ABSTRACT
According to the author, breast-feeding was subject to all the insecurities and anxieties associated with a woman's sense of femaleness. She even compared an analytically observed disturbance of lactation with premature ejaculation in a man. The pain of physical separation from the child is extinguished when it is first put to the breast. The mother–child unit is re-established, and the process of incorporation, which in the sex act took place through the vagina, making use of the oral sucking mechanisms, and which was continued in pregnancy, now undergoes a repetition–with a reversal of roles between the two partners in the sucking act. A young mother with a very ambivalent relationship to her child had to give up breast-feeding even though she wished to continue with it and possessed an amply functioning mammary apparatus.
