PARTISAN REVIEW
defense of her chastity to be taken as a comment on the females,
animal or human, who willingly submit or who merely play at escape?
Professor Kinsey is like no one so much as Sir Percival in Malory
who, seeing a lion and a serpent in battle with each other, decided
to help the lion, "for he was the more natural beast of the two."
This awkwardness in the handling of ideas is characteristic of
the Report. It is ill at ease with any idea that is in the least complex
and it often tries to get rid of such an idea in favor of another that
has
the appearance of not going beyond the statement of physical
fact. We see this especially in the handling of certain Freudian ideas.
The Report acknowledges its debt to Freud with the generosity of
spirit that marks it in other connections and it often makes use of
Freudian concepts in a very direct and sensible way. Yet nothing
could be clumsier than its handling of Freud's idea of pre-genital
generalized infantile sexuality. Because the Report can show, what
is
interesting and significant, that infants are capable of actual ·
orgasm, although without ejaculation, it concludes that infantile
sexuality
is
not generalized but specifically genital. But actually it
has long been known, though the fact of orgasm had not been estab–
lished, that infants can respond erotically to direct genital stimula–
tion; and this knowledge does not contradict the Freudian idea that
there is a stage in infant development in which sexuality is generalized
throughout the body rather than specifically centered in the genital
area- the fact of infant orgasm must be interpreted in conjunction
with other .and more complex manifestations of infant sexuality.
6
The Report, we may say, has an extravagant fear of all ideas
that do not seem to it to be, as it were, immediately dictated by
simple physical fact. Another way of saying this is that the Report
is resistant to any idea that seems to refer to a specifically human
situation. An example is the position it takes on the matter of male
potency. The folk feeling, where it is formulated on the question,
and certainly where it is formulated by women, holds that male
potency is not to be measured, as the Report measures it, merely by
frequency, but by the ability to withhold orgasm long enough to
6
The Report also handles the idea of sublimation in a very clumsy way. It
does not represent accurately what the Freudian theory of sublimation is. For
this, however, there is some ·excuse in the change of emphasis and even of
meaning in Freud's use of the word.
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