The Centrality of Beating Fantasies and Wishes in the Analysis of a Three-Year-Old Girl

Abstract

Freud's (1919) classic paper, “A Child Is Being Beaten,” with its introduction to masochism, offers an excellent example of how child psychoanalytic data can clarify his ideas, correct those where he went astray, and check whether ones that seem speculative are supported by developmental data. Toward these ends, the analysis of a three-year-old girl with prominent beating fantasies is presented. Her analytic material suggests that it is unimportant from a treatment or pathogenesis perspective to differentiate between different types of sadomasochistic content in such fantasies. That is, the phenomenological distinction between beating fantasies and beating wishes does not seem to have much practical utility. All such fantasies have the same essential structure and are compromise formations in which pain is sought to maintain the complex equilibrium provided by them. Her material also indicates that such phenomena do not require oedipal stage engagement or dynamics to develop, although they will, of course, be colored by this stage's issues as the child engages it. Even sexualization, the so-called hallmark of beating fantasies, can arise as a means to deal with various cumulative traumas and does not require access to the sexual stirrings of the oedipal stage to occur.