The Rope of Sexuality: How Children ‘Researches’ Prime Infant Sexuality—A Freudian–Laplanchian View

This article revisits Freud’s account of children’s sexual “researches” and their enduring influence on adult psychic life through a dialogue with Laplanche’s theory of the enigmatic message. I argue that infantile sexual theories are not transient developmental constructions but enduring psychical formations that shape epistemological attitudes, symptom formation, creativity, and desire. While Freud locates the emergence of the epistemological drive in the child’s attempt to make sense of bodily excitation and the enigmas of birth and sexual difference, Laplanche situates the enigma in the unconscious sexual messages transmitted by the adult-other. Rather than resolving the tension between these accounts, I explore their productive intersection. I introduce the metaphor of the “rope of sexuality” to conceptualize how endogenous excitation, enigmatic messages, infantile theories, repression, and subsequent experience become intertwined across psychic life. Freud’s notion of the infiltrate further illuminates how these early configurations remain operative in adulthood. Through clinical and observational vignettes, I examine the relation between infantile sexual research and the child’s capacity to explore and symbolize the world. Psychoanalysis, from this perspective, reactivates the subject’s original epistemological effort through the ongoing work of translation and retranslation: transforming enigma into meaning while preserving the incompleteness intrinsic to psychic life.