EARLY SEX KNOWLEDGE: WITNESSING PARENTAL COITUS
Few things are guarded as closely in certain segments of Western society as the privacy of coitus. The peeper who seeks to observe sexual activity clandestinely is prosecuted, and prosecutions of parents who have allowed their children to observe them in sexual activity are also recorded. Such constraint about the privacy of sexual activity has been carried over into the scientific literature. The psychoanalytic tradition has strongly proscribed “observation [by children] of sexual scenes between adults, especially between the parents. . . .” While it may have various results, Fenichel says, “… what is always present is the linking together of the conceptions ‘sexual satisfaction’ and ‘danger,’ . . . The most frequent types of misinterpretation are the interpretation of sexual intercourse as a cruel, destructive act, and the interpretation of the female genitals as a result of castration.”r The observation of adult coitus by a child is spoken of as the “primal scene” by psychoanalysts.
Since the psychoanalytic tradition is so enmeshed in Western culture, and even more narrowly in middle-class culture, the relevance of the “primal scene” to other cultures and even other classes is moot.6 Anthropologists report frequent observation by children of adult sexual behavior in many non-Western groups. Such observation may serve as a method of learning about techniques of sexual activity.
If observation by a child of parental coitus frequently has the pro found effect claimed for it by many psychoanalysts, it seems reasonable to expect that this should be evident in our data. If the outcome of such observation is the interpretation of coitus as aggression, then it is possible that the type of sex offense committed years later by such persons would be characterized by force or sadism. If the outcome is reinforcement of castration fears, then the individual might become interested in persons of the same sex or interested in children as non-castrating objects.7 This interpretation would suggest that force offenders, pedophiles, and homosexual offenders would be more likely to have observed parental coitus than other groups.
In the control group nearly one in 20 (4 per cent) reported having observed the “primal scene”. This increases to one in ten (10 per cent) for the prison group. Ten of the sex-offender groups are within or close to this range. In one group, the incest offenders vs. adults, no subject reported seeing parental coitus. The homosexual offenders present a mixed picture with two groups similar to the prison group and one like the controls. The incest-offender groups are similarly low, near the controls, as are the peepers, the heterosexual minor and adult offenders, and the heterosexual adult aggressors. The exhibitionists on the other hand are higher and similar to the prison group in this respect.
The only groups in which a larger proportion had observed parental coitus were the aggressors vs. minors (22 per cent), the aggressors vs. children (21 per cent), and the heterosexual offenders vs. children (16 per cent). The proportion for this last group is the only indication of a tendency within any tripartite offense group for the offenders against children to have observed parental coitus in a slightly greater proportion than the groups whose offenses were against older persons. The two force groups tend somewhat to bear out the notion that the “primal scene” may induce sadistic attitudes in sexual behavior, but there is no evidence for the castration complex theory in the sense that the male may later be induced to seek out nonthreatening children or males as sexual partners.
In any case, it appears that the observation of parental coitus may occur with no untoward consequences for some people at least, and that its frequency is not much greater for any sex-offense groups, except the three mentioned, than might be expected from current social class practices. The “primal scene,” as recalled at the conscious level at least, represents, as many psychoanalytic concepts do, a partial truth.
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