Chapter 3
The Oral Influence
A world of strange desires and wild longings lies hidden in the mind of every man.
Freud has given a key to the explanation of mind, the first key that has ever fitted, and that is the Freudian 'wish'. The 'wish' is a course of action which some mechanism of the body is set to carry out, whether it actually does so, or not. It is any purpose or project for a course of action even if it is merely entertained in the mind. It is dependent on a motor attitude of the physical body, which goes over into overt action when the wish is carried into execution. It is the interplay of compatible and antagonistic wishes that one finds to be the text of the entire Freudian psychology.
E. B. Holt adds that in Freudian psychology all emotions, as well as feelings of pleasure and displeasure, are separable from the 'wishes'. The idea or purpose, seemingly implied in the 'wish', is not involved. The 'wish' contemplates no end whatsoever. The doctrine of the 'wish' shows us that life is not lived for ends. It is a process, and its motive power comes not from in front, but from behind, from the wishes which are in ourselves. We play the game rightly if, instead of suppressing wishes, we lucidly discriminate the facts.
Biological and psychological development are inseparably related. The essential nature of the individual consists in strivings and urges, innate or unlearned, which originally are quite independent of environment. Whatever an individual is or does at any given moment is very largely predetermined by his earlier experiences and his reactions to them. The earliest years of life represent the period when biological and mental experiences most profoundly influence the individual because he is then less pre-formed or conditioned.
The child's first biological need is for food, so he sucks at the mother's breast. Sucking is a pleasure, and it becomes associated with the mother. The child is thus introduced to the
Oedipus Complex.
All men pursue pleasurable excitement and the avoidance of pain. Hence, according to Freud, the human organism is automatically regulated by a 'pleasure-principle'. As already shown, the child's first pleasure is found in food. Sexual activity comes next and is the most intense experience of pleasurable excitement. Freud explains that any given process originates in an unpleasant state of tension and therefore determines for itself such a path that its ultimate issue coincides with a relaxation of the tension.
A state of tension beyond a certain point is painful, while the process of releasing that tension carries with it a sense of pleasure, which, in the case of sexual orgasm, is poignantly intense.
Pleasure and pain are the opposite poles.
A child has his sexual impulses and activities from the beginning. He brings them with him into the world, and they develop through manifold stages.
Sexual or libidinal experiences, then, occur in inimagine. The mother's breast becomes the original object of the sexual desire of the infant. During the sucking of the infant there is revealed the first impression of the sexual instinct. Of course, sucking first involves the taking of food, which is an answer to another instinct, hunger. But an infant will wish to repeat the act of sucking without demanding more food. The mere act of sucking itself gives him pleasure. And this satisfaction, it is said, is libidinal or sexual.
Sucking excites the mouth and lips. Thus, the mouth and lips, together with other parts of the body, form the erogenous zones, areas of the body which afford sexual pleasure.
A little later, the child replaces the mother's breast as a source of gratification by a part of his own body, his thumb or tongue, or perhaps his genitals. When the child seeks and finds objects of sexual interest in his own body, he is said to behave autoerotically. Later, instruction awakens a reaction against this impulse of childhood gratification.
Let us return now to the first period of infant development, the oral or cannibalistic stage. As yet, there is no clear differentiation between the taking of food and sexual activity. The object of the one activity is also that of the other.
Anyway, the sexual aim seeks to take the object into its own body. During the latter part of this oral stage, biting becomes manifest, and so an oral-sadism stage develops. During this period, a kind of contradictory attitude toward objects, a love-hate mixture, appears.
This is the point at which oral love may develop. The first object for oral pleasure was the mother. The sucking of the mother's breasts becomes the model for every love relation. Kissing, fondling, even stimulating the genitals, adds to the pleasure. By the mother's tenderness, she further awakens sexual interest and prepares for its future intensity. She teaches the child to love.
In the case of a boy, his erotic attachment to his mother is by nature exclusive and jealous of any rivals. Of course, the father becomes the greatest and most foreboding rival. The Oedipus Complex offers the child two possibilities, one active, the other passive. Besides his wish to put himself in his father's place and have intercourse with his mother, he may want to supplement the mother and be loved by the father.
