Transcription
Can you become sexually attracted to your own body, passionately desired? Can you become sexually attracted to an introject, a self-state, a representation of someone in your mind, an inner voice? Can you be sexually attracted to a transformation of yourself in your own mind? Yourself as a child? Yourself as a woman, if you're a man? Yourself as a man, if you're a woman? Yourself as an animal? Can you be sexually attracted to a story, a narrative which involves only you?
[Music]
Can you be sexually attracted to a future version of yourself? To a past version of yourself? Can you be sexually attracted to your own absence? To your own death? For example, these are all forms of autoerotism phenomena, which is one of the cornerstones of pathological narcissism. In the topic of today's video, today we have a saucy, saucy video. We're going to discuss what else? Sex.
Some people are sexually attracted to their own bodies. They are their own sexual objects. Even when they have sex with partners, they're actually masturbating with a partner's body. Some people are sexually attracted to how they imagined themselves to be. They imagine themselves to be, for example, children, and then they are attracted to themselves as children. Some people imagine themselves to be of the opposite sex. Some men imagine themselves to be women, and then they are attracted to themselves as women. And so, all these are manifestations of a phenomenon known as autoerotism, first described, who else, by Sigmund Freud.
Today, we are going to survey, we're going to explore the entire range of autoerotism: the attraction to one's body, the attraction to one's self as a sexual object, the attraction to oneself as one could have been. Role play with oneself. Masturbating is a main form of sexual activity. We're going to discuss phenomena such as homosexuality, transgender states, and gender dysphoria, and we're going to link them to various mental health theories, including Freud's original theory of narcissism. Because, as Freud said, some people are sexually invested and emotionally invested in an internal object which represents themselves. This is called narcissistic libido.
People who are sexually attracted to themselves, people who interact sexually only with themselves, people who are emotionally and sexually invested only in themselves, are of course incapable of maintaining any libido attraction or relationship with others. In other words, they have an impaired, impaired object relations. Even when they have sex, even when they have a sexual or intimate partner, they're all alone. They're solipsistic. They're isolated in their own minds and their own universe, and they, within this universe, they undergo fascinating transformations from one gender to another, from one sex to another, and from one libidinal object, from one sexual object to another. These transitions, these manifestations of internal turmoil, a kind of identity disturbance, underlie and permeate the narcissistic dynamic.
My name is Sam Vaknin, and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. I'm 100,000% heterosexual, so don't entertain any unseemly thoughts, and I'm a professor of psychology. I will start by reviewing some recent literature. Then I will discuss homosexuality, transgender, and gender dysphoria, and then I will give you a review of the original concept of autoerotism in Freud's work. These are the three parts of the video, and you're completely at liberty to watch only those parts that interest you, as is always the case.
So, shortly, I will review for you the most recent literature on autoerotism and similar paraphilias. But before we go there, let's start by a general overview of homosexuality, transvestism, transgender, and gender dysphoria, and try to place it in the continuum of narcissism and, more specifically, autoerotism. So, this is the first part of the lecture. Then I go on to literature review, and then at the very end, I will describe Freud's concept of autoerotism.
Let's start with homosexuality. Research failed to find any substantive difference between the psychological makeup of a narcissist who happens to be heterosexual and a narcissist who happens to have homosexual preferences. There is no typical profile of a homosexual narcissist. The, the homosexual narcissist is not more predatory than the heterosexual narcissist. The question of whether the homosexual narcissist is lying or telling the truth when he says that he wants to get laid by one and all, the question of whether the homosexual narcissist is suicidal, whether he's not afraid of AIDS. These are all essentially homophobic questions.
Both heterosexual narcissists and homosexual narcissists are predators. Both of them devour narcissistic supply sources as they go along. Narcissists of all stripes and all sexual orientations look for new victims the way tigers look for prey. The hungry, the hungry for adoration, admiration, acceptance, approval, any kind of attention. All sources die hard once taken for granted. The narcissistic element of conquest simply dies, and very often the narcissist is compelled to devalue the source and move on, as I've explained in previous videos in my interviews with Richard Grana.
