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In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud states that the results of infantile object-choice are carried over into the later period, «as a consequence of the repression which has developed between the two phases they prove unusable. Their sexual aims have become mitigated and they now represent what may be described as the “affectionate current” of sexual life […], behind this affection, admiration and respect there lie concealed the old sexual longings of the infantile component instincts which have now become unserviceable» (1905, 199).
These «old sexual longings» (which must be given up) include not only those of the young child's first object-choice (at between two and five years of age), but also those which date back to the breast-feeding period: «There are thus good reasons why a child sucking at his mother's breast has become the prototype of every relation of love» (1905, 221).
Freud underlines the fact that the object-choice of the pubertal period is obliged to dispense with the objects of childhood and to start afresh as a «sensual current». Should these two currents fail to converge, «the result is often that one of the ideals of sexual life, the focusing of all desires upon a single object, will be unattainable» (1905, 199).
Many years later, Freud writes in Female Sexuality that the female child reaches the father after having gone through a pre-oedipal phase which is characterised by exclusive attachment to the mother. This phase takes on much greater significance in females than in males. He adds that the importance of this phase, and especially how long it lasts, have previously been underestimated: in effect, the possibility that «a number of women remain arrested in their original attachment to their mother and never achieve a true change-over towards men. This being so, the pre-Oedipus phase in women gains an importance which we have not attributed to it hitherto» (Freud, 1931, 225) dates back to this phase. Thus it happens that during marri