According to this theory, every human being has both male and female elements, or more accurately, active and passive tendencies. In the normal male, active tendencies will predominate. In the female, the passive ones.
In some cases, a person's entire character remains under the "oral influence". For such people, sucking is highly pleasurable, and they retain from the infantile period a deep conviction that sucking will make everything well for them They look forever for a mother substitute who will care for them and give them everything they need. Their whole attitude toward life is that they expect the mother's breast to flow eternally for them. They long to receive gratification by way of the mouth.
They become gum-chewers, smokers, and cocksuckers. They must forever have something in their mouths, something to substitute for the mother's breast.
They have an infantile hang-up they can't shake off.
Doctor D., a well-known Midwest psychiatrist, tells the story of Mala Pearson. The story begins one dark, winter evening in his consulting room. He'd had a heavy day and was just getting ready to close up and go home.
There was a knock on the outer door, and he said, "Come in."
An attractive young man opened the door, took a step inside, then paused nervously. Immediately, Doctor D. was on the alert. There was something about the young man's manner that made him uneasy, though he couldn't put his finger on it.
"Yes?" the doctor asked, raising one eyebrow.
"Are you the head shrinker?" the young man inquired.
"I'm a psychiatrist," Doctor D. answered, trying to account for the sense of frustration this strange young visitor gave him. He sensed that the mask the young man evidently wore was some kind of an attempt to confuse him.
The young fellow started talking about his wife. "She's beautiful blonde and blue-eyed." He gave the doctor a quick, sidelong glance and paused a moment. Then he went on, "But I'm not so much interested in her beauty. I prefer a woman to be normal, if you know what I mean?"
"No, I don't," Doctor D. admitted, the whole matter puzzling him "But won't you have a chair? Perhaps you can explain more about your wife to me." With effort, the doctor remained outwardly impassive, though a deep curiosity was now stirring in him.
The young man took a chair opposite the doctor's large mahogany desk. "Now, where were we?" he asked.
"You mentioned your wife-"
"Oh!" The young man looked faintly surprised, but explained rapidly, "We've been married two years, and I still love her. But our marriage is no good." Up went his eyebrows, and his lips curled. "I'm afraid of where it will end. I've got a conscience, but Mala hasn't. They say men are greedier than women. Do you agree?"
The doctor had been following the dissertation with interest, trying to get a more vivid picture of this young man and his wife.
"I don't believe you've been listening to me," the young man said.
"Why do you say that?"
The young man arched his eyebrows again and looked petulant. "Then why don't you answer my question?"
"First, I was listening to what you were not saying."
A startled look passed over the young man's face, but at once he covered it by smoothing out the creases in his trousers. "That's impossible! I don't know what you mean!" he said.
"Sometimes, silence speaks louder than words," the doctor quoted. "Greed, however, isn't confined to either sex. It's more a matter of the individual."
There was another long silence, and then the young man said, "I guess I'm a Puritan. At least, Mala says I am."
His mounting tension told the doctor to be prepared for either of two things: a confession, or an attack. He soon realized which it would be.
The young fellow leaned forward, his hands gripping the arms of the chair. His face, up until now, had been a mask of tragedy. Hostility, suspicion, and a certain slyness took over.
The doctor maintained silence.
Maybe this type of silence seems cruel to those who don't understand it. Speech is action and may well be felt as a threat, however encouraging its content may be. Silence is the absence of threatening action and will bring out feelings and attitudes that otherwise would remain hidden. The small animal hides because of anticipated danger and ventures out only when things are silent and motionless.
So Doctor D. retained his silence until the air between him and his visitor seemed to pulsate with it. Suddenly, the stranger lifted his hands and brought them down, tightly fisted, on his chair. His voice shook with suppressed fury, and his eyes blazed.
"Goddamn you! Why do you make it so hard for me to say it?" he demanded.
The doctor allowed another short pause. "But I have done nothing," he then said quietly.
Now, the fury on the young man's face turned to fear. He glanced around the room with a curious, furtive look. "We're alone?" he asked.
"We're alone," the doctor said.
The young man smiled a strange, secret smile. Then, with perfect composure, he met the doctor's glance, his hands folded in his lap. "I am Case Pearson," he said. "I have come to talk to you about my wife."
"All right, Mr. Pearson."
