Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

January 16, 1951. MASTURBATION: SOME REMARKS ON A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INVESTIGATION. René A. Spitz, M.D.

Dr. Spitz, investigating attitudes toward masturbation in relation to the development of psychoanalytic thought, covers in detail the literature of the past seventy years, and to a lesser extent, publications going back to the eighteenth century. Up to 1924 most contributors to the literature of the subject wrote for medical journals. Since then, the accent has shifted to pedagogical, psychological, and psychoanalytic publications, the influence of Freud's Three Contributions in 1905 and the Symposium on Onanism in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association in 1912 having been delayed because of World War I. The early literature reveals a primarily moralistic attitude toward masturbation, although the attitude of Western civilization is more moderate than that of the Middle Ages and of antiquity. The first publication found by Dr. Spitz is the English Bekker's Onania, published about 1700. The spread of written information and interest in the subject is traced thereafter to the Continent, with Tissot's work (middle eighteenth century) taking precedence. Bekker and Tissot stress dire and terrifying consequences of the practice, though the remedies suggested are notably gentle. A sadistic campaign against masturbation emerges in the second half of the nineteenth century, coincident perhaps with the dawn of awareness of infantile sexuality. The sadistic attitude varied in different countries according to the degree of anxiety engendered and the concomitant hostility. The French recommended primarily mechanical restraints, the English surgical intervention, while the Germans concentrated on educative, disciplinary measures. Though in Germany attention was focused on children, extremes of repression in England led to the selection of women as suitable objects of retaliation, with clitoridectomy the treatment of choice. This found adherents in Vienna and France but