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Masturbation is the act of obtaining pleasure from manipulation of the genital organs.

Before Sigmund Freud shed light on infantile sexuality, masturbation was exclusively viewed from the extremely negative perspective of religion and morality, rather than being seen as a social and medical problem. This is attested by Dr. Samuel Auguste David Tissot's L'onanisme: Dissertation sur les maladies produites par la masturbation (Onanism: Dissertation on the illnesses produced by masturbation; 1778), which for more than a century and a half remained the standard reference on the issue. In 1576 Michel de Montaigne, in his Essays (II, 12), was the first to introduce the term masturbation into the French language; its etymological origins are controversial. In 1835 the word appeared in the sixth edition of the dictionary of the French Academy, where onanism was given as a synonym.

In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), Freud defined masturbation as an infantile sexual activity, an autoerotic practice whose erotogenic zone is the genital region. During the child's development, most of the other erotogenic zones lose their importance and are subordinated to the genital zone. Within psychoanalytic theory, Freud gave a central place to masturbation, specifying in a note added to the same text in 1920 that "masturbation represents the executive agency to the whole of infantile sexuality and is, therefore, able to take over the sense of guilt attaching to it" (1905d, p. 189, n. 1). He placed the three phases of infantile masturbation at the period when the infant is nursing, at four years of age, and at puberty.

René Spitz held that autoerotic activity in the form of playing with the genitals during the first eighteen months of life is a good indicator of appropriate object relations, just as appropriate sexual activity is in the adult. Melanie Klein always placed great importance on masturbatory fantasies, arguing that these indirectly feed into most activities of the normal child, such as play and schoolwork.

The reactions of caregivers to the child's masturbatory behaviors play a part in structuring the child's personality. In the case of the "Wolf Man," presented in "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (1918b [1914]), Freud explained that within the childhood nodal complex, in the realm of sexual relations the father takes on the role of the enemy: the person who interferes with autoerotic sexual activity. Spitz showed that this restriction of sexuality, masturbation in particular, allows for social and civilized attainments such as the superego in humans.

Freud insisted on the infantile aspect of masturbation, and this topic became controversial at a 1910 meeting of the founders of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society to discuss "the harmful effects of masturbation" (Nunberg and Federn, 1962-1975). From this it was wrongly extrapolated that masturbation in adults is regressive and should be viewed as psychopathological. It should be stressed that masturbation in adults, within the framework of an object relation, is a normal expression of adult sexuality. Hence, it is to be distinguished from infantile autoerotism, which, if it persists into adulthood, is considered a sign of neurosis or perversion.

FRANCK ZIGANTE

See also: Actual neurosis/defense neurosis; Alcoholism; Autoeroticism/alloeroticism; Castration complex; ; Erythrophobia (fear of blushing); Female sexuality; "Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses"; Jouissance (enjoyment); Latency period; Mastery, instinct for; Neurasthenia; Pregenital; Rite and ritual; "Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes"; Tics; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.