ABSTRACT
The construction of personal, individual identity is woven over a background of bodily essence, including gender identity, and this entails a person effectively feeling what he or she claims to be. In order to elaborate this central triangular conflict of impulses and oedipal fantasies, the child needs to be able to carry out complex mental processes, projections, and introjections, and must be able to think his or her emotions. S. Freud suggests the need for linking "thing representation" and "word representation" as a basic element in thought processes, thus giving the body and its sensorial experiences an inescapable place in mental evolution. Freud referred to myths and proposed explanatory metaphors to explain the unconscious functioning of his patients. Whatever the case, the child is born with the innate fear of being alone and the need to be cared for and the infant's relations with adults promote the growth and development of his or her identity.
