Freud and the Cartography of Infantile Sexuality

Abstract

Childhood sexuality and the desires, demands, and conflicts it entails occupy a foundational, if often paradoxical, location in the work of Sigmund Freud. Repeatedly revised in his writings on psychoanalytic theory, diagnosis, and methodology the imprint of infantile eroticism leaves its trace on everything from an individual’s psychic life to rendering visible the fragility of their gender development and their objects of sexual desire (1938, 1933, 1919, 1905a, 1899). Its residue is found in the symptoms of hysteria and neurosis and the regression to its desires is far from uncommon in both the “normal” and the “pathological” (1912b, 1908b, 1905c, 1905b, 1905a). Our Oedipal desires and the restrictions society imposes on them undergird the psychosocial dynamics of both “savage” and “civilized” societies and underpin our artistic and cultural development (1918b, 161, 1918a, 1930). At base, the erotic life of the child, within Freudian psychoanalytic discourse, is the ground or “prehistory” upon which the psychical and the cultural are built (1925, 175).¹

The effects of seduction do not help reveal the early history of the sexual instinct; they rather confuse our view of it by presenting children prematurely with a sexual object for which the infantile sexual instinct at first shows no need. It must, however, be admitted that infantile sexual life, in spite of the prepondering dominance of the erotogenic zones, exhibits components which from the very first involve other people as sexual objects.

Freud (1905c)