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The author's thesis is that nonprocreative sexuality in man is used to acquire a primary identity, and that once it is established, the maintenance of 'identity' in man has priority over any other principle determining human behavior, including the pleasure and reality principles. The maintenance of identity is accomplished by complex means including some of a nonsexual nature.
While the animal's identity is innate, the long dependence of the human infant on the mother is the source of identity. The symbiotic universe of mother and child is organized to include the unconscious of the mother, and to the child it constitutes the nucleus of his emerging identity. Man can experience his identity only in terms of an organic instrumentality within the variations of a symbiotically structured umwelt; he must consciously express his identity in terms of what he is for someone else. This is brought about within the mother-child symbiosis in a way similar to imprinting. The 'imprinting-stimulus combination' is transmitted to the child by the way in which the mother stimulates some of the child's senses and does not stimulate others. While the mother is satisfying the infant's needs, and in fact creating certain specific needs