For some minutes, as Case Pearson chattered, the doctor could get no clear picture of the problem, other than that the couple's sex life wasn't all that it might be.
Meanwhile, Pearson kept up a running stream of self-justification. He was virile, all man, and so forth.
"Mala's interest is astrology. I don't know much about it." He paused, staring hard at the doctor. "I'm a Jupiter, she says. She can tell by the shape of my head. She's a Jupiter, too, and she says Jupiter people are wise. Perhaps that's true, unless they're afflicted, like her first husband."
He sighed and went on. "I sometimes think her knowing astrology does her no good. She can see something bad coming, but she can't do anything about it. But I guess it helps her to understand other people rather well. I know people can't help behaving certain ways, and I try to make allowances. But some things are dirty nasty-"
He paused again, evidently expecting Doctor D. to understand his observations.
"I'm not an expert at astrology, either," the doctor reminded the young man.
"What I'm trying to say is my wife's a confirmed-"
Suddenly, he left his words in the air, and his breath failed him. His frown deepened.
"A confirmed what?" Doctor D. probed.
The man shifted nervously, twisting his hands in his lap. "A confirmed cocksucker. She doesn't care much about sex in the regular way."
"And you?" the doctor asked calmly.
"It's repulsive to me! Oh, I like to suck nipples and finger a girl a bit. But I get nothing out of a blow job. I think it's degrading!"
The doctor felt a growing uneasiness in himself, a sense of impotence in seeing the horror and fear in the young man's eyes.
"Sometimes," the poor fellow added, "I think she's a witch!"
In his efforts to understand what was going on in this particular situation, Doctor D. let his mind wander back to his meetings with other women similar to Mala Pearson. Her story, as told by her husband, had started in the doctor a disturbing train of thought.
After a while, he asked, "Will your wife agree to visit me?"
"I think she will," the young man said. "At least, she says she will. The whole thing is making her as miserable as it makes me."
Two days later, Mala Pearson entered Doctor D's consulting room, breezing in like a sudden gust of wind that takes one unawares. She came toward the doctor with movements so subtle that they defied analytic description. Her blue eyes were large and luminous, and her smile brilliant. Doctor D. caught himself thinking that she was indeed a beautiful woman.
His first thoughts were: Did she know exactly why she'd come? Or had her husband misrepresented this visit to her? She began immediately to refer to her persistent sleeplessness, as if that were her basic problem. All medical treatment had failed to give her relief. She hadn't, as yet, started to rely on drugs, but she had to have relief before her general health was seriously threatened. In a second breath, she revealed that she was twenty-four years old, had suffered a loveless, poverty-stricken childhood, had married young and had a daughter by her previous marriage. She had been married two years to her present husband.
As she tugged off her gloves, she suddenly became shy. She supported her chin in her hand and said, "I do hope I'm not wasting your time, Doctor. You see, I came here only to please Case. I don't believe in psychiatrists."
This frank announcement was made with a smile which brought out her charming dimples. Their eyes met, and she lowered hers, her long, black lashes brushing her pale cheeks.
She blushed and continued, "At least, I don't believe in what they think. You talk to a psychiatrist, and he won't believe there's nothing really wrong with you. He'll try to make you think you're mentally unbalanced and that you have all sorts of complexes, that it's all wish fulfillment, and a lot of other crazy things. But here I am!"
She paused, as if gathering her thoughts, then relaxed gracefully in her chair.
"I don't know where to begin," she said. "You see, there's nothing really wrong with me, except I can't sleep. I've thought and thought, and I can't find any reason for it at all."
Her lips smiled sweetly while she eyed the psychiatrist wisely through half-lowered eyelashes. He kept silent and attentive, and after a long pause, she murmured sadly, "If I could feel well, I wouldn't worry about it. But my nerves go to pieces."
"You seem well now," he observed.
"Yes, but-" Suddenly, all light and laughter were gone, and her voice went hard, her eyelids became heavy. "If you want to know why I seem well, I'll tell you! I have a secret friend, but that won't last long. Those affairs never do." She looked up with a frown on her face.
The doctor read fear in her look, as if the whole world were her enemy. Then she started talking about her present life in a more animated manner.
