Permit me, therefore, to continue with my brief presentation of
infantile sexuality. What I have told you about two organic systems I
could supplement by a discussion of all the others. The sexual life of
the child exhausts itself in the exercise of a series of partial
instincts which seek, independently of one another, to gain satisfaction
from his own body or from an external object. Among these organs the
genitals speedily predominate. There are persons who continue the
pursuit of satisfaction by means of their own genitals, without the aid
of another genital or object, uninterruptedly from the onanism of the
suckling to the onanism of necessity which arises in puberty, and even
indefinitely beyond that. The theme of onanism alone would occupy us for
a long period of time; it offers material for diverse observations.