Conquest is important to all narcissists, whether they're heterosexual or homosexual. And somatic conquest is important because it proves to the narcissist his own superiority, irresistibility. The very act of subduing, subjugating, or acquiring the power to influence someone provides the narcissist with narcissistic supply, empowers him. The newly conquered, idolized narcissists, they serve as kind of trophies. The act of conquering, the act of subordinating, they're epitomized by this sexual encounter. It is an objective and atavistic interaction, regardless of the sex of the target. Making love to someone means that the consenting partner finds the narcissist, or one or more of the narcissist's traits, such as his intelligence, his physique, or his money, finds them, or him, the narcissist, irresistible.
The distinction between passive and active sexual partners is mechanical. It's false. It's superfluous and superficial. Penetration does not make one of the parties the stronger one. To cause someone to have sex with you is a powerful stimulus and always provokes a sensation of omnipotence in the narcissist. Whether one is physically passive or active, one is always psychosexually active.
Anyone who has unsafe sex is gambling with his or her life, though the odds are much smaller than public hysteria would have us believe. Reality does not matter. Though it is a perception of reality that matters. Getting this close to perceived danger is the equivalent of engaging in self-destruction. So, it's a form of suicide. Narcissists are at times suicidal in this sense. In this way, they are self-destructive by being reckless, and this is common to all narcissists, heterosexual and homosexual.
But there is one element which might be unique to homosexuals: the fact that their self-definition, that their core identity hinges on their sexual orientation. I know of no heterosexual who would use his sexual preference or sexual orientation to define himself almost fully. I know of no heterosexual who would, who would say, "I'm heterosexual" when he seeks to describe himself. Homosexuals, a homosexual, a gay man would say, "I'm gay." A lesbian would say, "I'm lesbian." This is their core identity. Homosexually, homosexuality has been inflated to the level of a subculture, a separate psychology, identity politics, a myth. This is typical of persecuted minorities. However, it does have an influence on the individual, of course. Preoccupation with body and sex makes most homosexual analysis somatic narcissism.
What I'm trying to say is that prevalence and incidence of somatic narcissism among homosexuals is bound to be a lot more common than among heterosexual narcissists. In other words, many more homosexual narcissists are somatic than heterosexual narcissists. Moreover, the homosexual, as Freud had observed, makes love to a person of the same sex. In a way, the homosexual makes love to his reflection. In very substantial ways, in this respect, the whole homosexual relations are highly narcissistic, or if they are not narcissistic, they're highly autoerotic. Making love to someone who looks like you, to a very large extent, is autoerotic, the same way that making love to your offspring is autoerotic.
The somatic narcissist directs his libido, his sex drive, at his own body, as opposed to the cerebral narcissist who directs at libido, is libido at his intellect. So, somatic narcissist is emotionally and sexually affected, invested in his own body. The somatic narcissist cultivates his body, nourishes his body, nurtures his body. He is often a hypochondriac. He dedicates an inordinate amount of time to the needs, real or imaginary, of his body. It is through his body that the somatic narcissist tracks down and captures his supply sources, and the supply that the somatic narcissist so badly requires is derived from his shape, from his form, from his constitution, from his build, from his profile, physical profile, physiological profile, from his beauty, from his physical attractiveness, his health, or his age.
If I'm right, in the majority of homosexual narcissists are somatic. This is their psychological profile. The somatic narcissist downplays narcissistic supply directed at other traits. He uses sex to reaffirm his prowess, his attractiveness, his youth. Love to the somatic narcissist is synonymous with sex, and he focuses his learning skills on the sexual act, the foreplay, the coital aftermath. "How many orgasms did I give you?" It's like a scorecard. Seduction becomes addictive because it leads to a quick succession of supply sources. Naturally, boredom, a form of transmuted aggression, sets in once the going gets routine. Routine is counter-narcissistic by definition because routine threatens the narcissist's sense of uniqueness, being not average, above the common.
And so, this leads us to transsexuals. Philosophically, there is little difference between a narcissist who seeks to avoid his true self, a narcissist who positively attempts to become his for self, and a transsexual who seeks to discard his true gender or her true gender. There is a similarity there, a superficially appealing similarity. But is it doubtful? Is it questionable? Or is it real? Is the rejection of one's gender, gender dysphoria, the equivalent of the narcissist's rejection of his true self?
