कर्वे विरुद्ध फ्रॉइड....Sexual Behavior in the Human Female

#RDKarve64thDeathAnniversary
आज ऑक्टोबर १४ २०१७, र धों कर्वेंचा ६४वा स्मृतिदिन 
 
W. H. Auden, 'In Memory of Sigmund Freud':

"...

for one who’d lived among enemies so long:

if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,

     to us he is no more a person

   now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives:

..."

Stanley Cavell: “Most philosophers in my tradition, I believe, relate to psychoanalysis, if at all, with suspicion, habitually asking whether psychoanalysis deserves the title of a science…. I am for myself convinced that the corpus of Freud’s writing, and a considerable amount of writing that depends upon it, has achieved an unsurpassed horizon of knowledge about the human mind. Accordingly I would not be satisfied with an answer that declares psychoanalysis not to be a science, if that answer denies that horizon of knowledge.”

  ग. वा. बेहेरे (G V Behere), 'कटाक्ष', २०१३ (मूळ लेखाची तारीख माहित नाही बहुदा १९८०चे दशक)

मला फ्रॉइड आवडतात . त्यांच्या कित्येक गोष्टी चुकल्या असतील पण त्यापेक्षा जास्त गोष्टी त्यांच्या बरोबर निघाल्या. त्यांचे माझ्या वर दुसऱ्या एका प्रकारचे ऋण आहे. त्यांच्या मुळे कित्येक शेकडा दर्जेदार कार्टून निर्माण झाली, सिनेमा / टीव्ही सेरीअल्स मधून डझनाने कॉमिक सिच्युएशन्स तयार झाल्या.

Artist: Bill Proud, The Spectator UK, 2008

त्याच प्रमाणे कर्वे यांचे संतती नियमा संबंधी, भारतातले, स्वतःला उध्वस्त करून टाकणारे, अग्रणी (pioneering) कार्य आणि, लैंगिक स्वतंत्र्याबद्दचे त्यांचे विचार तसेच त्यासंबंधातील द्रष्टेपणा मला थक्क करतात पण त्यांचे इतर कित्येक बाबतीतले विचार आणि वाचन इतके बालीश आणि उथळ होते की त्याचे आश्चर्य सुद्धा वाटते.

ऑडेन यांच्या कवितेतील जणू 'enemies' असल्यासारखे, र धों कर्वेंना (१८८२-१९५३) मात्र सिग्मंड फ्रॉइड (१८५६-१९३९) अजिबात आवडत नसत कारण त्यांना फ्रॉइड यांचे मनोविश्लेषण पूर्णपणे अशास्त्रीय वाटे. त्याला ते 'तोतयाशास्त्र' म्हणत. ('र धों कर्वें', य. दि. फडके, १९८१).

[फडके जरी उल्लेख करीत नसले तरी कर्वेंचे हे विचार कार्ल पॉपर १९०२-१९९४ (Karl Popper) यांच्या विचारावर आधारित दिसतात. पॉपर हे २०व्या शतकातील मोठे प्रस्थ होते. जॉन ग्रे (John Gray) या विषयाबद्दल लिहतात: "...The battle lines of the Freud wars were drawn early in the twentieth century, with Karl Popper formulating his argument, sometime around 1919, that psychoanalytical interpretations cannot be scientific because they cannot be falsified; he later attacked psychoanalysis in these same terms in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and Conjectures and Refutations (1963). The pattern of accusation against Freud has not changed much over the years: he claimed to be founding a science but presided over an authoritarian cult; he exaggerated the originality of his ideas; he suppressed or distorted evidence in order to insulate his theories from criticism, or else revised his theories without properly explaining why he did so..."] 

ते दोघेही कट्टर नास्तिक असले तरी फ्रॉइड यांचे धर्माबाबतचे विचार कर्व्यांसारखे कडवे नव्हते:

"... While religions might be illusions, illusions were not just errors—they could contain truth. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud went further, arguing that religion had played an essential role in the development of human inquiry. The Jewish belief in an unseen God was not a relic of ignorance without any positive value. By affirming a hidden reality, the idea of an invisible deity had encouraged inquiry into what lay behind the world that is disclosed to the senses. More, the belief in an unseen god had allowed a new kind of self-examination to develop—one that aimed to explore the inner world by looking beneath the surface of conscious awareness. Freud’s attempt to gain insight into the invisible workings of the mind may have been an extension of scientific method into new areas; but this advance was possible, Freud came to think, only because religion had prepared the ground. Without ever surrendering his uncompromising atheism, Freud acknowledged that psychoanalysis owed its existence to faith." (जॉन ग्रे)

त्यामुळे कर्वे आणखी चिडत असणार.

