Determinants 2

Sigmund Freud, when a child, happened upon his parents while they were making love. He wrote later, and others joined him in writing about what he had written, that the experience had an effect on his life. So there's an example from my 'Determinants' previous post of "accident" playing a role in how we respond in childhood to our sexuality; because it's obvious to most parents that childhood sexuality begins almost immediately. A comic example mentioned by Anthropologist Clyde Kluckholn in my Humanities 5 undergraduate college class, was the spectacle of Navajo, young Indian boys (members of a peaceful Native American tribe) breast feeding with an erection; A fact which might for most suggest earlier weaning.

Freud's confession was used in an attack on Freud's psychoanalytic postulates by a Medical doctor, Nat Morris, in his 1974 book A Man Possessed. The whole scheme of the attack was repeated in 2004 by another Medical Doctor, from Northern Ontario, Canada, Medical School. Medicine wants the psyche for IT'S province. So far it's failed miserably.

Earlier than the firewood-gathering saga, in which I repeatedly mentioned I simply did not know, and do not know now what happened, where we lived some miles from my Grandmother when my family first returned from America, there was at the end of our tennis court, behind the house, a neighbor's carpentry workplace. On a gorgeous sunny day, early in the morning, the neighbor choreographed a scene in which I stood on the stairs to his workshop and watched him masturbate. I now know that some child abusers are clever at directing very young children and come from a place where they consider what they are doing is completely normal, sane and ordinary. I was three or four at the time.  So young that I was still in what must have been the traditional anal stage of childhood development. After the scene watched from the steps, some days later, I took a cricket stump, speared a large human turd in the tennis court outhouse, and flung it in the direction of the carpenter's workplace.  Later still, when a cousin visited, I led a pantomime in which we would hammer nails into the head of the carpenter. From this I deduce that the scene I watched was later interpreted by me as having been a violation.Even, or especially, children know what is right, and what is not so right.

There is one other memory from about the time we lived with my Grandmother that I have told very few people. My impression, now vague, is that the very few I told it too failed to convey they knew what I'd said. So, I'll try again. A neighbor child, a girl my age, played with me in the empty garage at the end of the front yard. In the garage there was a oil can with a long, thick spout. I couldn't have been older than five. I put a few drops of oil in the depression of her navel, while she was lying on the oil-slicked floor, on her back. I then sealed the oil, or tried to, with a piece of plastercene (playdough). Is it too much of a stretch to posit that at age five boys sometimes symbolically impregnate?

Unlike Freud not only did I never see my parents making love I have not one single memory of them even touching, or even sitting near each other. Yet, they were nearly always together for more than fourteen years when my mother died of polio. By huge contrast, while my father was away in the war my mother was so lonely she had me sleep in her bed. On one occasion she had me put my arm around her while she slept on her side with her back to me. It was awkward, a long way to reach up. Not long after, days later, I asked her if I could see her breasts. She quietly declined. When we returned from the surf we would stand in our swim suits at the hall mirror, shoulder to shoulder, looking back into the mirror, to see who had the best tan.

So, when I read 'Medical' books pooh-poohing Freud's theory of childhood sexuality I'm certain from experience that they are wrong, and worse, probably in denial. Similarly, not finding anything Oedipal in Hamlet, and making too much of the fact the Greek didn't know he was marrying his mother, I just laugh. Little boys get their cues to adult sexuality from their mothers, period!

Barry