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This chapter is an attempt to bring some greater order into the area of sexual theory by helping to differentiate the basis of adult polymorphous sexual tendencies from the imperious incursions, of pathological significance, which contaminate the adult sexual life. They come from areas of polymorphous and perverse infantile sexuality. In order to do this in a way that will have immediate validity for the consulting room, I plan to discuss both the technical and theoretical problems separately and then relate them one to the other.
It would be a plausible deduction from the psycho-analytic theory of personality development that sexual behaviour does not need to be taught, but derives its form from instinctual drives modified by identification processes. Sexual education, therefore, has no precise place in the psycho-analytical method, which aims to bring about integration and differentiation in psychic structure in order that learning by experience may take place. In all our patients, regardless of age, the clinical material presents us with the task of assisting in the differentiation of levels in psychic life. Our business is the analysis of the infantile transference with the co-operation of the more advanced and most mature mental structures.
In the realm of sexuality this becomes a pressing problem immediately puberty commences and the urgency of genital desire makes itself felt in the transference. The experience of carrying a latency child in analysis into puberty highlights the terrible chaos of levels, zones, and identifications that the pubertal process produces. But in grown patients, whether the genital life has progressed no further than masturbation, or has settled into a stable heterosexual mating, the problem of differentiating analytically between the adult sexual life and the intrusive infantile substructures must go on even though our attitude toward the content of the adult activities is simply one of putting them aside as not in t