Chapter 12. Infantile Polymorphous Sexuality

We are approaching the whole area of sexuality from the point of view of structural theory, claiming that as a tool of investigation it facilitates differentiations which are more germane to the psychoanalytic method of research. We have taken Freud's idea of the primal scene (in phantasy) augmented by the insights of Melanie Klein into the importance of the phantasies, or, in psychic reality, the facts, about the inside of the mother's body, as the basic sexual situation, or set. We are classifying states of mind related to sexual activities according to the participation of the self in this primal situation.

The first problem we must broach here, which did not arise in the chapter on adult sexuality, is the problem of identity, or rather the sense of identity. It is clear that the adult sense of identity derives from the introjective identification with parental figures and is fundamentally bisexual, although an individual's integration may not have proceeded so far as to enable bisexuality to be experienced and acknowledged.

In latency also, as described in Chapter 7, an adult part of the personality exists to hold the sense of identity at most times, but the objects of its identifications are so separated, desexualised and diminished in creative vitality on the one hand, and the adult states so alternating with pseudo-mature states induced by projective identification, that adult sexual states of mind hardly arise. The pot-pourri of adolescent states of mind is hardly worth describing in this respect until our discussion of infantile and perverse states has been accomplished. Yet it is in the adolescent that the problem of identity is most in evidence. One of the difficulties that lies in the way of the application of our theory is that the adult sexual states of mind, probably in most people, dominate for only the relatively brief period of life when they actually are procreating and rearing their young children, that is, before either settling back into the late