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Since the publication of Freud's classic study "A Child Is Being Beaten" (1919), there have been numerous additional clinical observations so that we have come to recognize that beating fantasies are not only more prevalent than originally supposed, but also that the manifest and latent content of such fantasies (to borrow terms from dream psychology) is more varied than was at first considered. In fact, Dr. Ernst Kris—during the discussion just mentioned—expressed the opinion that "the infantile wish to be loved by the father was often, or perhaps regularly, conceived by the child as being beaten by him." This view corresponds to the familiar infantile sexual theory which has as its core the formula: what the father does to his sexual partner, i.e., the mother, during coitus is to beat her.
The importance of oedipal components in such fantasies is well known, and I mention here only Marie Bonaparte (1953) who regards them as typical reactions of the young girl to her oedipal conflict, the oedipal wish for the father being expressed in a succession of beating fantasies as elucidated by Freud. The preoedipal components as well as the masculine version of beating fantasies have also received attention (see, e.g., Bergler's [1938] paper on the buttocks-breast equation and its role in the preliminary phases of such fantasies). We also find in the literature comments on the relation of beating fantasies to sibling rivalry, anal-aggressive strivings, infantile voyeurism, and to the overt perversions such as masochism, sadism, and fetishism.