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Míša Stekl
WGS 385: Freud
Professor Wilson
April 7, 2018
Infantile Sexuality

“What is it that goes to the making of these constructions which are so important for the

growth of a civilized and normal individual?” (Freud, Three Essays, 178) With this question,

Freud anticipates one of the key contributions which psychoanalysis would offer feminist and

queer theory: an account of subjectivity as constructed through an economy of sexual desires.

The subject is sexual, and the sexual is phantasmatic; sexuality may be the “truth of ourselves,”

but that truth consists in fiction. This paper explores the role of fantasy in Freud’s theory of

sexuality, arguing that in distinguishing sexual drives from instincts of self-preservation,

psychoanalysis both complicates and reinstates the myth of the origin. Thinking with

psychoanalysis, against biological determinism, we can reconceive sexuality in the

indeterminacy of its individual development. However, feminists must remain attentive to the

limits of Freud’s thought, wherein sexual fantasy remains the mimicry of an anatomical – indeed,

“natural” – origin that is represented and prescribed according to a heterosexist signifying order.

Sexuality, for Freud, is irreducible to a hardwired biological instinct; nonetheless, it is the

imitation of biological processes. Hence, although Freud claims that the infant is born with

neither a sense of self nor a fixed sexuality, “there seems no doubt that germs of sexual impulses

are already present in the new-born child” (176). These initial germs of sexual impulses, of

course, seem to have little in common with our familiar world of adult sexuality, centered as it

(normatively) is around genital contact with another person; for genitality is but one potential

outcome of the complex process of infantile sexual development. Infantile sexuality first takes
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root, rather, in the repetition of pleasures discovered as if accidentally, while satisfying

biological instincts such as hunger and defecation (182).

Thus the first stage of infantile sexual development is oral. Its “germs” emerge in the

infant’s biological need for nourishment: when breast- (or bottle-) fed, the infant inevitably

learns the pleasures of sucking. But sexuality quickly detaches from the hunger instinct: though

it was the latter which introduced the infant to sucking, he or she now enjoys a world of pleasure

wholly independent of nourishment. The object and aim of the sexual drive have departed from

the nutrition to which they were initially tied, yielding to the infant’s first truly sexual pleasure:

the rhythmical stimulation of the lips. Until roughly 18 months of age, the mouth is the infant’s

primary “erotogenic zone” – “a part of the skin or mucous membrane in which stimuli of a

certain sort evoke a feeling of pleasure possessing a particular quality” (183). Importantly, any

body part – even an organ – can become an erotogenic zone, as long as its stimulation produces

pleasure. In this sense, infantile sexuality is “polymorphously perverse”; the infant may explore

any variety of pathways in its pursuit of a pleasure which cannot but appear pointless from the

viewpoint of self-preservation.

The independence of sexual drives from biological instincts becomes apparent as nearly

every infant begins to suck its thumb – an effort to repeat, by mimicking, the erotogenic pleasure

of breast-feeding. Several critical transitions may now be observed: “The child does not make

use of an extraneous body for his sucking, but prefers a part of his own skin because it is more

convenient, because it makes him independent of the external world, which he is not yet able to

control, and because in that way he provides himself, as it were, with a second erotogenic zone,

though one of an inferior kind.” (182) As sexuality becomes independent of the biological

processes it nevertheless imitates, the infant becomes independent of the external world. Seeking
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to relive erotogenic pleasures, the infant discovers that it cannot (“yet”) control reality, as the

mother – or at least her breast – often remains absent in spite of the infant’s desires. To

compensate for this lack, the infant indulges in auto-erotic sexual fantasy: by sucking its own

skin, it finds a means to control its own erotogenic stimulation. Selfhood, then, is constituted

through the displacement of sexual drives by fantasies which, however, can only ever yield

“inferior” substitutes for the original object, the mother’s breast. From the oral stage onward,

“lack, gap, splitting will be [the infant’s] mode of being. It will attempt to fill its (impossible,

unfillable) lack.” (Grosz 35)

