Affectional-sexual development, in comparison with other aspects of development, motor and language, for example, has been more often repressed than encouraged by most families in the United States and throughout most of the Western world. In the United States, sex is seldom treated as a strong and healthy force in the positive development of personality. Infant sexual behavior, in the eyes of many, is negative, perverse, and destructive. Some see infant sexual-affectional potential as related to excesses—addictions that control the individual and weaken reason. That infants have erotic capacity has been pointedly ignored or overlooked. After an asexual infancy and childhood, sex is supposed to burst out in full bloom at puberty or, better, later. Sexual innocence has been assumed to be normal and appropriate. Still earlier, infants were considered depraved if they masturbated, asked sex-related questions, or showed any sexual interest or curiosity. Ignorance was and is deemed best to keep dormant any precocious sexual feelings. It has been taken for granted that other aspects of physical and mental growth would proceed gradually from birth to full maturity, but knowledge about sexual capacity and interest has been either consciously or unconsciously suppressed even in the community of social and behavioral scientists. This is an enigma, for as early as the turn of the century, Bell, Freud, and Moll were reporting that in infants of suckling age, various parts of the body could give pleasurable sensation and romances did develop in childhood, and it was known that “unscrupulous nurses” had found that they could calm crying babies by stroking their genitals. Freud observed that sexual behavior of the infant and child not only was ignored but “the educators consider all sexual manifestations of the child as an ‘evil’ in the face of which little can be accomplished”. To find sexuality suppressed in the schools is perhaps understandable; to find it largely overlooked in the behavioral and social sciences is more difficult to understand and to accept.
What would be the outcome of a concerted effort to give infants the opportunity to develop fully their capacity for sensory and affectional response? We do not know because we have not wanted to know. Those who argue that the individual, to be fully human, must have the opportunity to develop all his or her capacities argue that this principle should apply to sexual capacity as well as to intellect and motor skills. Those who argue for discipline, self-control, and the curbing of harmful or socially disruptive human tendencies, argue that only the minimum of stimulation and no erotic experience should characterize the personal encounters of infants. Those who opt for restriction of erotic expression in infancy and childhood are in the majority in the United States at the present time.
*30/187/5*
