ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the difficulty of working with psychosexuality as a central human experience within current object relational psychoanalytic theories. The first step towards understanding the self as a psychological agent is the 'discovery' of affects through primary object relationships. Affects are not inherently known to the infant. Mothers find it particularly difficult to mirror baby's sexual excitement. According to Jean Laplanche, psychosexuality evolves in infancy out of non-sexual, instinctual activity. When a non-sexual instinct, having created excitation, loses its natural object, the ego is turned in upon itself and left in a state of arousal. The chapter describes clinical cases to illustrate that the healthy path of erotic development, based in muted early mirroring of sexual feelings which leaves a continuing search for recognition and physical engagement of a partner, may go awry. In such cases, early interactions may leave the individual alienated and excluded from his or her sexual self and from the enactment of desire.
