lunes, 11 de febrero de 2013

THE FOETUS AND COITUS, Michel Hervé Bertaux-Navoiseau



 Eustache Le Sueur. Présentation de l'enfant au Temple. an?

Musee des Beaux Arts, Marseilles, France

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THE FOETUS AND COITUS


            Just as the main function of the foreskin is autosexuality, in the same way, nature provided woman with two sexual organs: one, internal, orientated towards reproduction, the other, external, meant for pure pleasure, precisely in order to enable the latter during the period when coitus risks being harmful to the foetus. This one must not be bothered, troubled in its sleep. Nothing warrants that coitus might not terrorize and traumatize it. Being woken up at home by a more or less striking and violent intrusion, being knocked over, worried by panting and screams and having to wonder unsuccessfully about what is happening, may be unpleasant and ill-lived by some, a minority, let us wish, but whose trauma will ruin the whole existence.
            So, the extravagant Japanese hara-kiri turned the warlike failure of supposed braves (what a queer bravery to impose on its close relations such an atrocious spectacle!) into an homage to the memory of parental coitus; in the last act of his life, the samurai identifies with his begetter through shaming violent penetration by the father into his own belly, realizing a fantasy of inverted oedipus. The syndrome of Koro equally seems to be linked with a trauma of the prenatal period. Let us report that cutting the fraenulum of the tongue of children realizes a threat that is much more terrible than that of circumcision since bearing on the head.

Foetus, do not disturb!
               The trauma provoked with the infant by the sight of parental coitus (cf. Freud, the Wolf-Man), is one of the great discoveries, now commonly admitted, of psychoanalysis. This trauma explains numerous psychical or psychosomatic diseases. However, it seems that there are many more such diseases than infants having had the opportunity to assist a love scene. The likeliest hypothesis is that the traumatizing love scenes have not been seen but perceived at foetal age. Freud explains the Wolf-Man’s constipation (his main psychosomatic symptom) by the pleasure felt through enemas lived in a rebirth phantasy. Do not the spasms inducing that constipation find better explanation in the urge to oppose a phantastical sodomy, dreaded by the child? This interpretation casts a garish light upon the Wolf-Man’s fantasy of his first appointment with Freud:

".. he (Freud) is going to take me backwards and shit on my head."

All the more since the association made by the patient with the tale of the great-father seems to explain the dream by the intrusion of the father into the womb. Let us recall that the tale counts the story of a tailor in his shop. A wolf jumps in. The tailor cuts its tail and the wolf runs away. It is likely that the tale of the little red hood might also enlighten the dream.
               Like the paranoid personality, the foetus takes for itself what happens around it. The start of the paranoid episode of the Wolf-Man at the very moment when he sees himself excluded from Freud’s house, which had become for him a quasi family shelter, takes all its meaning; not only does the substitute of the father upsets him through sending him to a physician who clumsily operates his nose (penis) – which dramatically fulfils the maid's forecast of a wound – but also does he symbolically bar him out of the way to the mother. The small drop makes the vase overflow.
               Psychoanalysis already revealed with certainty (cf. Françoise Dolto) that the child suffers repercussions from accidents occurred to the pregnant mother. After the Second World War, the medical profession lifted the traditional forbidding of coitus during pregnancy. The multiplication of psychosomatic diseases, notably autism and asthma, appears to be a direct consequence of that "liberalization"; the percentage of the population likely to become allergic has risen from 10% in 1950 to 30% in 1990.
               For numerous psychosomatic diseases find their traits in aggressions endured by the foetus. Epilepsy is the most obvious one since it mimics orgasm through introducing the tongue in the trachea. Allergy has gained currency. Halpern[1] quotes a case of anaphylactic shock to sperm; the sensitization would have occurred inside the uterus through contact with the father’s sperm. Asthma mimics lovers’ panting breath. The itching of eczema reproduces the friction of sexual act. Autism seems a rebellion against the unconscious "egoism" of troublemakers of foetal sleep and the auto-mutilator behaviour of autists may be a repetition of what they suffered inside the womb, or at its way out: the experience of suffering associated with pleasure. The anorexic and compulsive eater seem aping, in a repetitive way, what they have felt as "great rub" followed by long abstinence. It can be thought that numerous cases of prematuration are caused by the fact that the child does what is necessary in order to escape a become inhospitable place and that the obese take so much room in order to demonstrate that theirs has been repetitively violated in the beginning of their existence!
               Laurence Pernoud[2] acknowledges that we do not know the consequences of coitus on the foetus. Some, among whom Françoise Dolto, posit the idea of a positive effect of orgasm and even of the hormones of pleasure. However, as long as the absence of possible negative effects has not been demonstrated scientifically, pregnant mums will be prudent to be content with clitoral orgasm, the only one understandable by the foetus, taking into account its personal practice. If the mother is frigid particularly, the foetus undergoes coitus like her, without positive effects but with inconvenience. The foetus is the obliged witness of the sexual life of its parents; it must not be its victim. During pregnancy, cautious parents will be content with accompanying it in its autosexuality without taking the risk to teach it more of it. For many seem to perceive coitus as unbearable trouble, which the individual will suffer of his whole existence long.





[1] Allergies. Paris : M.A. éditions ; 1984.
[2] Pernoud L. J'attends un enfant.

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