Libido Theory
Libido theory is part of Freud’s generalized theory of instincts. I shall not concern myself here with the scientific and epistemological questions raised over the years about the concept of instinct (or drive); instead, I wish only to discuss libido theory, that description of the maturation of sexuality as a movement and elaboration through stages, each of which has its focus on a different part of the body. Concomitant with his object relations theory, embodied in his description of the oedipus complex, Freud saw a development, governed by an inherited timing mechanism, in which—in all humans— “psychic energy” converges on a part of the body, “cath-ecting” it with “libido.” (I do not have time—seventy years was not enough—to discuss the pros and cons of the concept of “psychic energy,” nor need we be concerned here that neither “cathexis” nor “libido" was ever defined in scientific terms.)
The inexorable progress of libidinal development starts with the oral phase, wherein the infant’s life-preservative, affectionate, and sensual drives center in the mouth and its functions. Next is the anal phase, with its pleasures of expelling and retaining feces (and urine), and then the phallic phase, in which boy and girl focus on their intense penile or clitoral sensations and note their anatomical differences. The final libidinal phase is genital maturity, consisting of loving and genitally gratifying heterosexual relations, and is reached only by those fortunate few who surmount the oedipal conflict. To this theory of libido, a conceptual groundwork for all human psychology, was added an important corollary, that different emotional disorders took their origin from two sorts of disturbances occurring at one of these libidinal phases: fixation due to excessive gratification during that phase, or regression because of anxiety from a more advanced to an earlier phase. This special theory is mentioned now only because Freud based his theories of the production of perversions particularly on the libido theory’s description of sexual advance from zone to zone.
As a description of human childhood development, Freud’s observations on zonal phases have been confirmed and can be so any time with biologically normal children. However, no studies have been published that confirm the implications drawn from the observations. It has not yet been shown that any class of neurosis, including perversion, or psychosis is caused by a disruption of the sensual experiences of the mouth, defecatory or urinary systems, or phallus (see, for example, 99, 11). (There is, however, much evidence that disturbed object relations during these phases cause psychopathology.) Libido theory as an explanation of neurosogenesis has been so far off base that it has never attracted serious attempts to test it by scientific methods.
An odd piece of libido theory is the notion that libido is a quantitative energy that flows or can be dammed and that the function of the “mental apparatus" is to reduce the “instinctual tension"—unpleasure—that results from such damming. True, people usually get pleasure from tension reduction, as with sleeping, eating, intercourse, excreting, affect discharges, skin scratching, and so forth. But is that an effect of the postulated libido? Being a neurophysiological construct, libido can be challenged by a neurophysiological model. As it turns out, libido is as hard to seize as were the “humors" of past eras. Rather, mammals (113), including man (66), have a precise brain center that produces the subjective experience called pleasure. Experimentally, it does not deplete as if drained. It can be turned on and off endlessly, so that an animal can experience the same degree of intense pleasure even thousands of times an hour (113). Even the most parsimonious explanation of pleasure at present does not resemble this hydraulic model of a flow of substance or energy; the energic requirements of a central nervous system switching mechanism are infinitesimal.
Conflict
Two types of painful situations can influence personality development and thus sexual development. First there are traumas (acute, chronic, or cumulative), severe impingements on the infant by events not felt as emanating from its own psyche. These events may be unpleasant internal sensations, such as hunger, body pain, or respiratory distress, or they may be external struggles against objects separate from one’s body that frustrate or traumatize—inanimate objects intermittently and important people persistently, especially mother at first. Not all traumas produce conflict; the second category of painful situations, conflict, implies intrapsychic struggle in order to choose among possibilities. Thus, if a small child has a powerful sensual impulse that is forbidden by his parent, this does not cause infrapsychic conflict even though the child may change his outward behavior when the parent punishes him. Later in childhood, however, if the parents’ value system has been learned and accepted (internalized) by the child, there will be present within the psyche a set of moral positions received from the parents plus an inner technique of self-punishment based on guilt. This then exemplifies intrapsychic conflict: one part of oneself threatening or punishing another part, frustrating the latter’s drive toward a gratification.
Trauma or frustration may cause reaction (change) rather than conflict. For instance, early in infantile development a stimulus may produce change without conflict by an ethological process like imprinting, by classical conditioning, or by operant conditioning. (These participate in creating such nonconflictual behavior as modes of speech or preferences in toys, clothes, or food.) Freud did not believe trauma caused perversion of sexual development until it caused conflict; conflict is awareness of the need to choose between alternatives and requires a development advanced enough that memory, judgment, and perhaps fantasy are beginning to influence behavior. He seems to leave no room for the idea of a sexual aberration that is not also a perversion, that is, a habitual aberrant erotic act not the product of conflict: “We were thus led to regard any established aberration from normal sexuality as an instance of developmental inhibition and infantilism’’ (24, p. 231). For him, all sexual aberration resulted from fixations and traumas at the various stages of childhood libidinal development, with the threats and punishments surrounding desire for parents—the oedipal conflict—as the decisive factors.
Freud’s theory of the causes of perversion (as of all sexuality) is a combination of the five categories we have been considering: bisexuality, oedipus complex, the primacy of the penis, libido theory, and conflict. Granted variably powerful constitutional influences, such as inherited bisexual tendencies or unusual constitutional capacity for pleasurable sensation in a nongenital part of the body, he felt that, above all else, it was infantile conflict—castration anxiety, preoedipal and oedipal conflict, fear of heterosexuality—that changed normal sexuality into perversion. In briefest summary, he believed that perversion in males was due to the boy’s fear that his desire for his mother could lead to his father cutting off his prized penis, which would make the boy the same as a girclass="underline" inferior anatomically and psychically because of castration. In the girl, perversion was said to result from the inability to come to terms with the fact that she is already castrated; she must deny that fact by overemphasizing the value of her clitoris, which prevents her from shifting to the more feminine vagina or makes her unwilling to turn to her father—to heterosexuality. Without taking her father as her new love object (renouncing her mother), she fails to enter into the oedipal conflict as a feminine person who wants to be made whole by a baby. Perversion may mark failure at any step in the process of oedipal development in boys and girls. (In addition to this oedipal [interpersonal] theory, Freud felt that specific elements in perverse acts are the result of libidinal fixation. By this, he meant that when the child’s further development was blocked by castration anxiety, the boy or girl might fall back on earlier libidinal gratifications. If, for any reason, mouth, anus or bowel, urethra, skin, or any other body part had been the focus of intense libidinal excitement earlier, the child could regress to this safer and more gratifying “position” in the face of severe anxiety. This accounted, for instance, for anal intercourse among male homosexuals or oral intercourse in male or female homosexuals.)