After she'd married Case Pearson two years ago, she'd led a gay social life. She had everything that money could buy. She said nothing about her husband until Doctor D. prompted her. Then she gave only a factual description. He was a handsome, virile, refined man who liked sports and fishing. He had never worked because, at seventeen, he'd inherited a fortune from his father. He was an honest, sincere, loving man.
She'd mentioned nothing about the relationship between them, so Doctor D. remarked on that.
She gave a forced smile. "Oh, he never trifles, if that's what you mean. And I manage him all right."
"You speak as if he were some trained animal."
She laughed, fluttering her eyelashes. "Well, at times, he's rather difficult," she said. "He's spoiled from having too much money. And, you see-" Her mouth took on a curiously, self-conscious twist. "he's also pretty much of a Puritan. But he's very much in love with me."
"I'm not surprised at that," Doctor D. said, frankly admiring her beauty.
What did rather surprise him, though, was the change in Mala Pearson at the mention of her husband. She became cool, as if dimly aware of some danger that lurked about her.
"Do you enjoy sex?" he asked.
It was a blunt question that made Mala's lips twist into an amused smile. She drew herself up and said, "I suppose I must get used to such personal questions. Yes, I enjoy certain kinds of sex."
The doctor allowed a slight pause, before he continued. "I gather you don't enjoy the usual kind of man-woman sex."
Her lips had ceased to smile. "If you mean plain old fucking, I like it once in a while. But usually it doesn't mean much to me."
"How do you like it?"
Mala Pearson was obviously startled. But she controlled herself and said, "I like to suck, and to have a man mouth and tongue me."
There was an embarrassing pause, before Doctor D. asked about her child. Again, she became animated.
"Heather's six, and an absolute darling. I don't know what I should do without her!" Pride and affection showed on her face.
"Who is she like you, or her father?"
"Like me!" came the hostile answer.
"Is her father alive?"
"Oh, yes! But I divorced him. Hank was a washout. I only married him to get away from home. He was the best of the group I had to pick from at the time. But he had nothing to give me."
"He gave you a daughter."
She looked up with an aggrieved expression. Recovering herself, she said, "I suppose you could put it that way. But he's never done anything for me, or the child. Not like-" Her eyes clouded, and she frowned, as if concentrating on some memory that belonged in the dim, distant past. She seemed to forget the doctor's presence. Then, as if in reply to a question that had not been asked, she said, "I don't know whether I was happy as a child, or not. My life seemed very dull."
She told that her father had worked occasionally in the oil fields, but that her family had been very poor. She was the oldest child in a family of six. She paused and looked down at the carpet, her mouth set, her expression somber.
"My mother was sick all the time," she said. "I had to look after the other kids, scrub, wash, cook. I skipped a lot of school, which I didn't mind at the time." She laughed with a roguish look. "Of course, I was sorry later."
She told that her father had gone off on a job one time, promising to send back money, which he never did. He never returned.
"And then my mother died."
"When was that?"
"When I was sixteen."
Up to now, she had told her story with a careless air, as if the memory was of little interest to her. With difficulty, the doctor got out of her that the younger children were put in a Home, but that her father had sent for her.
"What was your mother like?" he asked.
She answered gravely and gently, "She was kind and generous, but she suffered great pain."
"And was she often irritable?"
Mala simply inclined her head, as if it would be a sacrilege to criticize her mother. She went on to eulogize her and to excuse her faults.
"She used to be full of vitality, but she found it hard to bear the constraint forced on her by her illness. She had a temper. But she wanted to be a good mother-"
"How did she die?"
"I don't really know. It had something to do with drugs she had to take. They weakened her heart."
Mala continued, "She couldn't have gone on much longer. Death was a merciful release."
"And you?"
"And then my father sent for me."
"I see. How did you feel about joining your father?"
"Both thrilled and terrified."
"Why the terror?"
She laughed and spread her hands. "A man wouldn't understand, I suppose. But I had no clothes, no training, no knowledge of the world. Of course, I was terrified."
"Well, what happened?"
She sat up straight and drew in a long breath, slowly letting it out. Her eyes went dreamy. "It was like a Cinderella story, and I was Cinderella. You see, my father had made a lot of money. He was rich. He gave me a check for a thousand dollars to start with, and opened a bank account in my name, telling me to do what I liked with the money. I'll never forget it!"
