At the age of sixty-nine, Freud finally accepted masturbation as not debilitating. Perhaps women seemed not quite as debilitated as they did during his youth. In his time Freud was both a prisoner and a revolutionary; Freud changed his culture, and the culture changed Freud.
Now clergymen receive training in sex counseling and
there are sex therapists or clinics in every major city. Popu
lar magazines carry material that would have been considered
pornographic in Freud's era. Nude beaches and clinging
T-shirts with sayings about oral sex are here. We teach sex in
the grammar school and allow adolescents into drive-in theaters
where the PG-rated show would have been rated triple-
X just two decades ago. We wonder whether the male erection
will persist in spite of women's liberation.
Freud's theories
no longer shock us, and yet, three quarters of a century
later, we continue to avoid our children's sexuality.
Havelock Ellis faced rejection, Freud provoked ridicule,
and in 1948 Alfred Kinsey met renewed furor with the first
scientific attempt to define and study human sexuality. He
included a study of childhood eroticism because he considered
such a study essential to the understanding of the adult
response.
He interviewed children as young as age two and found
that many had learned about sex around the time they had
begun to talk. He noted that girls were much more constricted
and inexperienced than boys and related this to the
extraordinary incidence of sex problems in women. Those
few women who reported childhood masturbation reported a
far higher rate of orgasm in marriage.
Kinsey dispelled a tenacious myth which Freud and many
others had espoused. "Ladies" were assumed to possess at
best an anemic, fragile response; Kinsey unequivocally demonstrated
that women have the greater and more durable
erotic potential.
In 1966, nearly twenty years after Kinsey began to publish,
William Masters and Virginia Johnson demolished
another, seemingly impenetrable, barrier. In the scientific
laboratory, they observed and recorded approximately
14,000 sex acts and studied the humans who could or could
not function. Masters and Johnson came to recognize the
immense importance of childhood influences. In Human Sexual
Response, they state: "Neither this book nor this chapter
can be complete without emphasizing an acute awareness of
the vital, certainly the primary influence, exerted by early
psychosocial factors upon human sexuality, particularly that
of orgasmic attainment of the female."
Following Masters and Johnson's revelations, a number of
prominent psychiatrists examined and elaborated on their
basic postulates. One well-recognized expert is Helen Singer
Kaplan, M.D., author of The New Sex Therapy. On the basis
of her work with countless clients, she describes our society
as sexually confused and constricted. She states: "Conflicts
between sexual wishes and fears of retaliation from gods,
society and parents are ubiquitous and perhaps unavoidable
to some extent in our society with our current child-rearing
practices...every manifestation of a person's craving for sexual
pleasure is apt to be denied, ignored or treated as a
shameful thing, and in general relentlessly assaulted with
painful associations and consequences, especially during the
critical childhood years."
It is the very intensity of the sex
drive that creates its vulnerability. It can be distorted, constricted,
dehumanized, and even entirely eliminated by
early, severe trauma. "This phenomenon is well known to the
horse breeder who carefully pads the breeding stall, lest his
expensive stud injure himself during coitus and thus refuse
to mate thereafter."