ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud, through his many publications related to child analysis, was an early influence in the development of child analytic thinking. In his 1901 book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud dedicated a section to the explanation of “symptomatic and chance actions”. Freud introduced two technical terms, sexual object and sexual aim. With regard to deviations from the sexual object, Freud described inversion and bisexuality. He described inversion as taking place when the object choice of a man is another man, and the object choice of woman is another woman. Freud said that sadism and masochism are the most frequent and significant of all perversions. Sadism is the aggressive component of the sexual instinct that becomes independent; it describes the desire to inflict pain upon the sexual object. Freud considered that infantile sexuality was neglected and ignored, and little consideration was given to the existence of a sexual instinct in childhood.
