Chapter 5) The Finding of an Object of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality - Study Guide by Sigmund Freud

5) The Finding of an Object

When the first beginnings of sexual satisfaction are linked with nourishment, the sexual object is the mother's breast. After this, the sexual instinct then becomes auto-erotic, and not until the period of latency has been passed through is the original relation restored.

The Sexual Object during Early Infancy

Even after sexual activity has become detached from the taking of nourishment, all through the period of latency, children learn to feel for other people who help them in their helplessness. Freud proposes that the child's affection can be identified with sexual love. A child's demand (or not) for excessive parental affection can have great implications regarding their disposition to neurotic illness.

Infantile Anxiety

Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact that they are feeling the loss of the person they love. For this reason too, they are afraid of strangers and the dark, etc. (i.e. a demand by their unsatisfied libido).

The Barrier against Incest

Parents' affection for their child may awaken his sexual instinct prematurely to such an extent that the mental excitation breaks through to the genital system which could result in incest as the child seeks a sexual object prematurely but, if this does not happen, then the child reaches the stage of choice of sexual object, on reaching maturity - after a sufficient period of latency in which the inhibition against incest was able to be built. Therefore it can be said that sexual love and what appears to be non-sexual love - for parents are fed from the same sources - the latter being an infantile fixation of the libido.

After- effects of Infantile Object-choice

Even those who have avoided an incestuous fixation of libido do not entirely escape its influence, since it often happens that a young man falls for an older woman, and a young girl for an older man. Freud proposes that in these cases the older figure represents a re-enactment of the child's affection for their opposite sex parent. Furthermore, Freud argues that even when this does not happen, a child's affection for his parents is the most important infantile trace, which on its revival in puberty, points the way to his choice of an object. There may be other points though which can result in various conditions for his object choice.

Prevention of Inversion

The implicit task of object-choice is that it should find its way to the opposite sex. The attraction which the opposing sexes exercise upon each other being the strongest force against inversion, other factors are prohibition by society, and in the case of men, predominantly female care in childhood, and am almost competitive relation with their father usually suffices. In girls, the close guardianship of the mother, assists their 'hostility' to their own sex, and choice in the 'right' direction.