Excerpt from "'A Child is Being Beaten': A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions" (1918)

In Part I of this essay, Freud observes that a "surprising" number of patients seeking psychoanalytic treatment who share the a psycho-sexual fantasy that "a child is being beaten." Freud links this fantasy to memories of childhood: witnessing corporal punishment at school or reading books such as Uncle Tom's Cabin in which the reader is a third-party to violence.