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The term and concept, sexualization, as currently used in psychoanalysis is imprecise and does not refer to a well-described and reasonably well-understood psychoanalytic process. This paper emphasizes that the problem of choice of a sexual mode of defense has not been addressed directly in the psychoanalytic literature and that it should be. Sexualization has been regarded here as an aspect of all sexual activity, representing the defensive perspective from which sexual behavior and fantasy are viewed. A narrower clinical meaning of sexualization has restricted it to the extensively elaborated defensive use of sexual behavior and fantasy, in which defense has greater urgency and significance in the patient's motivational hierarchy than does sexual drive gratification.
Previously described mechanisms by which sexualized defenses function have been reviewed and expanded. Emphasis has been placed on sexualized attempts to transform negatively toned, aggressively infiltrated, images of self and objects into more positive, pleasurably regarded ones. Some sexual fantasy and behavior involves attempts at validation of the illusion that the representational world can be omnipotently and pleasurably manipulated and controlled. The concept of "illusory actualization of fantasies" during masturbation (Nydes, 1950) has been elaborated to illustrate a mechanism whereby such sexualized transformations can occur within the representational world.