People sometimes seek sex reassignment because of advantages and opportunities which they believe are enjoyed by the opposite sex, and this rather unrealistic, fantastic view of the other is, is faintly narcissistic. It includes elements of entitlement, idealized overvaluation, self-preoccupation, and objectification of one's self and others. This gender dysphoria demonstrates a deficient ability to empathize, in some grandiose sense of entitlement, "I deserve to be taken care of." There's also some omnipotence, "I can be whatever I want to be, despite nature, despite God." So, transsexualism involves a lot of grandiosity, a lot of entitlement, and is very reminiscent of narcissism.
The feeling of entitlement is especially manifest in some gender dysphoric individuals who aggressively pursue hormonal or surgical treatment. They feel that it is their inalienable, inalienable right to receive such treatment on demand and without any strictures or restrictions. For instance, they often time refuse to undergo psychological evaluation or treatment as a condition for the hormonal or surgical treatment. It is interesting to note that both narcissism and gender dysphoria are early childhood phenomena. This could be explained by problematic primary objects, parental figures, dysfunctional families, or a common genetic or biochemical problem. It is too early to say which. As yet, there isn't even an agreed topology of gender identity disorders, let alone an in-depth comprehension of their sources.
A radical view, to some extent, was preferred in the '90s by Ray Blanchard. Ray Blanchard seems to indicate that pathological narcissism is more likely to be found among non-core ecodestonic auto-genophilic ginophilic transsexuals and among heterosexual transvestites. It is less manifest in core ego symptomic homosexual transsexuals. Auto-ginophilic transsexuals are subject to an intense urge to become the opposite sex and so to be rendered the sexual object of their own desire. This is the path they choose. A male chooses to become a female because then he can become his own object of unbridled desire and passion. In other words, these people are so sexually attracted to themselves that they wish to become both lovers in the romantic equation. They wish to become the male and the female simultaneously. It is the fulfillment of the ultimate narcissistic fantasy of self-sufficient sufficiency. The false self is a fetish, narcissistic fetish.
Freud made the distinction between anacolletic objects and narcissistic objects, and this is the ultimate in narcissistic objects. Autoginophilic transsexuals start off as heterosexuals. They end up being either bisexual or homosexual by shifting their attentions to the opposite sex. The autoginophilic transsexual proves to prove to themselves that they have finally become true and desirable. So, for example, by shifting his, his attention or her attentions to men, the male autoginophilic transsexual proves to himself that he has finally become a true and desirable woman. And this is all, of course, linked to autoerotism, first described, who else, by Sigmund Freud.
But before we go there, I would like to give you a literature review. You can skip the literature review and go directly to the last part of the video, which deals with Freud's autoerotism. But before we go there, I want to coin a new word: autosexual, not asexual, but auto-sexual. The label asexual has had come to signify anyone who does not feel the need to engage in partnered sex, who does not, who is not attracted to another person, sexually attracted. This is, of course, misleading. People who avoid having sex with other people, but they masturbate on a regular basis and an ex, as an exclusive sexual outlet, may not be asexual at all. They may be auto-sexual.
So, I want to suggest that within the range of asexuality and gray sexuality, we should destroy, distinguish a subvariant, a subspecies of auto-sexuals. These are people who actually have a sex drive, a very active or sometimes hyperactive sex drive, but it is directed at themselves, directed at their own bodies. That's why they masturbate, but they are not attracted to other people. They masturbate not only as a release, because masturbation is often coupled with fantasies, but these fantasies are autoerotic. They concern the person who is masturbating. All autosexuals are autoerotic, but only a minority of autoerotics are autosexual. I'll come to it a bit later.
Autoerotism more frequently finds expression via activities such as same-sex partnerships, homosexuality, or incest. Incest is actually having sex with a living expression of one's own genetic makeup. When you're having incest, you have a, you're having sex with someone who is 50% you. So, this is highly autoerotic. Similarly, homosexuals are having sex with the same sex. This is narcissism thrice removed, or more precisely, autoerotism twice or thrice removed. I'm going to delve into all this deeply a bit later, and I know it's going to be highly controversial.
The gay community in general rejects any attempt, any attempt to analyze the mental, mental issues or psychological issues underlying homosexuality. Homosexuality, to be clear, is determined mostly biologically. It's a biological phenomenon, and it probably is determined in uterus, in the womb, long before birth. But having been born a homosexual, there are layers and layers of psychology and a social context and a cultural context within, within which homosexuality operates, and it is there that homosexuality becomes very closely identified with autoerotism.
