Infant and Child Sexuality: A Sociological Perspective - Ipce

cause psychoanalytic theory, though grand, mystical, and rich in insights,
has not produced many empirically verifiable hypotheses. For
experts in child behavior to use unverified pyschoanalytic insights as
fact is unbecoming and potentially dangerous to those who depend on
their counsel. Secondly, psychoanalytic theory has drawn what empirical
support it has largely from observations of small samples of clinical
populations rather than from broad representative samples. In other
words, samples of children and adults who are ill, children and adults
who have been brought to a therapist or clinic because of some behavior
problem have provided the major source of samples in the past. Psychoanalytic
theory, though inadequately tested, has been utilized as a
source and justification for after the fact causal explanations of various
manifestations of sexual behavior.
What we need is not the abandonment of psychoanalytic theory, however.
Psychoanalytic theorists must continue to derive and test hypotheses
using psychoanalytic concepts. But what is needed more is that
other behavioral scientists with other theoretical and conceptual orientations,
including sociologists, do more to test social theories of
sexual development using large (rather than small), representative
(rather than clinical) populations. It is well known and generally accepted
that any aspect of human behavior, including sexual behavior,
benefits from study and research using alternative theoretical frameworks.
Sociologists have had much to say about adolescent and adult sexuality
in the past, but have given very little attention to infant,
child, and preadolescent sexuality. This book brings together what is
known to date in the sociology of the sexuality of the young. We begin
with the sociology of infant sexuality.
The human infant--here defined as being between the ages from birth
up to but not including three years of age--is a creature of potential.
The development of that potential, whether related to mental,
physical, or sexual-erotic aspects of growth, occurs at a very rapid
rate during the first two years of life. Actually the sensing mechanism
is at work much earlier than that--by about the eighth week of
gestation. (Liley, 1972). Until recently the human fetus in situ was
not accessible to study. It was thought that quickening (when the fetus
begins moving limbs and trunk) did not take place until the sixteenth
to twentieth week of gestation. Fetal movement is necessary to
the development of bones and joints, but the fetus apparently also
moves for the sensual reason of making itself more comfortable in the
uterus. The fetus is responsive to pressure and touch--tickling the
scalp and stroking the palm, for instance, elicit reactions. In fact,
the areas from which a cutaneous reflex may be obtained are very generalized
in the fetus. (Langworthy, 1933). It is possible that the fetus
is also experienced in sucking before birth. It is not uncommon to detect
the fetus sucking thumbs, fingers, or toes. We can conclude that
at least habituation and perhaps even some sensate learning can take
place during the gestation period.
That sensate learning is possible before or outside of the achievement
of self-awareness is at least tangentially supported also in studies
of infant “socialization” among other mammals. Harlow’s report
(Harlow and Zimmerman, 1959; Harlow, 1962) on affectional patterns of
rhesus monkeys deprived of interaction with a mother figure is a case
in point. Being deprived of the learning situation provided in normal
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