“A Child Is Being Beaten” is the strange title of Freud’s 1919 paper on sexual fantasy. This sentence, one of sadomasochistic, masturbatory enjoyment and announced from an unspecified source, indicates the phantasmatic scene admitted to by several of his patients. What are these beating fantasies? Freud says it is “not clearly sexual, not in itself sadistic, but yet the stuff from which both will later come.”
He’s trying to reach back to some primordial core of our subjectivity, centered on sexuality, the first outlines of guilt, and the desire for punishment. Also: the place where the prohibition against incest barely holds up in its commandment. The paper feels utterly wild—so many surprising elements are condensed into the phantasmatic image of an adult beating a child (usually a paternal representative, though sometimes the mother is present). Importantly, Freud notes, these aren’t the musings of perverse patients but rather the revelation of common daydreams—perhaps even unconscious universal scripts, that graft childhood experience with cultural mores.