As we see in this quote from Elisabeth Grosz, the psychoanalytic account of the self has

had great significance for feminist theory. Firstly, if desire essentially lacks, where this lack is

understood as the unbridgeable gap between libidinal fantasy and reality, then no sexuality can

claim the status of sovereignty. Man’s fantasy of absolute power is just that: a fantasy. Just as the

infant, powerless over the appearance or disappearance of its mother’s breast, tries to fantasize

away its real lack of control, the infant-become-straight-boy will counterbalance his lack of

power over external reality with sexual fantasies of active dominance. To call masculinity a

fantasy, in this sense, is not simply to say that it is “socially constructed,” in the common sense

of “not (biologically) real”; it is to understand that the very real violence perpetrated in the name

of hegemonic masculinity stems from desires which really exist, in every man’s unconscious, but

which exist only in negating reality.

What also emerges in this psychoanalytic theorization of masculine violence is that

neither sexuality nor the self are predetermined, either by biology or by culture. For Freud, all

identity is constituted through a phantasmatic process which began in infancy and could always

have yielded alternative outcomes. No woman was simply born passive and feminine, nor is any
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sexual orientation more “natural” than another. As we have seen, the little girl behaves

identically to the little boy to begin with; in the oral and anal stages, the sexes are equally active

and dominant. In infancy, and still in their unconscious, everyone is polymorphously perverse;

even the most “civilized and normal” man only earned his name by repressing any number of

“abnormal” (which is to say: universal but largely unconscious) sexual desires. But what is

repressed still exists in the unconscious; to identify as a “heterosexual man” would simply be to

remain unconscious of one’s homosexual and feminine desires. There is a woman within every

man, and a man within every woman. On the positive feminist reading, then, Freud offers a rich

and depathologizing psychic explanation of gender’s construction, wherein one’s sexuality

develops through a fixation on certain fantasies and a repression of others, in accordance with the

specificities of one’s body.

But we must carefully consider the mechanism by which fantasies supposedly fixate. If,

as we have said, sexuality is the phantasmatic mimicry of a biological origin, then we must

question the status of that origin. On the one hand, psychoanalysis seems to show that the origin

of a fantasy could only be represented in another fantasy. No body part could then be defined by

its “organic significance,” since significance is necessarily psychic. Yet, the term is Freud’s own:

“the penis … owes its extraordinarily high narcissistic cathexis to its organic significance for the

propagation of the species” (Freud, “Anatomical Sex-Distinction,” 257). No doubt some

erotogenic zones (i.e., genitalia) are more sensitive; yet, what is at stake in reading this

difference in cathexis as organically significant? As if Nature followed a certain teleology, in

purposely planting the “germs” of infantile sexuality in hyper-cathected erotogenic zones.

Orality and anality would then appear as tools by which Nature gradually awakens man to sexual

pleasure, guiding him toward the “normal, or is it better to say, ideal” outcome: heterosexual
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reproduction (257). Through this teleology, sexual pleasure would remain servile to the

preservation of the species, even as it is freed from self-preservation. “The victory of the race

over the individual” (257). Of course deviations from this “ideal” progression would be possible,

but they would remain deviations standing in the way of the preservation of the species. Whence

the history of psychoanalysis as a corrective technique, bringing deviant sexualities in line with

the reproductive norm.

Having shown that Nature can only be represented in fantasy, Freud nonetheless proceeds

to read his fantasy (of Nature) into Nature. But if Freud’s readership includes decades of feminist

and queer theorists, perhaps his text holds the key to its own overcoming: how are we to read

Freud’s reinstantiation of reproduction as the origin of sexuality, if not as Freud’s own phallic

fantasy – his phantasmatic effort to seize that origin, the real, which is precisely lacking in the

phantasmatic? Taking the psychoanalytic account of mimicry one step further, Grosz argues, we

might displace the primacy that the origin still holds for Freud (cf. Grosz 57). We would then

realize that any claim to know the truth of the origin is itself phantasmatic, in its routing through

desire and language.

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Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. 1925. “Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the

sexes.” SE XIX (pp. 248– 258).

Freud, Sigmund. 1905. Three essays on the theory of sexuality (Section II. Infantile sexuality).

SE VII (pp. 173– 206).

Grosz, Elizabeth A. Jacques Lacan: a Feminist Introduction. Routledge, 1990.