Page - 43 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Psychosexual development in puberty 43 In his essay “A Child is Being Beaten”, Freud (1919) describes precisely how some of his female patients could hardly relinquish their daydreams of a child being beaten. Freud describes his interpretation of these fantasies step by step: “The child being beaten is never the one producing the phantasy, but is invariably another child, most often a brother or a sister” (Freud 1919, 184). In the first phase of the girl’s beating fantasy, the father is beating one of her siblings, exposing her secret wish: “‘My father is beating the child whom I hate’” (Freud 1919, 185). In a later phase, the fantasized child herself is beaten, where the beating has a definitive masochistic character. “Now, therefore, the wording runs: ‘I am being beaten by my father’” (Ibid, 185). These pleasurable fantasies were told to Freud by one patient who could not recall any physical punishment at her father’s hands. In the third phase, another child is beaten by a different adult (such as a teacher), with these fantasies accompanied by a clearly masturbatory, orgasmic excitement. As an explanation for why these initially sadistic aspira- tions became a permanent libidinous facet of his female adolescent patient, Freud singled out factors from her childhood: the young girl had (presumably) done everything to inspire her father’s love, thus sowing the seeds of hate and rivalry for her mother; a younger sibling provoked her jealousy, which easily explains the first phase of beating the small child: “‘My father does not love this other child, he loves only me’” (Freud 1919, 187, italics original). The girl’s wish to have a baby with her father was disappointed when the new sibling was born, with her incestuous longings causing her guilt that spoils her triumph: “So far as I know, this is always so; a sense of guilt is invariably the factor that transforms sadism into masochism. But this is certainly not the whole content of masochism” (Ibid, 189). The third phase of beating constitutes a concomitance of guilt and eroticism: It is not only the punishment for the forbidden genital relation, but also the regressive substitute for that relation, and from this latter source it decries the libidinal excitation which is from this time forwards attached to it, and which finds its outlet in masturbatory acts. Here for the first time we have the essence of masochism. (Freud 1919, 189) The essence of masochism thus becomes clear: the wish for coitus is supplanted by beating – pleasure and punishment together. However, details of this common fantasy of being beaten – also often represented in pornography or played out in contact with prostitutes – can have various meanings. The search for pleas- ure through real or fantasized pain may be difficult to understand. Freud strug- gled with a conceptual definition of sadomasochism as well as the complex links between conscious and unconscious fantasies. Cultural phenomena such as S&M bars for homosexuals or the bestselling book Fifty Shades of Grey indicate the wide scope of this subject. Indeed, 70 million copies of this trilogy have been sold worldwide; it depicts the relationship between a female student and a businessman six years older, who motivates her to bondage and sadomasochistic practices.1