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of the sexual drive (1915a,b), while based on endogenous and continuous excitations and pressures, is characterized by plasticity in source (bodily zones), aim and object. Thus, the countless permutations and later outcomes in infantile sexuality can be accounted for, including the complexity of the sexual object with its interchangeability or its fixity. Ingeniously Freud suggested that sexual, libidinal energy “leaned” at first on the inborn life- preservative drives that orientated the infant to the mother -- sucking on the breast then became a source of libidinal pleasure, imbuing the mouth as an erogenous zone. Noting the idea of “leaning on” as a metaphor, she references Mark Solms’s (2012) designation of the erogenous zones as objects not sources. While drive and internal object are separated for sake of classification and exposition, they are intertwined. After 1915 Freud occupied himself increasingly with the importance of the objects of the sexual drive and related fantasies. The prototype of sexual fantasy for Freud was the infant’s soothing itself by hallucinating the need-satisfying lost object. The object or its loss was part of the formation of sexual fantasy. For Kulish, (2019), this intertwining of object and drive is the ‘sine qua non’ of the development of infantile sexuality (Kulish 2019). In this regard, Kulish also credits input of Kleinian thinking in which unconscious aggressive and sexual phantasies are mental representations of the instincts and are inherently relational. The aim of the instinct is characterized by a specific type of object relatedness. Such pre-existing, pre-verbal bodily potentialities allow the infant to select from and organize the world around him. The infant’s inner reality is slowly comprised through a series of introjections, projections and projective identifications in the form of bodily symbolic fantasies (Ogden, 1984; Blass, 2017). Along with many North American authors, she gives the inner world of objects and the external interpersonal environment increasingly more importance in the shaping of drives, which she has come to see as less dependent on their inborn, programmed sources. In agreement with many psychoanalytic writers (Dunn 1993, Hadley, 1992) and the neurobiologists (Schwartz, 1987; Solms, 2012), Kulish arrives at a view that drive and object, drive and environment cannot be separated. In regard to the inseparability of drive and object , Kulish further draws on Loewald (1971a, b; 1985), seeing libido as a force, emerging from the ego, by which the ego strives to keep itself connected with the world from which it is differentiating itself. Because drives are essentially communicative, the individual will thrust meaning onto significant others in the very act of libidinally engaging with them. Thus, the analytic situation becomes an erotic field: “the transference neurosis is the patient’s love life as it is relived in relation to a potentially new love-object, the analyst” (Loewald 1971b, p. 311). Here sexuality is intimately linked with connections to objects, and with the meanings of objects and not their cathexes. In a more complicated way, her thinking on the intrinsic link of sexuality with object is influenced by the work of Jean Laplanche (1997, 2004, 2007; Laplanche and Pontalis, 1968), where he draws on the work of Ferenczi (1933/1949) to posit a primal seduction or awakening into sexuality by the parent. Kulish also works with Laplanche’s extension of Freud’s “leaning
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