50 Psychology Classics (37 page)

Among women who had not had extramarital sex, 17 percent said they would consider it actively or at least not rule out the idea. But among those women who had already “strayed,” 56 percent said they would probably do it again.

The “missionary position” was simply a European and American cultural norm (why, Kinsey did not know). It was not so favored in other cultures, and was little used by other mammals. The Western world continued to favor this position, even though a woman is much more likely to experience orgasm if she is on top, because she is free to move as she wants.

Men and women in a state of deep sexual engagement have exactly the same facial expression as people who are being tortured.

As the sexual act reaches its climax, in both sexes the senses of touch and pain diminish and the vision narrows.

Educated women generally had more sexual experience, possibly because they considered themselves more “enlightened” and less subject to taboos about female sexuality.

If Kinsey was a biologist, why are
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
and its brother volume considered classics in psychology? In 1950s America, psychology was equated more with behavior than with what went on in the mind, and his work was about human sexual behavior. His team wanted to show that humans could not escape their mammalian (read “animal”) heritage; in relation to sex, we were bound by our physiology to have certain responses in relation to stimuli. Although we like to think of the sexual act as being about love, Kinsey aimed to show that it was less about the higher mind than we liked to believe.

Yet for a scientist, Kinsey made the fundamental mistake of blurring the line between his subjects—the people he was interviewing—and his private life. Those around him, including his wife and colleagues, found themselves in steamy and unorthodox situations in the name of “research.” This less admirable aspect of the Kinsey phenomenon is shown to good effect in the film
Kinsey
(2004), starring Liam Neeson.

As well as a whole chapter on homosexuality and one on pre-adolescent sexual play, Kinsey also addressed such subjects as pornography (in the days before
Playboy
), sex graffiti, sado-masochism, erotic stimulation by animals, group sex, and voyeurism. The chapters on human sexual anatomy and on physiological response during sex and orgasm, in their explicit detail, did more to educate Americans about their own bodies than anything that had come before. Even today, it is a rare reader who does not learn something from these sections.

For conservatives, Kinsey's work was the beginning of a downhill slide for civilization, and they made much of his inclusion of sex offenders (1,300 were interviewed) in his studies. Yet Kinsey saw himself in the same light as Copernicus and Galileo, reporting what he saw in the physical world irrespective of theological or moral dogma. Given that the subject of his scrutiny was sex, his fame was perhaps inevitable.

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1894, Kinsey was the oldest of three children. His father, who taught engineering at a local college, was a devout and domineering Methodist, and Kinsey grew up in an environment that outlawed any talk or experience of sexuality. He was an active Boy Scout, and loved camping and being outdoors
.

Following school Kinsey obeyed his father and took engineering courses, but was desperate to study biology. After two years, and against his father's wishes, he enrolled at Bowdoin College in Maine, where he graduated
magna cum laude
in biology and psychology. He received his doctorate in biology at Harvard in 1919, and the following year obtained a post as assistant professor of zoology at Indiana University
.

In the last years of his life Kinsey had to fight to continue his research. His goal was to interview 100,000 people, but in 1954 pressure from religious groups influenced the Rockefeller Foundation to cancel its annual funding
.

Kinsey's other books include a widely-used school textbook,
An Introduction to Biology
(1926),
The Gall Wasp Genus Cynips: A Study in the Origin of the Species
(1930), and
The Origin of Higher Categories in Cynips
(1935). He died in 1956
.

“The infant can only experience complete enjoyment if the capacity for love is sufficiently developed; and it is enjoyment that forms the basis for gratitude. Freud described the infant's bliss in being suckled as the prototype of sexual gratification. In my view these experiences constitute not only the basis of sexual gratification but of all later happiness, and make possible the feeling of unity with another person.”

“An infant who has securely established the good object can also find compensations for loss and deprivation in adult life. All this is felt by the envious person as something he can never attain because he can never be satisfied, and therefore his envy is reinforced.”

In a nutshell

How we cope with pain and pleasure as an infant can shape the basic life outlook we carry into adulthood.

In a similar vein
Anna Freud
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence
(p 104)
Harry Harlow
The Nature of Love
(p 142)
Karen Horney
Our Inner Conflicts
(p 156)
R. D. Laing
The Divided Self
(p 186)
Jean Piaget
The Language and Thought of the Child
(p 222)

Prior to Freud, people thought that childhood was a time of simple happiness. Children's rage, frustration, sadness, or lack of enthusiasm was explained away by physical factors, and their emotional lives were not taken seriously. But Freud showed that children experience significant conflicts, and that these shape us as we move into adulthood.

Taking up where Freud left off, Melanie Klein helped forge a whole subfield of psychoanalysis focusing on the earliest months of life. Other psycho-analysts including Anna Freud had focused on children, but Klein broke new ground in her emphasis on the mental life, including fantasies, defenses, and anxieties, of the infant. She believed that the way a baby comes to grips with its environment sets a pattern for adulthood, affecting the ability to love and the development of basic character traits such as envy and gratitude.

Klein never attended a university, and had three children before becoming a psychoanalyst. Yet this late starter attracted fanatical adherents, the “Kleinians,” who waged intellectual war against other Freudians, including Anna Freud and her camp in the 1940s. For a long time Klein's detractors achieved their aim of sidelining her, but there has been a renewal of interest in her work, and her impact on child psychology cannot be denied.

Envy and Gratitude
is a collection of writings covering the last 15 years of Klein's life. From these essays and articles we examine her well-known “paranoid/schizoid” and “depressive” positions in childhood, her practice of psychoanalyzing children while they played, and her controversial idea that in infancy people develop a basically envious or grateful view of the world.

To understand Klein, we must appreciate that her work was based on the Freudian idea of “object relations,” in which emotions are always expressed toward an “object,” usually a person but sometimes even a part of a person.

Klein believed that the first of a child's object relations is with the breast of the mother, which becomes the focus of all the baby's feelings. From babies' point of view, depending on whether they are satisfied, the breast seems to be either “good” or “bad,” and all their latent feelings of love and hate are poured into this relationship with the breast. Babies either idealize the breast's source of love and sustenance, or feel persecuted by it if their needs are not instantly met. These split feelings are the first time that a human being experiences anxiety.

The splitting is what Klein called the “paranoid-schizoid” position. Whatever is good about the mother and her breast children “introject” or make part of themselves. Whatever is bad in themselves they “project” onto the mother. In short, the paranoid-schizoid position is babies' attempt to establish some kind of control over the external and internal world before they develop their own ego or sense of self.

According to Klein, Freud's “life instinct” and “death instinct” were evident even in infancy. These forces were what gave the early relationship to the “object” such intensity. There is both desperation to get what we need to survive, but also jealousy, anger, and aggression to destroy the object (observed in the baby's anguished screaming and “scooping out” of the breast) when it is not forthcoming with its love, attention, or food.

In the second half of babies' first year, however, Klein observed that the development of an ego means that the polarities of love and hate meld into one. The mother can now be seen to accommodate both, and children can take more responsibility for their feelings. This more realistic picture is helped along by the development of the superego—the socially conditioned self—which begins to take a major role in shaping children.