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Although there were a few theoreticians writing about the sexual impulses of children, the Victorian age maintained a discourse of purity, innocence, and naïveté about the young child (Makari, 2008). Freud's early views were shocking; provocative; and, in the end, revolutionary in their presentation of the psychosexuality of children. Freud maintained that there were arousable areas of the body that provided pleasurable experiences and that the child repeatedly engaged in these activities. Stimulating those areas, the young child, according to Freud, was “shameless” without yet experiencing the restrictions of polite society on sexual activities. Freud labeled the child's engagement in variable sexual proclivities as perversions. However, he considered such behavior as a normal developmental part of our humanity that eventually becomes repressed as we become adapted into a normative acculturated life.
Freud had many advocates drawn to and supportive of his views on early libidinal experiences and its shaping of child and adult sexuality. This served psychoanalytic thinking well into many decades of the 20th century. For example, take the earthy, vivid, and dramatic writing of Loewald (1971) on this subject of the sexed body and the manifold experiences of the embodied self.
The life of the body, of bodily needs and habits and functions, kisses and excrements and intercourse, tastes and smells and sights, bodily noises and sensations, caresses and punishments. Tics and gait and movements, facial expression, the penis and the vagina and the tongue and arms and hands and feet and legs and hair, pain and pleasure, physical excitement and lassitude, violence and bliss—all this is the body in context of human life. (p. 123)
However, more recently, there has been a significant shift away from Freud's emphasis as demonstrated by Fonagy's research. Fonagy (2008) carefully studied various sex-related words in articles, related to sexual body parts, sexual orientation, normative