Ernest Borneman

Ernst Wilhelm Julius Bornemann (12 April 1915 – 4 June 1995), also known by his self-chosen Ernest Borneman, was a German crime writer, filmmaker, anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, psychoanalyst, sexologist, communist agitator, jazz musician and critic. As both a Jew and a member of the German Communist Party, Borneman's life was in great peril when the Nazis came to power in 1933. He fled to London by posing as a member of the Hitler Youth on his way to England as an exchange student.

Borneman is most relevant to MAPs, AAMs and allies through his research into young people's sexuality, and related theory of sexual developmental psychology and phases of sexual maturity. There are only 2 sources in English where Borneman drew on this research, discussed in this page.

The Largest Single Community Sample Study of Children's Sexuality?

Borneman led a team of researchers and conducted one of the largest studies of children's/young people's sexuality from the youth's perspective, ever to be conducted. In a paper presented to the World Congress of Sexology, entitled "Progress in Empirical Research on Children's Sexuality" (1983), Borneman outlines his findings after his research team had spent 40 years collecting a large community sample of over 4,000 taped conversations where children and adolescents discussed their everyday sex lives (including dreams, sexual fantasies and sexual contact). Largely hidden from and unknown to their parents, the young people who participated were gathered through the 1940s to the 1960s, with Borneman's publications about the research appearing mainly in the 1980s-90s. During researcher, Borneman and his colleagues were arrested multiple times before changing their research method. As Borneman explained:

"Sooner or later, of course, the adults intervened, called the police or the park attendants, and asked what in the world we were up to. Most of us were arrested at least once and got used to carrying thick wallets full of documents identifying us as members of a research team. Despite the fact that we were in no way conducting a participant observation study, and were merely attempting to understand children’s sexual thinking, it was very difficult to communicate this distinction to authorities. The experiences were painful, and so we began to train children in handling tape recorders. This worked extremely well…"

Tom O'Carroll, former chairman of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) during the 1st wave of the MAP Movement, wrote about Borneman on his personal website.. He wrote:

"The perils of scientific research into children’s sexuality are vividly illustrated here in the words of larger-than-life polymath Ernest Borneman, [...] best remembered now as a sexologist who dared to study children’s sexuality.

Borneman’s bold radicalism got off to an early start when, as a youth, he found himself in the company of Marxist poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht; even more promisingly, he worked for psychologist Wilhelm Reich, who, as many heretics here will be aware, advocated a childhood start to active sexual life, seeing sexual repression as key to the mass psychology of fascism. Borneman would in later life become a professor at the University of Salzburg, president of both the Austrian and German societies for sexological research, and in 1990 first winner of the prestigious Magnus Hirschfeld Medal for Sexual Science. Not bad for someone who has had his collar felt by the police as a suspected paedo!"

In the same paper, Borneman explained that "No field of sexology is beset with more objections [...] than research into children’s sex life. Such objections reach the height of absurdity with the denial that there is such a thing as children’s sexuality. [...] Of course, pedologists mean something else by children’s “sex life” than laypersons. We don’t limit the term to a connotation of “having intercourse.” In our vocabulary, children’s sex life encompasses the child’s entire existence as a sexual being. In this sense, it may even be permissible to speak of prenatal sex life" [Sexual behavior in utero, in the womb, has since been empirically verified - see our page on youth sexuality].

For Borneman, "Human sexuality [...] consists less of bodily activities than of mental ones - desires, fantasies, disappointments, anxieties. In this specific sense, the child’s sex life resembles that of the adult human". As the majority of erotic / sex life resides in fantasy, the gulf between "adults" and "children" is much smaller than might usually be assumed.

Among other important findings, Borneman coined an initial phase of psychosexual development - "the cutaneous phase" - in which "the entire skin surface of the newly born is a single erogenous zone." The genitals has been over-emphasized, "since we observed that the sexually mature person of our day is a cutaneously oriented person whose entire body surface is libidinally sensitive. Such people are not genitally fixated [...and the] embraces they seek are not exclusively of the genital kind."