Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

Freud opens his second essay by repeating one of the key opening statements of his first essay: childhood is crucial to human sexual development, but a lack of research makes the subject difficult and obscure to parse. He attributes the lack of general awareness about infantile sexuality to what he calls infantile amnesia, his term to explain the fact that adults have virtually no memory of their earliest years of life. Freud argues that even though these years are shrouded in the mists of time, they are nevertheless hugely influential for the later sexual life of the adult. Over the course of childhood, factors such as loathing and shame help to condition the child in socially respectable ways, subduing and shaping their sexual instincts and their childlike shamelessness, and producing repressions and inhibitions of the sexual instinct. This “progressive process of suppression” occurs in a number of stages (42), culminating in the latency period of childhood. Freud argues that this is necessary for normal and civilized persons to emerge. He also suggests that these suppressions of the sexual instinct are not only the result of cultural forces and upbringing but emerge from something innate in the organism.