ABSTRACT
Before tackling the description of normal infantile sexuality, Freud begins with psychopathology. He shows that sexual deviations have their origin in early childhood and result from a disturbance of psychosexual development. Under the name of "infantile sexual theories", Freud includes the multiple hypotheses that children toy with before acquiring a real knowledge of adult sexuality. In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud introduces the notion of stages of psychosexual development. Infantile development goes through a certain number of phases, each of which is characterised by the primacy of a given erotic zone and of a particular mode of object-relating: Freud calls them the oral, sadistic-anal, phallic and genital stages. The notion of polymorphously perverse infantile predisposition should not be confused with that of perversion in the adult, as is sometimes the case.
