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We have made the point that a child's current relationships and his physical and emotional growth continue to be affected, if not determined, by his earlier experiences. This is especially true of the sexual development of the teenager, of his feelings about himself and his body, of his capacity to anticipate and finally enjoy sexual experience reciprocally with the partner of his choice.
His capacity to enjoy his body and to be able finally to integrate sexual feelings with tenderness is rooted in the early physical and emotional relationship he had as a baby with his mother. This goes for the girl, of course, as well as for the boy. Her very first physical closeness is also with her mother, in whose arms she first begins to feel some fleeting physical identity and sense of what belongs to her body and what it looks like.
As we have already mentioned, a number of things can interfere with the mother's capacity to accept the baby in a physical and emotional way, and there are differing factors in each baby which may inhibit its capacity to utilize and to respond to what