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May 15, 1951. ON THE PRINCIPAL OBSCENE WORD OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE—AN INQUIRY, WITH HYPOTHESIS, REGARDING ITS ORIGIN AND PERSISTENCE. Leo Stone, M.D.
Dr. Stone's linguistic and etymological investigations revealed that the word 'fuck' has persisted longer in the English language than all similar terms in both usage and taboo, and that its derivation is obscure.
A female patient had the obsessional thought, 'I want to fuck (occasionally 'rape' or 'kill') the analyst'. Analysis showed that her aggressive, masculine wishes were used as a defense against a deeply repressed passive trend associated with a wish to suck.
It was suggested that there might be a general unconscious association between the words 'fuck' and 'suck' among English-speaking people; that the word related to the first object relationship ('suck') might find representation in the other one related to the second great biological expression of object relationship, sexual intercourse, with a reversal of the situation in regard to activity-passivity. From these and other impressions the hypothesis was developed that the rhyme between 'fuck' and 'suck' might have been an important unconscious determinant in the linguistic fixation and taboo of the former in general usage, regardless of its origin. The introduction of and widespread addiction to tobacco in England in the sixteenth century might have heightened the conflict about the word 'fuck', whose resemblance and relationship to 'suck' was already unconsciously important. During the period of the rapid spread of smoking the word 'fuck' disappeared from dictionaries and from polite usage.
Dr. Ernst Kris agreed that such studies contributed to the reformulation of the antecedents of the Oedipus complex, and also noted that shifts in the distribution of passive and active attitudes in individual behavior could be reflected in social usage, speech, and symbolism. Dr. Géza Róheim doubted that the relationship noted between these two words existed in othe