Polymorphous perversity

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Polymorphous perversity is Sigmund Freud's descriptive term for the non-specific nature of childhood sexuality in its primordial form. In psychoanalytic theory, infantile sexual energy (libido) is yet to be definitively channelled into specific aims and objects, and is capable of focusing itself in any direction and on any object. The term points to the amorphous and changeable nature of the libido prior to being shaped in the processes of socialization and psycho-sexual development. Sexual pleasure in this sense is not merely genital, but potentially present in all sensual interactions, including touching, smelling, sucking, viewing, exhibiting, rocking, defecating, urinating, hurting, and being hurt.^[1] It is this original non-specificity of the libido in early childhood that makes possible the variations of the sexual drive that later manifest as so-called 'perversions’ in the adult.