The expressions change of object or choice of object refer to the notion of a love-object. The theme of a change of object refers back to the earliest sources of object relations. In his "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" (1905d) Sigmund Freud described object-choice as being "diphasic, that is, it occurs in two waves" (p. 200). The first wave occurs in the oedipal period and the second at puberty, when the definitive form that sexual life will take is determined. The sexual instinct that until then had been essentially autoerotic discovers the sexual object. The adolescent can choose a new object only after renouncing the objects of his or her childhood: "The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it" (p. 222). Psychoanalytic authors have concurred in thinking that in both sexes, the primary object is the mother.

While, for Freud, the oedipal stage was lived out between two and five years of age, some...