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Psychoanalysis has been concerned with the question of masturbation since the earliest days of Freud's explorations into the mysteries of human sexuality and its relations with the neurotic disorders he was observing in his consulting room. His views, as well as those of his students and followers, changed and evolved over the decades, but the subject has never faded from psychoanalytic interest. It has, to one degree or another, been conceived as a central issue in both normal psychic development and pathogenesis.
It is Laqueur's thesis that this view of the importance of masturbation is of relatively recent origin, and he has produced a remarkably readable, witty, and scholarly study of its place in history from the classical era to the present in support of this position. In essence, he proposes that what he calls “modern masturbation”—the notion that “solitary sex” is both physically and morally corrupting and potentially lethal to both sexes—dates only from the early eighteenth century, “around 1712.”
In or near that fateful year there appeared on the burgeoning London literary market an anonymous screed bearing the title “Onania, or, the Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences, in both SEXES Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice. And seasonable Admonition to the Youth of Both Sexes.” The author, whom Laqueur has identified as a notorious quack and pornographer named James Marten, graciously offered for sale a number of medicaments that, he assured his readers, would surely cure them of this dreadful vice. Aggressive marketing by Marten and his