फ्रॉइड आईन्स्टाईन सारख्यांची सुद्धा फिरकी घेत असत : “Does not every natural science lead ultimately to this—a sort of mythology? Is it otherwise today with your physical sciences?”...विज्ञान सुद्धा शेवटी एक प्रकारचे मिथच बनते... कर्वेंना त्यांनी नक्कीच सोडलं नसत!

फ्रॉइड हे मानवी जगातील  वादग्रस्त व्यक्तीमत्व आहे पण त्यांचे अनन्यसाधारण महत्व, पुन्हा जॉन ग्रे यांच्या भाषेतच, फ्रॉइड यांचाच एक विचार घेवून सांगतो:

"Freud thought that civilisation is inestimably valuable – unlike some other writers in central Europe, he was never tempted by barbarism. But he also recognised that civilisation is inherently flawed, not because of political repression and corruption or economic inequality, but because of the nature of the human animal. That is why civilisation can never be rid of its faults, can never be entirely benign. I think that is true. In the language of religion, it might be called original sin. In other religions such as Buddhism, it is called original ignorance. However one wants to put it, it is a truth that humans are ineradicably flawed, and that is a commonplace in pretty much any religious tradition. It’s only recently, in the last 150 years, that the idea which Freud presented in a secular form is considered to be shocking."

म. वा. धोंड फ्रॉइड आणि कर्वे यांच्या कार्याची खालील शब्दात तुलना करतात :
"... कर्वे हे बुद्धिवादाचे व विचारस्वातंत्र्य , लेखनस्वातंत्र्य, आचारस्वातंत्र्य , यांप्रमाणेच कामस्वातंत्र्य हेदेखील व्यक्तिस्वातंत्र्याचेच एक अंग. मनोविकृतीवरील उपाय म्हणून फ्रॉइडने संभोगाकडे पहिले, तर कर्वे यांनी केवळ उपभोगाच्या दृष्टीने. त्यांनी कामविकृतीचा फारसा प्रपंच केला नाही..."
(पृष्ठ ९१, 'रघुनाथाची बखर', 'जाळ्यांतील चंद्र: समीक्षालेखसंग्रह', १९९४ & १९९८)

धोंड फ्रॉइड-कर्वे तुलना का करतात हे समजल नाही आणि 'मनोविकृतीवरील उपाय म्हणून फ्रॉइडने संभोगाकडे पहिले' हे वाक्य मला पटतही नाही. पण आपण सध्या कर्वेंबद्दल धोंड काय म्हणतात तेवढेच पाहू: "कर्वे यांनी संभोगाकडे केवळ उपभोगाच्या दृष्टीने पहिले."... संभोग, हस्तमैथुन (masturbation)  नव्हे. 

कर्वे दुर्दैवाने ऑक्टोबर १९५३मध्ये वारले आणि त्याच वर्षी अमेरिकेत आल्फ्रेड किनसे (Alfred Kinsey) आणि इतर लिखित 'Sexual Behavior in the Human Female' हे स्त्रीयांच्या कामजीवनाबद्दलच्या समजांना उध्वस्त करणार पुस्तक प्रसिद्ध झालं!

विकिपीडिया आपल्याला सांगतो: "The Kinsey Reports, which together sold three-quarters of a million copies and were translated in thirteen languages, may be considered as part of the most successful and influential scientific books of the 20th century."

"शास्त्रीय पुस्तके" हे त्यांबद्दल वाचून कर्वेंना अत्यानंद झाला असता पण त्याहून ही जास्त आनंद हे वाचून झाला असतकी त्या पुस्तकामुळे  फ्रॉइडयांच्या स्त्रीयांच्या कामजीवनाबद्दलच्या कल्पनांना सुरुंग लागला.

काय होत्या त्या कल्पना.

वंडर वूमन, २०१७ मध्ये डायाना प्रिन्स सांगते: 

सौजन्य : Warner Bros. Pictures

स्टीफन जे गुल्ड (Stephen Jay Gould) लिहतात आपल्या पुस्तकात 'Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History, १९९१':

“…Puberty enhances the libido of boys but produces an opposite effect in girls—“a fresh wave of repression.” Later, sexuality resumes in a new way. Freud writes:

When at last the sexual act is permitted and the clitoris itself becomes excited, it still retains a function: the task, namely, of transmitting the excitation to the adjacent female sexual parts, just as—to use a simile—pine shavings can be kindled in order to set a log of harder wood on fire.

Thus, we encounter Freud’s famous theory of female sexual maturity as a transfer from clitoral to vaginal orgasm:

When erotogenic susceptibility to stimulation has been successfully transferred by a woman from the clitoris to the vaginal orifice, it implies that she has adopted a new leading zone for the purposes of her later sexual activity.

