ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten” is thought to be based on Anna Freud’s analysis with him. When one considers Freud’s work, it is important to consider its intellectual, social, and personal context. Freud was well acquainted with late-nineteenth-century thought on sexuality, perversion, and pathology, as delineated in the work of Krafft-Ebing, Moll, and Havelock Ellis. The transition from high birth rates balanced by high death rates to lower birth and death rates occurs when a country or region shifts from a pre-industrial, agrarian economic system to an industrialized urban one. Children lose their value as an overall asset as farmworkers, and instead become an economic burden. Much smaller families become the norm. Freud revered C. Darwin, as did the late-nineteenth-century sexologists, basing their theories on Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. The Linnaean classification system, based on kingdoms, classes, orders, genera, and species, was just becoming established. Naturalists and biologists strove mightily to classify nature.
