Masturbation Freud

There are countless passing references to, and several extended discussions of, masturbation in Freud s writmg. A few of his comments must suffice to indicate his position. analyzing the... 

In 1897, in a letter to Fliessf Freud writes .. . It has dawned on me that masturbation is the one major habit, the (primal addiction, and that it is only as a substitute and replacementfor it that tKe other addictions—for alcohol, morphine, tobacco, —come into... 

Freud s most detailed comments on masturbation are contained in his contribution to a discussion on this subject held in the... 

Here Freud is hardly the libertine his contemporary critics believed him to have been. Freud remained opposed to masturbation throughout his life. The views of other psychoanalysts, as we shall see, remain ambivalent and hesitant on this subject to this day. 

Freud thus comes down squarely on the side of the true believers in the myth of masturbatqi mental illness. I must confess that here again I am unable to share Stekel s point of view.. .. As he sees it, the injuriousness of masturbation amounts to no more than a senseless prejudice which, purely as a result of personal limitations, we are unwilling to cast off with sufficient thoroughness. I believe, however, that. .. to take up such a position contradicts our fun-... 

We must cut short our review of the psychoanalytic aspects of the myth of masturbation and will conclude by citing the views o(Ouo (Femchel, whose book. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, is cofisidered the definitive modern text on psychoanalysis. Fenichel is considerably less opposed to masturbation than Freud had been. But he, too, tries to present moral criteria of what are desirable and undesirable attitudes toward masturbation as if they were scientific psychoanalytic criteria of mentally healthy behavior. Masturbation, Fenichel writes, .. . is normal in childhood and under present cultural conditions is also normal in adolescence, and even in adulthood as a substitute when no sexual object is available.. . . ... 

Freud, S. Contribution to a discussion on masturbation (1912). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XII, pp. 239-254. London Hogarth. 1958. 

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