"That was a thrill, I can see. But I still don't understand the terror part of it."
"I I don't know how to tell you. I guess it started with the anger I felt when I found out he had a mistress." The outrage in her voice was clear.
"You didn't approve?"
"I had nothing against the woman as a person, but-"
"She was taking your Prince Charming away from you?"
She flashed a look of resentment, then said honestly, "I guess maybe that was it. But I got over it pretty quickly, what with the excitement of having money and new clothes, and a lot of men admiring me, including my own daddy."
She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. "He was tall, dark, and handsome, and all the women admired him."
"Including you?"
She laughed and shrugged.
"I caused some trouble between him and his girl friend," she admitted. "I didn't dislike her, but she disliked me. She was jealous of my father's attention to me."
"And then what happened?"
She hesitated. "Well," she answered at last, "I sort of took her place in my father's life."
"You mean--? "
"Yes. I know there's a name for it when you do it with your own blood and kin. But it was my own father who taught me the oral love way, and I liked to do it to him."
She closed her eyes and told about the first time she'd lowered her head over his cock, taking it into her mouth. "I had no feeling of doing anything wrong! There was only the bulk of him between my lips, the sliding of him, and the feel of his cock against my tongue.
"And then he groaned and made me suck faster. His hand came up to my breasts, and he kissed the back of my neck. And, oh, I knew I was loved! I was the center of his attention! He needed me to touch him, do things to him! And I became his world!"
She told how her father's obvious pleasure was her reward, how a tiny, sympathetic spasming began in her womb and rose to a point beyond her control, how she plunged her head faster and took his organ deep into the soft, constricting top of her throat. She'd felt his tension and shuddering as he cried out and jetted semen thick and fast so that she almost choked before she could swallow it.
His finger on her clitoris had slithered around in fast little movements. His other hand on her nipples kept rolling and teasing her sensitive stems.
Later, they both lay panting and gloriously content.
"And you'd never had sex until that time?" Doctor D. asked. ;
"No," she said. "And my father didn't deflower me."
She was silent for some time, and the psychiatrist felt it necessary to question her about her first husband. She was evasive, but with much patience, he found out that she rated him a good enough man in bed, though he flirted with a number of girls behind her back.
"He had a habit of picking his nose in public, and despite his splendid physique, he was immature. I mean, his cock was like a young boy's," she said.
"And you didn't like that?"
"No! My daddy had a big one. And I like a man to be a man!"
"Why did you marry him?"
"I guess it was mostly because of my daddy. You see, after a time, he got to feeling guilty over what we were doing. Anyway, he found himself another girl friend, and I guess he wanted me out of the way."
"Tell me more about your sex life."
"Well, it was Hank who deflowered me, and he was the first man to do it to me in the regular way. At first, he felt all right. And then, I realized his cock was much too little. I guess, after the first few times, he didn't get much satisfaction out of me, either. So we got to going down on each other. I'd mouth him, and he'd mouth me."
Doctor D. was strangely moved by some of the things Mala Pearson told him. "Are any of us what we appear to be?" he asked, causing her to draw back into herself, be on guard.
"My first husband certainly wasn't!" she said heatedly.
Doctor D. wanted to ask why she'd divorced him, but she started talking about her second husband. He was quite different from the first one.
"Then you married him for love?"
Her mouth twitched in amusement. "You're a sharp one, Doctor, I know!" she said. "But you're wrong this time! I married Case for his money!"
She recalled her childhood of poverty again and admitted she had a fear of being poor. "You see, I needed money at the time I met Case. My daddy was a born gambler, and by that time, he'd lost all of his money."
"You prefer being rich?"
She grimaced. "You ever try being poor? If not, you do it sometime!" She recalled sharing a stick of hard candy once with one of her brothers. What a luxury that stick of candy had seemed then! She'd done the shopping for her mother, and there never was enough money for all the items her mother told her to buy. One day, the grocer had given her that stick of candy, and she remembered the joy and fun of sucking that thick, milky, sweet stem. "It tasted like heaven," she said.
The psychiatrist asked, "Did your mother nurse you at her breast?"
"I don't really know," she said.
"And that stick of candy? Did it come to symbolize your brother in any way?"
