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SINCE FREUD'S ORIGINAL DESCRIPTION IN 1915, THE PHASE OF "ORAL organization of sexual life" has been recognized as the foundation of an infant's pleasurable interaction with his own body and with the world in which he lives. Freud (1905) states:
The first of these [organizations] is the oral or, as it might be called, cannibalistic pregenital sexual organization. Here sexual activity has not yet been separated from the ingestion of food; nor are opposite currents within the activity differentiated. The object of both activities is the same; the sexual aim consists in the incorporation of the object—the prototype of a process which, in the form of identification, is later to play such an important psychological part [p. 198].
Later authors, notably Abraham (1916), (1924), Middlemore (1941), A. Freud (1946), Lewin (1946), (1950), Hoffer (1949), Spitz (1955), (1957), (1965), and Wolff (1959), (1966) have enlarged our knowledge