eneral traits do we
wish to recognize the sexual manifestations of the child. I believe that
the association of the manifestations into which we gained an insight
through psychoanalytic investigation justify us in claiming thumbsucking
as a sexual activity and in studying through it the essential features
of the infantile sexual activity.

*Autoerotism.*--It is our duty here to arrange this state of affairs
differently. Let us insist that the most striking character of this
sexual activity is that the impulse is not directed against other
persons but that it gratifies itself on its own body; to use the happy
term invented by Havelock Ellis, we will say that it is autoerotic.[11]

It is, moreover, clear that the action of the thumbsucking child is
determined by the fact that it seeks a pleasure which has already been
experienced and is now remembered. Through the rhythmic sucking on a
portion of the skin or mucous membrane it finds the gratification in the
simplest way. It is also easy to conjecture on what occasions the child
first experienced this pleasure which it now strives to renew. The first
and most important activity in the child's life, the sucking from the
mother's breast (or its substitute), must have acquainted it with this
pleasure. We would say that the child's lips behaved like an _erogenous
zone_, and that the excitement through the warm stream of milk was
really the cause of the pleasurable sensation. To be sure, the
gratification of the erogenous zone was at first united with the
gratification of taking nourishment. He who sees a satiated child sink
back from the mother's breast, and fall asleep with reddened cheeks and
blissful smile, will have to admit that this picture remains as typical
of the expression of sexual gratification in later life. But the desire
for repetition of the sexual gratification is separated from the desire
for taking nourishment; a separation which becomes unavoidable with the
appearance of the teeth when the nourishment is no longer sucked in but
chewed. The child does not make use of a strange object for sucking but
prefers its own skin because it is more convenient, because it thus
makes itself independent of the outer world which it cannot yet control,
and because in this way it creates for itself, as it were, a second,
even if an inferior, erogenous zone. The inferiority of this second
region urges it later to seek the same parts, the lips of another
person. ("It is a pi