Primal scene

In psychoanalysis, the primal scene (German: Urszene) is the initial witnessing by a child of a sex act, usually between the parents, that traumatizes the psychosexual development of that child. The scene witnessed may also occur between animals, and be displaced onto humans.

The expression "primal scene" refers to the sight of sexual relations between the parents, as observed, constructed, or fantasized by the child and interpreted by the child as a scene of violence. The scene is not understood by the child, remaining enigmatic but at the same time provoking sexual excitement.

The term appeared for the first time in Freud's published work apropos of the "Wolf Man" case (1918b [1914]), but the notion of a sexual memory experienced too early to have been translated into verbal images, and thus liable to return in the form of conversion symptoms or obsessions, was part of his thinking as early as 1896 [as witness his letter of May 30 of that year to Wilhelm Fliess, where he evokes a "surplus of sexuality" that "impedes translation" (1950a, pp. 229–230)]. Here Freud is already close to the model of the trauma and its "deferred" effect. The following year, in his letter to Fliess of May 2, Freud uses the actual term urszene for the first time; and gives the approximate age when in his estimation children were liable to "hear things" that they would understand only "subsequently" as six or seven months (SE 1, p. 247). The subject of the child's witnessing parental coitus came up as well, albeit in an older child, with the case of "Katharina," in the Studies on Hysteria (1895d), and Freud evoked it yet again in The Interpretation of Dreams, with the fantasy of the young man who dreamed of watching his parents copulating during his life in the womb (1900a [addition of 1909], pp. 399–400).

Freud persistently strove to decide whether the primal scene was a fantasy or something actually witnessed; above all, he placed increasing emphasis on the child's own fantasy interpretation of the scene as violence visited upon the mother by the father. He went so far, in "On the Sexual Theories of Children" (1908c, p. 221), as to find a measure of justification for what he called the "sadistic concept of coitus", suggesting that, though the child may exaggerate, the perception of a real repugnance towards sexual intercourse on the part of a mother fearful of another pregnancy may be quite accurate. In the case of "Little Hans," however, the violence was explained in terms of a prohibition: Hans deemed it analogous to "smashing a window-pane or forcing a way into an enclosed space" (1909b, p. 41).

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