ABSTRACT
One of Freud's major discoveries was the fundamental role of infantile sexuality in the shaping of the human mind. This chapter deals with the relationship between the very early aspects of psychical life and the ways in which a human being experiences his/her sexuality in adolescence and adulthood. Most of the time, we are dealing with issues of penetrability, permeability, and receptivity. The early forms of psychical interplay are laden with sexual antic-ipation; the construction of infantile sexuality and the expressions of sexuality in adults are determined and shaped by the qualities of early bodily interpsychical experiencing. The polarities of masculinity and femininity and the notion of a primal or original scene are always present in the different models of the origins of psychical life at a time when representations of sexual difference are not meaningful as such for the infant, but are very present and meaningful in the mental lives of his/her parents.
