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Comprised of various component instincts , such as active/passive or scopophilic/exhibitionistic and seemingly perverse elements which are incorporated into adult sexuality, infantile sexuality unfolds in a series of neurobiologically determined phases in a predictable sequence: oral, anal, phallic, and oedipal. Each phase is organized by erotogenic zones - sites in the body prone to or invested by libidinal stimulation and excitement at that time of life. Component instincts of the sexual drive with their sources in the erotogenic zones become synthesized later. Each phase is also characterized by specific fantasies, conflicts and ways of interacting with others that may persist through life and shape aspects of character or psychopathology. Psychosexual development plays out in a biphasic pattern, shaped by repression of the oedipal conflicts resulting in a period of latency, which ends at puberty. The polymorphically perverse nature of the child is satisfied in early stages through autoerotic activity. At this stage of his theorization, Freud wrote of the “ideas” and “wishes” in mental conflict, deriving from the drives. The conflict between the sexual drives and the self- preservation or Ego drives is equated to the one between the conscious and the unconscious mental processes. The Ego drives are equated with the conscious, and constitute the force repressing the sexual drives, located in the unconscious. In the early theory of unconscious sexuality of 1905, sexual drive/instinct was primary, and destructiveness was included in the form of sadism, when an aggressive component of sexual instinct has become independent and exaggerated, and has assumed the leading position. The cruelty and subjugation that the subject inflicts on the object then become the sole conditions for satisfaction. The aggression mixed with the sexual drive would be “a relic of the cannibalistic desires” (1905, p. 159). The independent sources of cruelty, linked to mastery, were only gradually recognized as belonging to the self-preservative instincts. Thus, in the period between 1905 and 1910, the drive theory was not fully formulated as dualistic. This ambiguity provided a fertile impetus for the later flourish of theoretical developments within French tradition in both North America and Europe (Scarfone, Laplanche, Denis). As late as in 1913, in “Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis” Freud (1913a p. 322) reiterates that sadism is bound to the partial drives corresponding to the anal-sadistic pre-genital organization and when they replace the genital drives, sadism arises. This function of mastery is common to both the sexual drives and the Ego drives (1909). At this stage of his theorization, he considers masochism “nothing more than an extension of sadism turned round upon the subject’s own self, which thus, to begin with, takes the place of the sexual object” (1905, p. 158). All these developments imply the notion of conflict between the drives, which can be found within the subject himself, who acts as subject and object at the same time. Alternatively, they can be staged between a subject and an external object that can assume the tendencies of either drives in play, that is, the repressed sexual drives or the repressing ego drives. Aggression, as an attribute that is both universal and independent from all the drives, can, at any given time, become autonomous and gain more energy in either of the factions in conflict
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