Infantile Sexuality and Attachment

Freud wrote in 1905 that children’s sexual life, although dominated by the erogenous zones, also has components in which, from the beginning, other people appear as sexual objects. These people — the child’s relatives, caretakers and mother in particular — are also objects of vital attachment. How can we differentiate between these two forms of connections that are so easily confused with one another?

This controversy is as old as psychoanalysis, but recent challenging developments in attachment theory have made it impossible to maintain the traditional arguments. Commenting on a paper by Daniel Widlöcher on the “eternal debate” between those who see asexual attachment as the earliest bond and those who see infantile sexuality as primary, eight major contributors to psychoanalytic child studies set forth the current state of thinking in both camps.

Contributors: Jacques André, Eduardo Colombo, Pierre Fédida, Peter Fonagy, Jean Laplanche, Dominique Scarfone, Claire Squires, Daniel Widlöcher