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Fenichel comments on the amount of work still required to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of the earliest stages of development and on the major difficulties which complicate their analytic investigation, namely the problem of accurate description by the adult of infantile phantasy content and the confusions introduced by regression. He quotes cases which support Freud's recent formulation of a long period of pre-Oedipal mother-fixation as a cardinal factor in feminine development. With the aid of this illustrative material he then discusses in greater detail three questions: (1) The instinctual aims of the early mother-fixation; (2) the reasons for its shipwreck, and (3) the infantile erotogenicity of the vagina.
1According to Fenichel the early relation to the mother is predominantly oral and sadistic. It is characterized not only by ambivalence but by primitive modes of object-relation, i.e. part-object love, incorporation and identification. Urethral and anal tendencies are also prominent, much more so than truly phallic. Urethral tendencies only become associated with phallic when the stage of penis-envy is reached, i.e. when detachment from the mother is already well under way. Clitoral onanism does not appear to be associated with penetration phantasies and imaginary attacks on the mother's body have the oral aim of devouring her body-contents. In none of the quoted cases does the father appear as a rival for the mother and they do not support de Groot's hypothesis of a negative Oedipus complex regularly preceding the positive. This phase also shows characteristic anxieties, namely fears of being starved and poisoned. The fear of being eaten which is so common in boys more frequently appears in girls as a dread of being sucked dry by a vampire mother. The dread of being deprived of all the body contents which Melanie Klein rightly maintains to be of general occurrence represents a fusion of oral and anal anxieties. Anal anxieties concern both exp