“A Child Is Being Beaten”

In 1922, Anna Freud presented to the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society as part of its requirements for applicants a clinical thesis describing beating fantasies in a fifteen-year-old girl. The pleasure accompanying the beating gives the fantasy a masochistic quality, in which being beaten by the father leads both to oedipal guilt and to eroticism; the fantasy "is not only the punishment for the forbidden genital relation, but also the regressive substitute for that relation". In "A Child Is Being Beaten" Freud shows that the sexual pleasure to be found in pain—characteristic of masochism—is closely linked to the eroticization of incestuous objects. He argues that the Oedipus complex plays a central role in perversions, just as it does in neuroses. Fantasy describes the consciously imagined scenarios of a child being beaten that the patient would recite to himself in a waking state.