The Polymorphic Perverse Sexuality of Infancy
We have already reached the conclusion, setting out from the idea of the shock being apparently due to sexual phantasies, that the child must have, in contradiction to the views hitherto prevailing, a nearly fully formed sexuality, and even a polymorphic perverse sexuality. Its sexuality does not seem concentrated on the genital functions or on the other sex, but is occupied with its own body; whence it is said to be auto-erotic. If its sexual instinct is directed to another person, no distinction, or but the very slightest, is made as to sex. It can, therefore, be very easily homo-sexual. In place of non-existing local sexual function there exists a series of so-called bad habits, which from this standpoint look like a series of perversities, since they have the closest analogy with the later perversities. In consequence of this way of regarding the subject, sexuality, whose nature is ordinarily regarded as a unit, becomes decomposed into a multiplicity of isolated striving forces. Freud then arrived at the conception of the so-called "erogenous zones," by which he understood mouth, skin, anus, etc. (It is, of course, a universal tacit presumption that sexuality has its origin in the sexual organs.)
The term "erogenous zone" reminds us of "spasmo-genic zones," and the underlying image is at all events the same; just as the spasmo-genic zone is the place whence the spasm arises, so the erogenous zone is the place whence arises an affluent to sexuality. Based upon the model of the genital organs as the anatomical origin of sexuality, the erogenous zones must be conceived as being so many genitals out of which the streams of sexuality flow together. This is the condition of the polymorphic perverse sexuality of childhood. The expression "perverse" seems to be justified by the close analogy with the later perversities which present, so to speak, but a new edition of certain early infantile perverse habits. They are very often connected with one or other of the different erogenous zones, and are the cause of those exchanges in sex, which are so characteristic for childhood.
According to this view, the later normal and monomorphic sexuality is built up out of several components. The first division is into homo- and hetero-sexual components, to which is linked an auto-erotic component, as also there are components of
