Freud : his dream and sex theories / by Joseph Jastrow.

  • Joseph Jastrow
Date:
1948,
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Freud : his dream and sex theories / by Joseph Jastrow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    childhood there is an acceptance of sex-objects which, if continued in later life, becomes a perversion, and by virtue of the diffuse distribution of child libido, what was formerly described (when psychology was innocent of psychoanalysis) as the age of innocence, now bears the formidable name: “polymorphous perverse.” That is what children are by nature; it represents a 3tage of their development. The radiations of sex at this criti¬ cal period are many. Being in love with one’s self rep¬ resents the narcissism of childhood. There is also the tendency to exhibit the body, exhibitionism; and an interest in the bodies of others, especially of the op¬ posite sex, voyeurism or inspectionism, h la peeping Tom. Sex perversions, homosexuality particularly, are fixations or regressioas in the development of libido. Volumes have been written on the Freudian theme of the aberrations of sexual love in children. It is as though by an unfortunate arrangement of nature, children were afflicted with parents which, like other children’s diseases, they must outgrow. Libido has a family setting, for which Freud develops a “family romance.” The Freudianized family appears to be not a pleasantly domestic circle, but a seething and some¬ what vulgarian center of strife. The typical complex is a parental one. Freud gives it a dignity by calling it classically the Oedipus Complex. The boy’s libido is directed toward the mother, his envy toward the father, whose place he wishes to usurp. As the story of Oedipus is that of the royal son doomed to kill his father and marry his mother, all unwittingly, in unconscious obed¬ ience to the decrees of fate, the source of the title-role is in so far located. Though the Greek drama does not at all follow the Freudian sequence, yet it is held that the Greek dramatist intuitively projected the plot of which Freud discovered the generic application. The
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