Word: freude
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...according to Freud, is a biological drive clamoring for gratification from the moment of birth. In normal human beings, its imperatives can be throttled by the rules of morality, but they can never really be denied. In the current issue of Transaction magazine, Sociologists William Simon, 38, and John Henry Gagnon, 37, argue heretically that Freud was mistaken: the sex drive is not strong but weak, and can be easily resisted. Moreover, sex forms no integral part of man's inherited endowment; sexual behavior is something he must learn...
...Where Freud went wrong, the authors contend, was in interpreting the sexuality of children with grown-up eyes. "It is dangerous to assume," they write, "that because some childhood behavior appears sexual to adults, it must be sexual." Parents who catch a young child playing with his genital organs will instinctively define the act as masturbation; to the child, the experience may well be a nonsexual experience of bodily discovery. Nonetheless, the child is taught, directly or indirectly, that certain activities are sexual in nature as soon as he is considered mature enough to absorb the lesson...
...Beast Within. Gagnon and Simon argue that Freud's error has been compounded by a tendency to confuse the adult obsession with sex, which is powerful, and sex education, which is incessant, with the sex drive-which is neither. "The whole imagery of sexuality as 'the beast within' was true because society defined it as true," says Simon...
...Kinsey Institute, where they worked together for three years. Gagnon is now with the sociology department at the Stony Brook, L.I., campus of the State University of New York; Simon is program director in sociology and anthropology at Chicago's Institute for Juvenile Research. Both writers found that Freud's views on sex are not only misbegotten but unrealistic and sadly out of date. One of the reasons that his theories still command popular respect "is that in a world fraught with instability and change, one wants to be able to hold onto a few universals. Freud tried...
...training room, he could be called an athletic Sigmund Freud. He listens with an attentive ear and reaches careful prognoses with the person in mind--and when needed he has a temper that disarms most hypochondriacs and malingerers...