Samantha Worthing Professor Adam Haley English 137 H 10 October 2012 Rhetorical Analysis of Freud's Essay on Infantile Sexuality

Sex; everyone is doing it. According to Freud even our children have a sex life; one that holds fewer boundaries than adults sex lives. "It is a part of popular belief about the sexual impulse that it is absent in childhood and that it first appears in the period of life known as puberty. This, though an obvious error, is a serious one in its consequences and is chiefly due to our present ignorance of the fundamental principles of the sexual life," said Sigmund Freud in his essay on Infantile Sexuality. His essay continues to disturb people as they read his concept of how children develop sexually and how repression causes issues and affects adulthood sexual encounters. Freud developed the psychological principle of psychoanalysis and focused his studies on the many repressions and hysterics which were caused by sexual experiences as young children (Ciccarelli, White 10). Who among the masses is willing to consider and accept that their newborn baby, toddler, or small adolescent has sexual desires even if it is proven undoubtedly true? His essay, though many readers would like to believe Freud was out of his mind when he wrote it, is one rife with rhetorical quality and is deserving of a proper analysis. Visually his essay doesn't seem to take on much of an aesthetic manner; although we should be thankful for the lack of diagrams or images depicting children's sex lives. No penises or vaginas are illustrated between paragraphs. This essay is designed only by the structure of his words which Freud happens to take into some consideration. He breaks his essay into parts which have individual titles to give readers a sense of direction. They include: "The Sexual

Worthing 2 Latency Period of Childhood and Its Emergence," "The Manifestations of the Infantile Sexuality," "The Sexual Aim of the Infantile Sexuality," "The Masturbatic Sexual Manifestations," and " The Sources of the Infantile Sexuality." Within these different segments of his essay (perhaps the most horrific and descriptive one being "The Manifestations of the Infantile Sexuality") are subtitles which highlight his beliefs in the most basic wording. In this way he clearly outlined what he wanted his audience to grasp most affectively. In the first lines of his essay Freud begins with the above quote, immediately challenging a belief which he points out has been at the apex of infantile ideology for centuries. He is instantly calling out to anyone who believes infants have no sexual life and telling them they are making "an obvious error (Freud)." He introduces a type of logos which most of his audience will not be able to identify with and he knows it. Freud is adding a shock factor into his essay; a true attention grabber which will turn close-minded readers away and invoke readers who wish to be enlightened. Having said that, it is paramount to recognize that Freud made no mistake to offend those who were not intellectual enough to think over his ideas critically. He had a distinct audience in mind when writing Infantile Sexuality. His audience can be identified as open-minded scholars with college education and a relatively broad experience of the world. This is evident in that he uses sophisticated words such as "coitus" rather than a simpler term "intercourse." He adds a level of sophistication, something that people might be questioning after reading an essay on the sex life of a baby. Likewise, in the second paragraph of his essay, he attacks writers, scientists, and doctors, disregarding their theories on human behavior. This suggests that his essay is intended for educated people and experts in the field whom Freud wants to share his deductions.

Worthing 3 Freud dives into his theory on infantile sexuality by explaining why we have a tendency to want to pretend it doesn't exist in his section "The Sexual Latency Period and its Emergence." He describes the existence of infantile amnesia, an event in which humans forget everything that happens in their lives until they are around five or six years old. Infantile amnesia represses the memories, especially those which are sexual, and is necessary for the educational part of children's lives where most sexual desires are repressed until puberty. In his description of this event Freud compares it to a more well known form of amnesia called hysteric. Hysterics suffer from physical issues like loss of sight or inability to walk which do not have any biological support but instead are caused from repressed memories (Webster). Anyone familiar with the symptoms of a hysteric would recognize that behind both forms of amnesia are repressed emotions. In this way Freud is pulling on the ethos of a more well known medical condition of his time. Freud sums up his point that without infantile amnesia and the repression of our sexual among other actions from our childhood we would have no hysterics what so ever, and there would be no repression or negative thoughts on infantile sexuality. Ultimately, infantile amnesia is a good thing. Also, Freud uses a significant amount of personal pronouns such as "we," "I," and "us," getting readers to feel more pathologically involved in the essay. He makes personal connections with himself and the audience in a subtle way to make readers recognize that they suffered infantile amnesia as well. He wants to reach deep into the soul of his audience to persuade them that their memories, including those which were sexual, have almost all been forgotten and repressed. As I read this part of his essay I understood and accepted the existence of infantile amnesia well because of the personal reflections that Freud's first person point of view forced me to do.

