Infantile sexuality

Infantile sexuality is Sigmund Freud’s account of early sexual wishes and attachments as forces that persist beyond childhood and shape dreams and later psychological life. In The Interpretation of Dreams, the concept connects a child’s first affections and rivalries within the family to dreams of parental death, to recurring sensations in dreams of flying or falling, and to Freud’s readings of ancient and modern tragedy.

Childhood Attachments and Family Rivalry

Freud argues that a child’s earliest attachments can include both affection for one parent and hostility toward the other. In his account, a boy’s first desire is directed toward his mother, making his father a rival; a girl’s first affection is directed toward her father, making her mother a rival. The child’s wishes are shaped in part by which parent appears to favor the child, and the child may resist the parent who seems to obstruct that preferred bond. Freud presents these feelings not as excluding tenderness: a girl may love her mother while wishing to take her place, and a boy may dearly love his mother while wishing his father would remain absent. In the child’s experience, death can represent permanent absence, since the dead do not return.

Freud supports this interpretation with examples of children adopting a parent’s role in play and speech. An eight-year-old girl, when her mother left the table, announced herself as her successor and offered vegetables to her brother. A girl not yet four said that if her mother went away, her father would have to marry her. Freud uses these declarations to illustrate how a child’s wish to occupy a parent’s place may coexist with affection for that parent. He further proposes that the child’s early rivalries can help explain dreams of a parent’s death, even in adults whose conscious respect for their parents remains strong.

Dreams of Movement and Bodily Pleasure

Freud also traces dreams of flying, falling, and dizziness to childhood play rather than treating them as direct products of bodily sensations during sleep. He describes games in which an adult rushes a child through a room with arms outstretched, bounces the child on the knees, or lifts and suddenly releases support. Children ask for such games to be repeated, even when fear or giddiness accompanies the pleasure. In dreams, Freud argues, the remembered play returns without the hands that once held the child: the dreamer now seems to fly or fall freely. He says the enjoyment can become anxiety, and that childhood romping may also end in quarrels and tears. On this account, sensations felt in sleep are not necessarily the source of the dream; they may themselves be reproduced from the remembered experience.

A colleague’s recollection of swinging as a child, when the downward movement produced a distinctive genital sensation described as pleasurable though not wholly agreeable, supports Freud’s claim that physical play and early sexuality can be linked. He also reports hearing from patients that their earliest remembered pleasurable erections occurred while climbing, and concludes that childhood scuffling and wrestling frequently contain the first stirrings of sexuality. The examples extend his account beyond family attachment: infantile sexuality, in his theory, can be registered in bodily games and later reappear in dreams, with the original pleasure altered into anxiety.

Classical Tragedy and the Reach of the Theory

Freud extends his account from childhood and dreams to cultural stories, arguing that parental attachment and rivalry are not confined to neurotic patients. He treats the widespread force of the Oedipus legend as evidence that such impulses belong, in less visible or intense forms, to ordinary childhood as well. In the myth, Oedipus is abandoned because of an oracle, grows up away from his birth family, and unknowingly kills his father, Laius, before marrying his mother, Jocasta. When a plague brings renewed scrutiny of Laius’s murder, the play’s delayed revelation establishes that Oedipus himself is the killer and the child of the dead king and Jocasta; he blinds himself and leaves Thebes. Freud reads the force of this recognition as more than submission to fate: the story moves its audience because it gives dramatic form to wishes Freud regards as potentially universal.

Freud contrasts this open realization of the child’s wishful fantasy in Sophocles’ Oedipus with its repression in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Hamlet’s delay in avenging his father is, in Freud’s interpretation, not simply a failure of will or an excess of thought. Hamlet can act in sudden passion and can deliberately arrange the deaths of the two courtiers sent to kill him. What he cannot do is take revenge on Claudius, the man who displaced his father and took his place beside his mother: Claudius has enacted Hamlet’s own repressed infantile wishes. The resulting inhibition turns the impulse toward revenge into self-reproach and scruples of conscience. The contrast lets Freud present the changing treatment of the same material—from explicit fulfillment to repression—as a sign of historical change in emotional life, while making infantile sexuality a bridge between psychological theory and literary interpretation.