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The term "autoeroticism" refers to behaviors designed to obtain sexual satisfaction without the intervention of another person (the most obvious example being masturbation). However, the term is often understood more broadly, given the Freudian conception of psycho-sexuality, according to which many different physical pleasures take on the value of sexual satisfaction. Genitals are not necessarily involved. By extension, the same can be said of certain psychic activities (reading, according to popular wisdom, is a "solitary vice"). "Alloeroticism," a less common term, refers by contrast to sexual satisfaction obtained with the help of another person.

Sigmund Freud, who took the terms from Havelock Ellis, appears to have used them for the first time in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, dated December 9, 1899: "The lowest sexual stratum is auto-erotism, which does without any psychosexual aim and demands only local feelings of satisfaction. It is succeeded by allo-erotism (homo- and hetero-erotism) but it certainly also continues to exist as a separate current" (Freud, 1950a, p. 280).

According to this initial definition, autoeroticism would appear first but would never disappear. Freud clarified his thought in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d) and then in later footnotes. He considered sucking to be a fundamental activity: "The child's lips, in our view, behave like an erotogenic zone, and no doubt stimulation by the warm flow of milk is the cause of the pleasurable sensation. The satisfaction of the erotogenic zone is associated, in the first instance, with the satisfaction of the need for nourishment" (p. 182). In 1915 Freud added: "To begin with, sexual activity attaches itself to functions serving the purpose of self-preservation and does not become independent of them until later . . . The child does not make use of an extraneous body for his sucking, but prefers a part of his own skin because it is more convenient, because it makes him independent of the external world, which he is not yet able to control" (1905d, p. 182). This is one of Freud's most important claims—infantile sexuality develops by making use of a function essential for life, from which it later detaches itself.

This autoerotic satisfaction is not required for every object cathexis, however, since, through this detachment, the child frees itself from its first object, the breast, which is the vehicle of a hallucinatory satisfaction and the subsequent disappointment that leads to the birth of the first representations.

"On Narcissism; An Introduction" (1914c) enabled Freud to take this a step further. When the child constitutes itself as an "object" for its own satisfaction, it is no longer a question of drive satisfaction, as in autoerotic activity, located in a given erotogenic zone, but rather of the beginning of the unification of drive and object: "the hitherto dissociated sexual instincts come together into a single unity and cathect the ego as an object" (1912-13a, p. 89). This unifying movement then acts on another person during the initial "object choices" that will govern all later sexual life. Freud would later refine these views and provide an overview of the process in a 1923 article on infantile genital organization (1923e).

Autoeroticism, therefore, characterizes an early phase of psychosexual development. However, as Freud acknowledged in his 1899 letter to Fliess cited above, it continues to "subsist," as many common clinical findings demonstrate. It also plays a major role in a number of disorders; in psychoses it can appear invasive (Gillibert, Jean, 1977), as shown in the case of Daniel Paul Schreber (Schreber, 1903/1988; Freud, 1911c), or deficient (Botella, César, and Sára, 1982). In this area as in so many others, the diagnostic dimension and the psychogenetic dimension are complementary.

ROGER PERRON

See also: Infant development; Narcissism; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.