Freud, Mead, and Malinowski Sexuality

Freud, Mead, And Malinowski

Sexuality And Eroticism

Freud, Mead, and Malinowski: Struggling to understand human sexuality

ometimes a cigar is just a cigar,' 'Freudian slip.' The ideas and concepts of Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis, have become so ubiquitous and part of Western culture and language, it is easy to forget that they did not always exist, fully formed, within our modern and post-modern worldview. "It is perhaps one of its chief merits that it forges another link between these three divisions of the science of man," that of biology, psychology, and sociology" wrote anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (Malinowski 1). The notion that we have a subconscious, and certain aspects of our consciousness are unknown, even to ourselves, was born with Freud, when Freud wrote: "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 a common error, is serious in its consequences and is chiefly due to our present ignorance of the fundamental principles of the sexual life" (Freud 1920).

Simply because we forget or repress our childhood sexual feelings does not mean that they did not exist, and do not exist within the psyches of our own children. Freud's writings, however widely critiqued, opened the door to a more critical and scientific examination of the role of human sexual impulses in societies across the world. "The open treatment of sex and of various shameful meanesses and vanities in man -- the very things for which psycho-analysis is most hated and reviled -- is in my opinion of the greatest value to science, and should endear psycho-analysis, above all to the student of man; that is, if he wants to study his subject without irrelevant trappings and even without the fig leaf (Malinowski viii).

The concept of childhood sexuality, or sexuality as something natural, and hard-wired into the human psyche was revolutionary when introduced. "No author has to my knowledge recognized the normality of the sexual impulse in childhood, and in the numerous writings on the development of the child the chapter on 'Sexual Development' is usually passed over" (Freud 1920). Freud also 'normalized' the concept of deviance, and advanced the notion that what we call perversion is not so different from the normal arc of sexual development. "The union of the genitals in the characteristic act of copulation is taken as the normal sexual aim. It serves to loosen the sexual tension and temporarily to quench the sexual desire (gratification analogous to satisfaction of hunger). Yet even in the most normal sexual process those additions are distinguishable, the development of which leads to the aberrations described as perversions" (Freud 1920).

Of course, to many, Freud's theory of normal human sexual development itself seemed deviant. Freud, when looking at an infant sucking his or her thumb did not see innocence, but a less obvious form of eroticism or self-stimulation. The only reason infants seem 'pure' is because of the middle childhood latency period of forgetting, where memories of infantile sexuality are repressed within our own psyches. The activation of the oral zone through breastfeeding and the anal zone through toilet training are all erogenous activities for the child. Onto the innocent projection of Victorian family life, Freud imposed a vision of primal drama which he called the Oedipus Complex for boys -- the boy desires to murder the father and possess the mother, and when the son sees he cannot kill his father, he merely tries to mimic the behavior of the father as a substitute form of gratification. In girls, penis envy, or the envy of the father and the dislike of the mother who has denied the girl a penis is known as the Electra Complex. These complexes serve a primitive utility in preventing incest, but children who are forced to feel guilty about their sexuality may develop fixations or arrested development, like fetishes or frigidity. Primitive, Attic drama was evidenced even in the modern drawing-room and almost inevitably produced a wounded psyche.

As a researcher and scientist, Freud's limitations lie in his anecdotal approach -- he lacks scientific, empirical data regarding the cases he draws from, and so his theories are often impressionistic at best, and at worse subject to the prejudices of his time, such as his discussion of female frigidity. Furthermore, because he was so anxious to question the hostility regarding discussions of sexuality in Victorian society, he also emphasized sexuality above all other drives, to the point of ignoring other impulses, such as self-preservation, Platonic relationships with friends and fostering self-esteem through work -- Freud sees all impulses as extensions of the sexual impulse. Because he came from a hyper-repressive society that tried to repress sex, perhaps inevitably Freud 'saw' sexual repression and sexuality everywhere in a way that might not be evidenced had he come from another culture. Freud has also been criticized for giving insufficient attention to biology and its influence on human behavior.

A similar criticism was leveled at anthropologist Margaret Mead, author of Coming of Age in Samoa. For example, according to the essay "Samoa: The adolescent girl," (2006) critic Derek Freedman argued that Mead: "ignored violence in Samoan life, did not have a sufficient background in -- or give enough emphasis to -- the influence of biology on behavior, did not spend enough time in Samoa, and was not familiar enough with the Samoan language." A lack of attention to cultural distinctions was another criticism frequently leveled at Freud, although ironically Mead, in her seminal ethnography, was trying to demonstrate that patterns of adolescent development were not universal constructs, and in Polynesia, there were not the same sexual anxieties that afflicted American teens, specifically girls.

When published, Mead's work attracted a wide readership, partially because she wrote during an era when flappers and sexual liberation were on the minds of many Americans. "Romantic love as it occurs in our civilization," wrote Mead, "inextricably bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness jealousy, and undeviating fidelity," does not occur in Samoa -- love songs and protestations of undying love are only superficial indications of such feelings (Mead 49). Mead presented a much sunnier picture of primitive, savage life than Freud, who believed that such impulses towards repression and violence had always existed, and produced the modern neuroses he dealt with in his practice.

In Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead painted a picture of a "primitive" society where girls experimented freely with their sexuality, and where virginity was often only symbolically demonstrated with token gestures upon marriage, except for girls of high rank, while parents of low rank "complacently" ignore their daughter's premarital experimentation and transgressions (Mead 70). While the anthropological accuracy of Mead's work has been disputed, there can be no denying that the perception that it created within American culture was seismic -- no longer was it assumed to be natural to undergo certain inevitable stages of sexual angst on the way to maturity. Sex, in Mead's Samoan vision, was free and unfettered, and viewed with humor, rather than as something with dire social consequences. Age and maturity, rather than sex, tended to delineate one's role and the respect one was accorded in the community, and girls even when "unmarried" were still "highly regarded" (Mead 30). Mead did not live with the Samoans, and her portrait was undeniably incomplete and perhaps 'bad' anthropology but reading Mead reveals a great deal of what she and many other educated women of her generation may have aspired to become when the book was published.