Childhood Sexual Theories and Childhood Sexuality: Chaired by Carmen Medici De Steiner, Montevideo

After opening the Panel, the moderator invited Paulina Kernberg to speak. To illustrate infantile sexuality in the mother-child relationship, her presentation used slides of portraits of the Madonna and Child depicting a spectrum of interactions ranging from skin sensuality to sexual excitement through their symbolic sexual connotations. It is through the skin that the child feels contained, bonded and diffusely stimulated. Skin pleasure is later integrated in adult sexuality (Anzieu). Her thesis focused on auto-erotism as the perpetuation of the relationship with the first object. This becomes auto-erotic; to begin with the child has no sense of individuation.

In the second part of her presentation, she demonstrates the similarity of expression of pre-adolescent and adult love by means of children's letters describing their amorous experiences. The majority of these psychological events are oedipal triangles that regulate social life. Following Freud, she believes that children are capable of experiencing most of love's manifestations: tenderness, devotion, jealousy, with the same intensity as the adult, and with sensations of sexual excitement long before puberty. She put forward her second hypothesis: that latency is a descriptive term that corresponds more to adults' ignorance of what occurs in a child's life than to a lessening of sexual impulses. She then described the following characteristics of infantile love: when the expectation that love will be returned is met by a corresponding reality, self-esteem increases. The conviction that love is genuine is achieved when it has lasted for a long time. The object of love is idealised and vulnerability is expressed through a feeling of surprise, disenchantment or wounded self-esteem. Love is sometimes expressed by a reversal, i.e. by rejection or by aggressive words and gestures, because the integration of the emotional and physical aspects of love is still taboo and sexual arousal causes the reaction f