"I don't know that, either. But the first time I sucked my daddy, I recalled that candy stick! Sucking his cock was like eating candy!" She gave a little laugh and blushed slightly. "But you're leading me astray, Doctor. I came to see you about my sleeplessness."
"Have you suffered from insomnia all your life?"
She looked puzzled and hesitated before answering, "not as a child," she said. "And I was all right with my first husband until we got to quarreling. After I divorced him, I was all right. And I slept while I was engaged to Case, and for a time after we were married, too. It's only the last six months that I've slipped back. It frightens me, for once it starts, I don't know when it will stop."
On the evidence given, it seemed to the doctor that her first sleeplessness coincided with her giving up of sex with husband number one. The doctor wondered if similar factors were working now.
He asked, "Are you satisfied with your present sex life?"
A baffled look crossed the girl's face. She seemed to be making up her mind as to what to say to that. "I couldn't satisfy my husband the last few times. But I think it's too much drink on his part, and no fault of mine."
"So he drinks a lot?"
She gave him a pained, but graciously forgiving, look. "He never did until recently. It started when I had my period."
She said she'd had no period until she was sixteen, the first one occurring right after she'd had sex with her father. She seemed embarrassed when telling about it and said that her mother had never explained such things to her. Being a woman had seemed a catastrophe menstruation and blood, and birthing babies and blood. "A woman feels and is unclean during her periods," she said. "That's why I got to sleeping in a separate room from my husband."
"You did with both your husbands?"
"No, I was too ignorant of those matters with my first one."
"Didn't your mother ever tell you anything at all about sex?"
"No, not directly. She warned me in a roundabout way about men and what they wanted. I'm afraid she was rather bitter about men in general."
"And in particular?"
Mala Pearson moved uneasily. "She suffered a lot when my father went away. I used to make excuses for him, saying he'd send for us. But she never believed me."
"Did you believe those things yourself?"
She paused before replying. "Maybe I'm psychic, or something." Her eyes went dreamy again. "I knew he would send for me. I learned it one night in a dream, when a huge snake was chasing me."
Doctor D. recalled that the snake was a symbol of male sexuality.
"You knew?" he asked. "And you knew the other thing was going to happen?"
Knowing exactly what he meant, Mala tried to make a joke of it. Then she said seriously that, as a little girl, she used to dream a great deal about snakes. "They would chase me, and I would fly away from them like a bird." She shuddered. "Sometimes, I'd have a terrible time waking up, and it was as if my life depended on it."
She fell silent, as if thinking over the meaning of her dreams. Then she asked, "What do those dreams mean?"
"Maybe we'll find out a little later."
She seemed displeased. "But I thought analysis was based on an interpretation of dreams!"
"It was your dream! What do you feel it means?"
"I don't know. I panic sometimes. Maybe it's my sense of insecurity."
"What things make you feel secure?"
"Well, having food. Being looked after-"
"Doesn't your husband look after you?"
"Oh, yes! And he has money."
"But you still don't sleep?"
She shifted restlessly. "You mean, my not sleeping has nothing to do with my insecurity?"
"I didn't say that."
"Then what has it to do with?"
"What do you think?"
She looked at him angrily. "Say, Doctor, what's the gimmick? I'm giving all the answers, and you're getting paid for it!"
Her tone was a rebuke. She'd assumed a regal pose, like a queen speaking to a slave. Then she slumped back and closed her eyes. Her face was empty of expression. The doctor remained silent.
At last, she stirred, sighed deeply, and asked, "Can you help me, Doctor, if I come again?"
"Are you coming back?" he asked.
She stared at him a long moment, then nodded. "Yes, anything is better than the way things are."
Life seemed to flood back into her, and she attempted one dazzling smile as she rose to leave. It vanished before it reached her eyes.
"Come back," the doctor said. "And bring your husband back too. It's possible he needs treatment even more than you do."
She went out ahead of the doctor, leaving a sense of dying light behind her, like the light in the sky after sunset.
The doctor remembered that she was only twenty-four, that she'd found her childhood security by sucking a stick of candy. She'd become an oralist after that one experience.
"It tasted sweet," she'd said.
like the milk from a mother's breast or a man's big, hard cock.