Worthing 4 Freud follows up his discussion on infantile amnesia explaining how it occurs through the period of latency. During this time children are educated and learn that certain acts are socially unacceptable and the repression which causes infantile amnesia begins. Here Freud evokes pathological emotions using words such as "shame," "loathing," and "morals." Readers instantly feel the serious and sorrowful tone which is reveal in this portion of the essay. He uses phrases which, though their intents may not be so, appear to be intimating at a negative ideology of social repression. He says, "the psychic forces develop [during the latency period] which later act as inhibitions on the sexual life, and narrow its direction like dams." A dam is associated with something that prevents thoughts and desires from flowing freely which is usually not a welcomed thought to humanity. Though he speaks of the period of latency as a necessary portion of our lives for social acceptance and understanding, his affect on the audience is not such and from there his reputation only gets worse. Freud describes "The Manifestations of the Infantile Sexuality" in the forms of thumb sucking and autoeroticism. This section of his essay holds one of his infamous, and, to some, heinous concepts. Readers who know of Freud will more than likely have an automatic repulsion from him because of his "everything is a penis or a vagina and all of you want to have sex with your parents" overview. However, this summarization of Freud's theory on sexuality is a fallacy brought on by the misinterpretations of shocking descriptions of the phases of infantile sexuality. Thumb sucking, known today as being a habit of children because of their desire for nourishment, is made sexual by Freud and described to lead to masturbation. However, reading between the lines one recognizes that Freud is considering the desire for nourishment to be a pleasurable, thereby sexual, one (Breger 141). If one views the entire description of infantile

Worthing 5 sexuality, how it manifests, and what objects it desires, the ideology is somewhat more acceptable. There is an obvious misconception of Freud's ideologies and theories which make most people who know of him very disgusted with him. We hold onto what we consider to be right through social bounds, and Freud definitely breaks those and runs freely. Despite most misconceptions of Freud's essay, I agree on some of his points. Infantile amnesia is a logical event. Who among this audience can remember more than a few fragmented moments in your earliest years of life? I surely cannot. Furthermore it does seem to make sense to me that children can have sexual tendencies if we relate sexual tendencies with pleasurable feelings derived from nourishment or care. Humans are naturally sexual creatures with attractive bodies and sometimes untamable desires. We take pleasure from sex, we take comfort from sex, we reproduce from sex. Perhaps Freud, being known for using mind-altering drugs, took things to an extremist level. Most of us will agree that a child wanting food does not equate to a child wanting sex. Some points are not well laid out in his essay and are therefore exaggerated by readers. However, what I am considering to be his intent in this essay is to explain that children, as young as they come, want to feel good. These good feelings, or pleasures, relate to sexual objects and aims. A babies sexual aim is to feel full in its tummy and safe in its mother/father's arms. Its sexual object therefore is the food its ingesting and the parents which care for it. We do not remember our sexual desires as children because they were repressed during the period of latency and a form of infantile amnesia swept over us. People who suffer from hysteria or other forms of sexual abhorrence have some form of repressed memory which prohibits them from functioning properly. Sigmund Freud broke the barriers of socially acceptable ideologies through this essay and every other one he wrote. Whether we like it or not, he must have been onto something for

Worthing 6 his essays to receive such a heavy lashing of discussion because here we are a century later still deliberating.

Worthing 7 Works Cited Breger, Louis. Clinical-Cognitive Psychology: Models and Integrations. Ed. Richard A. Lazarus. New Jersey. Prentice- Hall Inc, 1969. Web. Ciccarelli, Saundra K., and J. Noland White. Psychology. 3rd ed. New Jersey. Pearson Education Inc, 2012. Print. Freud, Sigmund. Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory: II. The Infantile Sexuality. Ed. A. A. Brill. New York. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company, 1910. Web. Webster, Richard. Freud, Charcot and hysteria: lost in the labyrinth. richardwebster.net. Web. 9 October 2012.