ORAL STAGE

The oral stage is the initial mode of organization of libidinal cathexes, establishing the buccopharyngeal area and the lips as the predominant erotogenic zone—and hence as the source of the instinct operating in conjunction with the instinctual aim (incorporation) and the instinctual object (the breast).

The act of taking nourishment tends to symbolize the mother's breast and the primal link that the infant establishes with its mother. Sucking at the breast, governed by biogically programmed behavior, procures an experience of pleasure for the infant which vouchsafes the mouth its role as the first erotogenic zone.

At the same time, however, the concept of anaclisis highlights the foundational role played by the mother's ministration and the taking of nourishment, making it possible to see how, at this first moment in development, there is an interaction between the vital sphere of need and the mental sphere of sexuality and fantasy.

Jean Laplanche has described both the dual movement of sexuality, as it first props itself upon ("anaclisis") and then disengages itself from the realm of physiological need, and the dual shift—metaphorically, from ingestion to incorporation, and metonymically, from milk to breast (or bottle). This model underscores the importance of maternal care for the constitution of the psyche. For Laplanche, "primal seduction," linked to the mother's sexuality, is at the root of the child's autoerotism and sexuality. Similarly, on the basis of the idea of a retroactive effect of the object of the drive upon its source, Laplanche evokes a "source-object" as the first form of internal object, constituted by autoerotism and constituting the origin of fantasy. Thus the representation of the mother's breast supplies the prototype of incorporable objects and precipitates the development of the first object-relationship.

René Spitz introduced the idea that the earliest oral experience of nursing gives rise to the representation of a "primal cavity" which orders the structuring relations between inside and outside. This "bridge from inner reception to external perception" (Spitz, 1965, pp. 61-62) may be looked upon as the matrix of the mechanisms of introjection and projection.

Oral experience thus initiates "the language of the oldest—the oral—instinctual impulses," evoked by Freud to account for the primal rejection of the bad and incorporation of the good in the establishment of the first boundary between the self and the outside world (1925h, p. 237).

It was Karl Abraham, in 1924, who subdivided the oral stage into two parts: an early oral phase covering the first six months of life, dominated by the pleasure of sucking and described as "pre-ambivalent" because the breast is not yet conceived as at once good and bad; and a later phase, covering the second six months, known as the oral-sadistic or "cannibalistic" stage, contemporaneous with teething, which sees the emergence of the wish to bite and the fear of destroying the loved object (and of being devoured in turn by that object). Ambivalence makes its appearance during this second phase, incorporation having become destructive. The child's cannibalistic instincts have been described as reactivating those of the mother (Golse, 1992).

Melanie Klein radicalized Abraham's account of a destructiveness linked to orality and to object-love, going so far as to say that libidinal development as a whole is completed only once the destructive instincts have been integrated into it. She maintained that sadism is at its height during the first six months of life.

The organization specific to the early, "passive" oral stage was characterized by Klein as the "swallow/be swallowed" object-relationship, by anxieties about being emptied or annihilated. The oral-sadistic stage was marked by the "devour/be devoured" object-relationship, by fear of dismemberment, and by projective identification. Fixation at the oral stage was reflected in a character type marked by greed, passivity, and dependency.

The experience of satisfaction obtained from feeding is not confined to oral pleasure, for it may involve the entirety of bodily feelings. This last consideration has been judged essential in the genesis of the feeling of identity, that is, of the self, and the first underpinnings of narcissism.

Oral introjection is also considered to underlie such other corporeal functions as cutaneous absorption, sight, hearing, respiration, and manual prehension. Contemporary work on autism has underlined the importance, in the first organizing experience of the psyche, of mouth-nipple and tongue-nipple contact, thought to convey the contrast between the elemental sensations of hard and soft (Donald Meltzer, Frances Tustin, Geneviève Haag, 1991).

Jean-FranÇois Rabain

See also: Good/Bad Object (Breast); Archaic mother; Oedipus complex, early; Orality; Stage; Unconscious fantasy; Weaning.

Bibliography

Abraham, Karl. (1927). A short study of the development of the libido, viewed in the light of mental disorders. In Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis. London: Hogarth. (Original work published 1924)

Brusset, Bruno. (1992). Le développement libidinal. Paris: PUF.

Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE, 7.

——. (1925h). Negation. SE, 19.

Haag, Geneviève. (1991). Nature de quelques identifications dans l'image du corps. Hypothèses. Journal de la psychanalyse d'enfant, 10, 73-92.

Klein, Melanie. (1932). The psycho-analysis of children (Alix Strachey, Trans.). London: Hogarth/Institute of Psycho-Analysis; Reprinted in The Writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 2). New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1975.

Laplanche, Jean. (1999). The drive and its source-object. In Essays on Otherness (John Fletcher, Ed.; Leslie Hill, Trans.; pp. 117-32.). London: Routledge. (Original work published 1984)

Spitz, René. (1965). The first year of life: A psychoanalytic study of normal and deviant object relations. New York: International Universities Press.