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In this study, I examine the relation of the ego to genital reality, and the significance of castration anxiety in this context. The idea of genital mutilation must not be overlooked as an inevitable factor in the individual’s development towards a procreative love life, for it is only after integration of the castration threat into the functional whole of the ego that clarification of genital reality, and the possibility of participation in it, become possible. The traumatic nature of the idea of castration, on the other hand, is connected with the fear of the final loss of this possibility.
The tangible atmosphere, into which the child is born, and with which from the very beginning it has elementary contact, is created by the genital relationship between the parents. First perceptions of this relationship are coenesthetic and possibly based on id-perception (Freud 1940a), through which the infant has direct contact with the parents' psychic process. It is quite natural that in this early phase, the mother is more important, and it is her unconscious that can reasonably be considered as the child's first reality (McDogall 1981).
Laplanche's study of the origins of sexuality from the point of view of seduction, led him to the conclusion that early maternal care leads not only to the excitation of the erogenous areas, but that simultaneously, certain sexual meanings from the adult world intrude into that of the child. There they are retained; they achieve their full sensual meaning and energetic cathexis only with physical and psycho-sexual development. According to Laplanche, this also provides a key, for instance, to the observations