The nature of the child’s tie to his mother 1

This chapter begins by describing very briefly few alternative views which in greater or less degree of purity are to be found in the psychoanalytic and other psychological literature. Psychoanalysts are at one in recognizing the child's first object relations as the foundation stone of his personality: yet there is no agreement on the nature and dynamics of this relationship. A child's intercourse with anyone responsible for his care affords him an unending source of sexual excitation and satisfaction from his erotogenic zones, and he proceeds to praise the mother who "by stroking, kissing and rocking him is fulfilling her task in teaching the child to love". Freud begins, as formerly, by telling us that "a child's first erotic object is the mother's breast which feeds him" and that "love in its beginning attaches itself to the satisfaction of the need for food".