So, as promised, we start with a review of the recent literature. The Journal of Sexual Medicine, January 2020. There's an article there, "Erotic Target Identity Inversions Among Men and Women in an Internet Sample," that's authored by Ashley Brown, Edward Barker, and others. And I read to you a few highlights from this fascinating article. Erotic target identity inversions (ETIs) are poorly studied paraphilias that involve sexual arousal by the idea or the fantasy of being the object of one's own sexual desires. So, the results of the study were: mild levels of reported sexual arousal to the idea of being the preferred erotic target were common among the four groups in the study, characterizing about half of them. Gender identity discomfort was associated with autogenophilia, autoandrophilia, and autoanthropomorphosophilia. I'll discuss one or two of these a bit later. Greater gender non-conformity was associated with otogynophilia, autoandrophilia, and auto nippiophilia. Autism scores were associated with autoendrophilia and autonophilia. Masochism was not associated with ETI scores, but humiliation was. Here's a linkage, by the way, to the BDSM community. The clinical implications of the study are: findings suggest that it may be important to distinguish between subgroups of those with different levels and types of ETI arousal and expression. The results support the concept of ETI as a paraphilic dimension in non-clinical samples and the possible role of gender-related psychological factors. So, this is the first study that seems to indicate that autoerotism has a variety of manifestations, of clinical manifestations, and that these manifest manifestations are critically dependent on gender roles and psychological factors.
Another recent article, "Autogynophilia: An Unappreciated Under-appreciated Paraphilia," was published by Anne Lawrence. And the abstract is: Autogynophilia is defined as a male's, men's propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female. It is the paraphilia that is theorized to underlie transvestism in some forms of male-to-female transsexualism. Autogynophilia encompasses sexual arousal with cross-dressing and cross-gender expression that does not involve women's clothing per se. The concept of autogynophilia, autogynophilia defines a typology of male-to-female transsexualism and offers a theory of motivation for one type of male-to-fail, male-to-female transsexualism. Autogynophilia resembles a sexual orientation in that it involves elements of idealization and attachment, as well as erotic desire. I want to make clear, this is idealization of oneself, what what can be called self-idealization, and it involves attachment to one's self as a sexual object of the opposite sex. So, a male would get attached to himself as a female. He would idealize himself as a female.
The article continues: Nearly three percent of men in Western societies may experience autogynophilia. Its most severe manifestation, male-to-female transsexualism, rare but increasing in prevalence. Some theorists and clinicians reject the transsexual typology and theory of motivation derived from autoautogenophilia. Their objections suggest the need for additional research. The concept of autogynophilia can assist clinicians in understanding some other ways puzzling manifestations of non-homosexual male-to-female transsexual, transsexualism. Autogynophilia exemplifies an unusual paraphilic category called erotic target identity inversions, in which men desire to impersonate or turn their bodies into facsimiles of the persons or things to which they are sexually attracted. I want to clarify that target inversion doesn't have to involve the opposite sex. A man can imagine himself to be a child, and this is known as auto-pedophilia. A man can imagine himself to be a woman, and this is autogynophilia. A woman can imagine herself to be a man, auto-androphilia. Both sexes can imagine themselves to be an animal, and this is bestiality. And so, these, um, target inversions involve autoerotism plus inversion plus conversion to another type, another organism, in a way. Separate from this, we have classical autoerotism, which involves sexual attraction and libido investment in one's own body or one's introjects. And separate from this, we have sexual activities that involve sexual partners which resemble the active person, for example, homosexuality or lesbianism. In both cases, there is attraction to this same sex, which somehow embodies the active partner. Similarly, incest, as I've mentioned before.