This dogma of transfer from clitoral to vaginal orgasm became a shibboleth of pop culture during the heady days of pervasive Freudianism. It shaped the expectations (and therefore the frustration and often misery) of millions of educated and “enlightened” women told by a brigade of psychoanalysts and by hundreds of articles in magazines and “marriage manuals” that they must make this biologically impossible transition as a definition of maturity.

Freud’s unbiological theory did further harm in two additional ways. First, Freud did not define frigidity only as an inability to perform sexually or as inefficacy in performance, but proposed as his primary definition a failure to produce this key transfer from clitoris to vagina. Thus, a woman who greatly enjoys sex, but only by clitoral stimulation, is frigid by Freud’s terminology. “This anaesthesia,” Freud writes, “may become permanent if the clitoridal zone refuses to abandon its excitability.”

Second, Freud attributed a supposedly greater incidence of neurosis and hysteria in women to the difficulty of this transfer—for men simply retain their sexual zone intact from childhood, while women must undergo the hazardous switch from clitoris to vagina. Freud continues:

The fact that women change their leading erotogenic zone in this way, together with the wave of repression at puberty…are the chief determinants of the greater proneness of women to neurosis and especially to hysteria. These determinants, therefore, are intimately related to the essence of femininity.

In short, Freud’s error may be encapsulated by stating that he defined the ordinary biology of female sexuality as an aberration based on failure to abandon an infantile tendency..."

गुल्ड पुढ लिहतात:

"... As women have known since the dawn of our time, the primary site for stimulation to orgasm centers upon the clitoris. The revolution unleashed by the Kinsey report of 1953 has, by now, made this information available to men who, for whatever reason, had not figured it out for themselves by the more obvious routes of experience and sensitivity.

The data are unambiguous. Consider only the three most widely read of extensive surveys—the Kinsey report of 1953, Masters and Johnson’s book of 1966, and The Hite Report of 1976. In his study of genital anatomy, Kinsey reports that the female clitoris is as richly supplied with sensory nerves as the male penis—and therefore as capable of excitation. The walls of the vagina, on the other hand, “are devoid of end organs of touch and are quite insensitive when they are gently stroked or lightly pressed. For most individuals the insensitivity extends to every part of the vagina.”

The data on masturbation are particularly convincing. Kinsey reports from his sample of 8,000 women that 84 percent of individuals who have ever masturbated depend “primarily on labial and/or clitoral techniques.” The Hite Report on 3,000 individuals found that 79 percent of women who masturbate do so by directly stimulating the clitoris and surrounding vulva, while only 1.5 percent use vaginal entry...." 

गुल्ड यांच्या पुस्तकाला २६वर्षे झाली म्हटलं तरी  इंडिपेंडंट,युके मधली डिसेंबर २०१५ मधली बातमी पहा :

"Masturbation is the 'most successful' way for women to achieve orgasm......Despite its international reputation for romance, France has topped a survey for having women most likely to fake an orgasm.

Out of a survey of France, the US, Spain, the UK, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands and Germany, French women struggled most to climax with their partner. Experts said this might be due to a culture that is still wedded to the classic sexual practice of vaginal penetration - which does not commonly induce orgasms in women...."

हे कर्वेंना माहित असत तर ते फ्रॉइड यांच्यावर तुटून पडले असते!

पण मला वाटत किनसे रिपोर्ट जरी बाहेर आला नसला तरी फ्रॉइड यांच्या स्त्रीयांकडून असलेल्या अपेक्षा, वर दिल्याप्रमाणे, clitoris to vagina, माहित होत्या. कर्वे म्हणत की "वैयक्तिक सुखावर मनुष्याचा निसर्गसिद्ध हक्क आहे , आणि जेथपर्यंत ते समाजहिताच्या किंवा दुसऱ्याच्या सुखाच्या आड येत नाही, तेथ पर्यंत ते मिळवण्याचा प्रत्येकास हक्क आहे." आता स्त्री हस्तमैथुन करताना आनंद कुठुनही मिळवो , दुसऱ्या कोणाला त्याबाबत बोलायचा काय अधिकार आहे?

पण कर्वेंनी कदाचित ते केल नसेल कारण भारतात फ्रॉइडप्रणालीचे मानसोपचार तज्ञ त्यावेळी कदाचित नसल्यामुळे भारतीय स्त्रियांना गुमराह करण्याचा प्रश्न येत नव्हता आणि कर्वे फ्रॉइडना फार महत्व पण देत नसतील.

Existential Comics #19