According to psychoanalysts (and I have Freud, and Norman O. Brown in mind) the newborn infant is "polymorphously perverse." Which is to say the baby is sexually attracted to anything and everything that brings it pleasure. The same child violently disdains anything that brings it anything but pleasure.
Here again Freud is only seeing face to face what religious poetic mysticism has divined darkly and expressed symbolically in the cult of Madonna and Child. Evelyn Under-Coventry Patmore: "The Babe sucking its mother's breast, and the Lover returning, after twenty years' separation, to his home and food in the same bosom, are the types and princes of Mystics" . . . At the mother's breast, in Freudian language, the child experiences that primal condition, forever after idealized, "in which object-libido and ego-libido cannot be distinguished"; in philosophic language, the subject-object dualism does not corrupt the blissful experience of the child at the mother's breast. . . where the first satisfaction of the sexual instinct is simultaneously the first satisfaction of the self-preservation instinct.
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 51-52.
According to Freud, the
pleasure principle (the child's polymorphous sexual perversion) gives way to the
reality principle (the self-preservation instinct), only when survival in the "real" world necessitates it. When this begins to take place, the child doesn't give up on his former polymorphous perverseness (his constant and perpetual seeking and attaining of pleasure-fulfillment, most notably at the mother's breast) willingly, as if he finds the tradeoff fair and desirable. On the contrary, every loss of pleasure-fulfillment is postponed only for the sake of survival such that each and every trade off, from pleasure and desire, to necessity and survival, transforms the necessity into a mere sublimation.
The ugly necessity is, in the mind of the child, merely a temporary path that will, eventually, lead back to the mother's breast. When, on the wedding night, necessity has been endured, and those lips lock once again onto the cornucopia of polymorpous-pleasure, every necessity endured up to that point has been rightly sublimated as the path, and thus part and parcel, of the sole desire, which is a return to unrelenting pleasure fulfillment, with the woman's breast as the primary symbol of this highest purpose for existence found lurking behind the necessity of survival. In this form of sublimation, every necessity of human survival is part and parcel of the endgame that is the return to Eden that exists just the other side of the chuppah. Every act of survival is foreplay, sublimation, since it's made a part and parcel of that for which sake it's endured.
Coitus is immoral because there is no man who does not use woman at such times as a means to an end; for whom pleasure does not, in his own as well as her being, during that time represent the full value of mankind.
Otto Weininger, Sex and Character.
John