Ettinger believes that Cubism began with Picasso's painting of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. He posits that Picasso used it to express his libidinal and aggressive drives at the oral incorporative and phallic levels of development, and to master his conflicts and anxieties related to fusion, separation, and castration. He traces Picasso's covert and repetitious use of transitional and fetishistic objects through the Cubist phase, and then his overt use of them in the Surrealist phase. He does so by referring to various plates of Picasso's paintings, drawings, and sculptures, and by biographical anecdotes.