The Development of Sexuality and the Self

The clinical influence of Freud's theory of normal adolescent and childhood development is still profound. Most contemporary psychoanalytic theories, except for Kohut's psychology of the self, continue his emphasis, to be sure, in significantly modified forms. Thus, infantile sexuality, primary narcissism, and primary masochism (aggression)—one or all of these—are core concepts of ego psychology, object relations theories, and earlier self theories: sexual, narcissistic, and aggressive wishes are considered building blocks of psychic structure, the primary issues in normal development, and the primary factors that lead to psychopathology. In these frameworks unconscious struggles to gratify wishes, without injuring or destroying the needed objects, are at the heart of the psychology of childhood and adolescence; adult maturity, sexual and otherwise, is attained by taming, relinquishing, or sublimating the tenaciously held aims of childhood wishes.

There is an enormously important problem with all of the modified versions of Freud's view of primary human motivation and of what constitutes pleasure, satisfaction, and fulfillment. It is four decades since Erikson (1956) pointed out that there is “a stubborn persisting tendency” in psychoanalytic theory: even though the importance of children's and parents' reciprocal attachments is acknowledged, clinical theories have failed to take the role attachments play in normal development into account. The result of this omission is that the person in treatment is frequently seen as a mere puppet of his or her infantile wishes (Erikson, 1950)—wishes considered to be identical with the pathological urges to exploit, violate, or destroy that are seen in serious adult pathology.