of an interior self distinct from any of the selfs overt appearances; a lack of a consensual, public clarity about the individual’s present and future sexual roles; and a dramatization of the sexual as intensely pleasuring, morally significant, and inherently dangerous. There was clearly a waiting audience for the anti — masturbatory rhetoric, an audience with existing anxieties, anxieties in search of explanation.
The theme of regulation, the disciplining of emotional response, is of course one of the major themes in Freud’s writings. This is evident in his welcoming of the presumed potency-reducing consequences of masturbation. In a similar vein, Helene Deutsch recalled that in a small seminar Freud stated his opposition to Wilhelm Reich’s insistence that sexual activity should begin in adolescence— that is as soon as biological readiness is manifested. Freud regarded the postponement of gratification as an important element in the process of sublimation and thereby essential to development (cited by Offer 1969:215).
One must ask how Freud, having passed safely through his own adolescence, could continue through most of his life to defend the validity of masturbatory prohibitions? Given the intensity of his feelings, it is almost unthinkable that Freud could have found nothing in either the content of his own post-pubertal masturbatory experiences or the tactics for managing that temptation to inform his treatment of the behavior or to interest him in its content and imagery, which appears so uninforming and unconcerned with content and imagery.
If Freud as a practicing physician was capable of believing in the toxic potentials of masturbation, how less inf ormed and more subject to anxiety and panic must have been the sexual encounters of the naive adolescent Sigmund Freud? Answers to the question of Freud’s history of sexual development have been provided recently by Isbister, who indicates that masturbation was not an innovation of Freud’s early adulthood:
It is known for certain, from his own lips, that Freud was not a virgin when he married…. Similarly, it is also clear that Freud was engaged in sexual activity during this time but of an autoerotic kind, that is to say, during his engagement Freud found sexual release through masturbation. Masturbation, a solution that he had sought for the frustrations of his calflove in his teens, was the only solution for Freud at this time.
(Isbister 1985:87)
Ascertaining that Freud’s view of masturbation was in part conditioned by his own experience adds to the signif icance of what can only be termed his exaggerated views of its pathogenic potentials. Indeed, Isbister suggests that Jones and Bernfeld had information that the fantasies of “gross sexual aggression” reported in Freud’s 1899 paper on “Screen Memories” were in fact his own (Isbister 1985:88). In not fully confronting his own adolescent experience and by displacing it, Freud may have failed to fully appreciate the role of masturbatory experience in psychosexual development or its role in the most general aspects of development.
Of Freud’s actual experiences in adolescence, relatively little appears in what presently constitutes the public record. The periods of childhood and youth are covered in less than fifteen pages in the official biography by Ernest Jones, where Freud’s adolescence is described as “a calmer development than the majority of youth” (Jones 1953:20). Klumpner, however, adopts a far less charitable view.
It seems to me that the Screen Memories paper supports the opposite hypothesis, namely that as late as May, 1899, there is no evidence that he had in any way analyzed his adolescent conflicts. Why would anyone who had mastered his adolescent struggles have to camouflage his materialistic or sexual fantasies from age seventeen behind a screen memory about dandelions and the delicious taste of a big piece of black bread? Rather, the paper on screen memories can be considered as evidence of a continuing defensive struggle with limited, if any, insight into the nature of the underlying conflicts.
(Klumpner 1978:19)
Though more contemporary psychoanalytic theorists, such as Blos (1962, 1985), Laufer (1976), Laufer and Laufer (1989) and Kaplan (1988), adopt a somewhat more balanced view than Freud, without exception they view the contributory consequences of masturbation as a necessary risk, one fraught with the familiar dangers of regression and fixation. Virtually without exception they view the positive consequences of masturbation in terms of an unmodified commitment to a concept of genital maturity that carries its own time-line. For them, genital intercourse and its desired “discharges” remain truly “the real thing”. The risks that concern them involve the revitalizing of the longings for infantile forepleasures or pregenitality that inevitably attract attention away from the more authentic meaning of true genital engagement.
The dangers are the legacies of earlier development, while healthfulness involves the fulfilling conventional social expectations of some point in the distant future. With the exception of concerns for physical transformations, few of the existential challenges of adolescence are viewed as having significant influence. It is apparent that these contemporary theorists are largely indifferent to the evident changes across the century in the erotic content of the surrounding social landscape or to the changed patterns of sociosexual behavior, which begins for many during the early and middle adolescent years.