XII. The Effects of Early Anxiety-Situations on the Sexual Development of the Boy

EARLY analysis shows that in its first stages the boy's sexual development runs parallel with that of the girl.1 As in her case, the oral frustration he experiences reinforces his destructive tendencies against his mother's breast; and as in her case, his withdrawal from the breast, and the onset of his oral-sadistic impulses are followed by what I have called the period of maximal sadism, in which his aim is to attack the inside of his mother's body.

In this phase the boy has an oral-sucking fixation on his father's penis, just as the girl has. This fixation is, I consider, the basis of true homosexuality in him. This view would agree with what Freud has said in Eine Kindheits-erinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci (1910), where he comes to the conclusion that Leonardo's homosexuality goes back to an excessive fixation upon his mother—ultimately upon her breast—and thinks that this fixation became displaced on to the penis as an object of gratification. In my experience every boy moves on from an oral-sucking fixation upon his mother's breast to an oral-sucking fixation upon his father's penis.