existence of extreme cases at the two ends of the series.
(p- 239]
By “the accidental factor” he means environmental experience, and he is saying here what most of us believe: the importance of the biological or the environmental in determining sexual behavior varies from person to person and from one time to the next. Feeling that all his psychoanalytic theories were ultimately biological, he did not adequately differentiate between biological philosophizing and the rigors of biological research. The former should be ignored (although, unfortunately, it has been the basis of the fiercest battles inside psychoanalysis, for example, the concept of psychic energy, life versus death instinct, libido theory, Lamarckian inheritance of past experiences of the human race) unless analysts are also willing to do the scientific work necessary to defend these theories.
In fact, on putting aside Freud’s “biologizing,” we find his contributions, now standing clear, perhaps even more formidable. One of the greatest of these has been his emphasis on infantile and childhood sexuality. He underlined the crucial importance of parent-child relationships (we shall look at that shortly when discussing the oedipus complex) as a cornerstone of his work almost from the start. What Freud undertook, as early as 1900 (23), was the most powerful and explanatory social learning theory of human development ever proposed.
Over the decades, his biological speculations have not been confirmed. However, his interpersonal theories and his observations of parent-child interactions, many fundamentals of which have not been refuted, have been a rich source for innumerable researchers to the present (including many who, to their shame, refuse to acknowledge his gift to them).
Freud told us, as no one had before, that parents have the greatest possible influence on their children’s development, that children create psychic structure in response, that adult sexual life can be traced back to effects in infancy, and that sexual desire and gratification have origins in infancy, long before their obvious upsurge at puberty. Exactly how parents transmit these influences to their children has been the subject of increasing study by analysts and nonanalysts for years. Freud’s ideas spurred the researches of physiologists, behaviorists, ethologists, general systems theorists—innumerable workers who now believe infancy and childhood are crucial developmental phases.
Social learning theorists, as they are called in academic circles, or object relations theorists, as they are known among psychoanalysts, have, of course, great theoretical differences. These may obscure an overriding similarity: the belief that behavior can be radically modified solely by the effects of one person on another. These workers also share the belief that the personality of the infant and small child, more than that of the adult, is especially vulnerable to permanent behavior modification. Their major area of disagreement may be over the question whether trauma, conflict, defense, and compromise formation as a resolution of conflict contribute fundamentally to personality formation.
We must here separate out the two different aspects of sexuality presented earlier. The first is that concerned with genital pleasure, more or less tied to reproductive behavior or its avoidance, and the other is gender behavior, that related to masculinity and femininity. Here again I wish to emphasize the danger of extrapolating from animal to human behavior, even if such caution is currently unfashionable. Of all the areas of behavior in which there is discontinuity between animals, even primates, and man, the greatest is in motivated behavior. The evolutionary rule is not only that certain fundamental behaviors persist, tied to neuroanatomic structures and circuits that are constant across species, but also that the higher one goes in the evolutionary scale, the greater the amount of choice available to the organism.
The brain substrates of what we call “choice” or “freedom" simply do not exist in any other creature as in man. No one seriously questions that man’s potential for variability of behavior is greater than that of any other animal or that man’s behavior, even in its neurophysiological roots, requires more priming (organization) by environment. For instance, we can search the evolutionary scale forever to find biological roots for aggression, but we cannot determine from that source why man so easily murders his own kind. Perhaps someday we shall find a thalamic focus for penile erections in man such as exists in monkeys (89); that sort of behavior—the fundament—obeys evolutionary rules. But there is a whole other level of behavior that is much more complicated, though the final action is simple and physiological—say, erection. The input leading to this latter behavior is not only thalamic or hypothalamic but goes through the unknown neurophysiology that is the result of previous experience fixed in memory and modified by fantasy (especially unconscious fantasy). It is unique to man. Man remembers differently from other animals: he symbolizes and he fantasies, and in that way he not only remakes the past but invents the future he anticipates.
In closer relation to our subject, an evolutionary perspective has failed to teach us much about human sexual desires, object choices, or pathology. For instance, the perversions, with their habitual, driving need for aberrant genital satisfaction, are not found in free-ranging members of lower species, but they are ubiquitous in man. The puny attempts to demonstrate perversion in lower animals (for example, the assertion that cows that mount other females are homosexuals) are not edifying.
Similarly, studies that reveal the distortions of behavior that can be permanently built into animals by experiments (such as conditioning, imprinting, or implanting electrodes in discrete brain structures) tell us about potentialities but do not give us answers about free-ranging behavior in man; the data only show us more questions we should ask. In other words, these findings in animals confirm nothing about humans; they only suggest. It is important for analysts, however, to recognize that, when theory-building, they ignore such suggestions at their peril.
For Freud, sexual development depends powerfully on relationships between parents and their child—the oedipus complex. Let us quickly review this hypothesis.
First, masculinity. The infant male, blessed with his inherently superior biological state, starts life as a heterosexual, says Freud. From the moment he becomes a separate being—the moment of birth—the first object of his awareness, intimacy, need, and love is a person of the opposite sex, a female, his mother. Becoming aware of the world around him and of his own body, he recognizes that his penis is a source of intense sensations and serves as the prime evidence of his maleness and therefore his superiority. This may even be reinforced by an inherited, unconscious sense of primacy. He shortly learns by observation (and perhaps, again inherently, even as part of the wisdom of the collective unconscious) that he is different from another group called females. By this point in infancy, then, he prizes his maleness. As his body develops, he reaches a phase in which his penis is the focus of intense erotic sensation. This excitement and its demand for gratification are inextricably linked with his first and continuing love object, his mother, and so he wishes to take his father’s place in hefitfe.'However, being small and vulnerable, he cannot do so, for his powerful father blocks the way. Any hopes he has of possessing his mother are dashed by the threat of castration and its inevitable consequent anxiety. And so, over a period of several years, he struggles to control his oedipal wishes, and will succeed, without severe damage to masculinity, if he can learn that his sexual wishes for his mother can be deferred, to be played out on another female later in life. Although a rival in this struggle, his father also becomes his ally by serving as a model for masculinity and encouraging the boy to emulate masculine behavior, as long as it does not include possession of his mother.