Читать книгу A Plea for Monogamy - Wilfrid Lay - Страница 10

Table of Contents

The recommendation to the neurotic patient to take up clandestine sex relationship is based on the same misinterpretation of psychoanalytic theory that is seen in the explanation given by shallow, self-styled psychoanalysts of Freud’s term “polymorphous perverse” as applied to the sexuality of children. Polymorphous means “of many shapes or patterns,” and implies that a child gets as much pleasure and satisfaction from stimulation of any one of its “erogenous zones” as it does from any other including the genital. This is quite easily comprehensible from the point of view that the child’s sexuality, like the unassembled parts of an automobile, is synthetized at puberty under the “primacy of the genital zones” whereupon all the pleasures of stimulation of all the other zones serve only as preliminaries to that of the genital.

And the word perverse in its etymological significance means only “turned in all directions,” i.e., as much toward one zone as to another. But the word perverse in its ordinary sense has the connotation of moral turpitude.

It would be as senseless to call a child’s interest in its skin, and pleasure in sucking its thumb or a piece of candy, perverse in this latter sense as it would be to call a ring gear of a differential wicked just because it was lying on the floor of a garage, and the mechanic had not yet put it in place.

Thus has Freud been misinterpreted and the good of all his fearless investigation into sexual life annulled by the shortsighted and ignorant misreading of his work on the part of so many of those who would call themselves his followers.