HUMAN SEXUALITY: SEXUAL REHEARSALS IN THE NEONATE AND INFANT
When a child is born, the program of sexual development and differentiation, previously controlled by genetic, hormonal, and constitutional events, passes to the behavior environment. There, social and cultural influences govern the continuing development and differentiation of psychosexual functioning. The principle of sexual bipotentiality, which pertains to reproductive anatomy and to the neurosexual centers located in the hypothalamus, applies also to psychosexual and sociosexual behavior. The social program of rearing resolves behavioral bipotentiality as masculine or feminine in early life.
In the first two years of life, behavioral components of adult sexual behavior begin to emerge, and the sociosexual and psychosexual components of adult eroticism are initiated. Childhood constitutes a period of preparation and rehearsal of the part-responses that are eventually chained together into adult sexual pair-bonding. It is characteristic of mammals for behavior segments to appear and to be rehearsed and practiced prior to their functional integration into the life cycle. Sexual behavior is no exception to this rule, judging from observations of animals, from accounts of primitive societies in which childhood sex play and sex rehearsals are permitted, and from the retrospective accounts of human adults.
There are three phases of psychosexual development in the neonatal and infancy period. The first, common to both sexes, is related to pair-bonding of the infant and the parent; it begins in the delivery room with parental participation in childbirth. The second comprises genital activity rehearsals, also present at or even before birth, and clearly observed in the genitopelvic responses of the male neonate. The third is a masculine and feminine differentiation phase which begins in the delivery room with the announcement of the infant’s sex.
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