ABSTRACT
Hadrian’s Wall was not anything he was aiming for. In a similar vein, we can think of the infant’s body-mind as inhabited by disparate and dislocated zones of tension and pleasure. Taken in themselves, there is no reason to regard them as sexual. Almost a decade after writing his essay on sexuality, Freud realizes that he has been taking the unity of the psyche for granted. The psyche, he comes to see, is itself a psychological achievement. As he puts it, ‘a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start.’ A ‘new psychical action’ is needed, he says, for an ego to be able to relate to itself as an ego.47 But if we think of infant life before this ‘new psychical action’, the disparate zones of tension, pleasure and imaginative activity seem to be just that.48
