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Les philosophes ordinaires ont soumis l'homme a la nature pour s'accommoder aux idees recues: prenant un vol plus rapide, je te prouverai, quand tu voudras, qu'il n'en depend nullement.
de Sade
FREUD, IN HIS "Three Essays on Sexuality" (1905), had given the whole concept of cannibalism a new dimension. He had discriminated cannibalistic features in infantile sexuality. Freud considered the cannibalistic desires of infantile sexuality intimately related to sadism and the aggressive factor in the libido. To the cannibalistic pregenital sexual organization Freud further attributed the aims of incorporation of the object and obtaining mastery over it.
Pursuing the route indicated by Freud, I shall offer a different significance of the cannibalistic features in adult human sexuality, be it in the foreplay preceding genital intercourse or in perversions proper, where it usurps unto itself an exclusive role and purpose. Following Freud, almost all analytic thinkers have placed too much emphasis on the sadistic and coercive nature of the cannibalistic impulses. I shall try to show that it has tender features as well, and serves functions other than those of incorporating and mastering the not-self object. Of course Freud was using the adjective