ABSTRACT
Karl Abraham blamed Freud for having been too premature, or too hasty, in abandoning the notion of autoerotism to the alleged benefit of the concept of narcissism, considered to be less descriptive, more meta-psychological, and hence better able to conceptualize in a more integrated way the dynamics of the ego and object relations. In his definition of auto-erotism, doesn’t Freud refer globally to an initial stage of the erogeneity of the body and of pleasure found not only in the erogenous zones but in the vital functioning of organs, with no apparent consideration of an external other? Didn’t Havelock Ellis go as far as to imagine that the hysteric could feel aroused in a dream without the least impact of an external source? If there can be no doubt that dreams can bring genuine pleasure to the dreamer, can we then infer that the dream is the prototype of autoerotism, and that the latter in no way involves the existence of an other? As Freud observes in a 1920 note to the Three Essays (1905), what matters is not genesis but the relation to an object. This indicates that autoerotism cannot, without becoming “perverted,” be reduced to masturbation in a model of an objectless state equivalent to organ pleasure.