Another article, it was published in in Journal of Sexual Research in March, in the quarterly March to June 2009, was titled "Erotic Target Location Errors: An Underappreciated Paraphilic Dimension." And it says: Based on studies of heterosexual, based on studies of heterosexual male fetishes, transvestites, and transsexuals, Blanchard in 1991 proposed the existence of a hidden to unrecognized paraphilic dimension, erotic target location errors (ETLEs), involving the erroneous location of erotic targets in the environment. Erotic target location errors can involve preferential attention to a peripheral or inessential part of an erotic target, manifesting as fetishism, or mislocation of a neurotic target in one's own body, manifesting as a desire to impersonate or become a facsimile of the erotic target, transvestism or transsexualism. Despite its potential clinical and heuristic value, this concept defines a paraphilic dimension that is underappreciated. And so, this review summarizes the studies leading to the concept of ETLEs and describes how they are believed to manifest in men whose preferred erotic targets are women, children, men, amputees, plush animals, and real animals. This review also describes the same phenomena in women and discusses possible etiologies, considers the implications of these concepts for psychoanalytic theories of transvestism and male-to-female transsexualism, as well as for the forthcoming revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
Another article that I wish to refer you to is "Clinical Observations and Systematic Studies of Autogynophilia." The term autogynophilia denotes a male's paraphilic tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman. This term subsumes transvestism as well as erotic ideas or situations in which women's garments per se play a small role on none at all. This review article, which was published, by the way, in in Journal of Sexual Marital Therapy by Blanchard himself, this review article presents clinical examples of the lesser-known types of autogyniophilia, those in which the element of cross-dressing is secondary or entirely absent. It sketches earlier attempts to label and conceptualize this phenomenon. It summarizes recent quantitative studies exploring the relationships between autogenophilia and other psychosexual variables, heterosexual attraction, and speculates on the etiology of autogynophilia and its relationship to transsexualism. It is concluded that the concept of autogynophilia is needed to fill a gap in our current battery of concepts and categories for thinking about gender identity disorders.
And finally, an article in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, August 2005, titled "Early History of the Concept of Autogynophilia," again by Ray Blanchard. It says: Since the beginning of the last century, clinical observers have described the propensity of certain males to be erotically aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women. Because there was no specific term to denote this phenomenon, clinicians' references to it were generally oblique or perithrastic. The closest available world was word was transvestism. The definition of transmittism accepted by the end of the 20th century, however, did not just fail to capture the wide range of erotically arousing cross-gender behavior and fantasies in which women's garments per se play a small role or none at all. It actually directed attention away from this phenomenon. The absence of an adequate terminology became acute in the writer's research on the taxonomy of gender identity disorders in biological males. This had suggested that heterosexual, asexual, and bisexual transsexuals are more similar to each other and to transvestites than any of them is to the homosexual type, and that the common feature in transverse diets and the three types of non-homosexual transsexuals is a history of erotic arousal in association with the thought or image of themselves as women. At the same time, the writer was becoming aware of male patients who are sexually aroused only by the idea of having a woman's body and not at all by the idea of wearing women's clothes. To fill this terminological and conceptual gap, the writer introduced the term autogynophilia: love of oneself as a woman.
I would like to also dwell upon the concept of autopedophilia. It was described by Kevin Sue and Michael Bailey. And here is the abstract of their article, titled "Autopedophilia: The Most Salient Dimension of Men's Sexual Orientation is Gender Attraction to Males Versus Females. A Second Dimension is Sexual Maturity: Attraction to Children Versus Adults. A Less Appreciated Dimension is Location: Attraction to Other Individuals Versus the Sexual Fantasy of Being One of These Individuals. Men Sexually Aroused by the Ideal Fantasy of Being the Kinds of Individuals to Whom They Are Sexually Attracted. They Have an Erotic Target Identity Inversion (ETI). We conducted," say the authors, "an online survey to investigate the prevalence and phenomenology of ETI among 475 men sexually attracted to children. Autopedophilia, or sexual arousal by the idea of being a child, was common among them. Furthermore, auto-pedophilic men tended to be sexually aroused by imagining themselves as the kind of children, with respect to gender or age, to whom they are sexually attracted. The results support the concept of ETIs and exemplify the simultaneous importance of three dimensions of male sexual orientation."
What are your irritants? I'm going to read to you the entry on autoerotism in the Freud Encyclopedia. Autoerotism is the term used to describe those forms of sexual activity that do not involve a sexual object. The specifically psychoanalytic sense of autoerotism is distinct from its general sense as a synonym for masturbation, although this distinction is sometimes blurred by psychoanalytic writers. Freud's concept of autoerotism had important ramifications for several central components of psychoanalytic theory, including the problem of the choice of neurosis, psychosexual development, and the etiology of perversion. The thesis that infantile sexuality is predominantly autoerotic underwent a gradual attrition after its publication in 1905.
The term autoerotism was introduced by the British sexologist Havelock Ellis in 1898. He used it to denote spontaneous, unprovoked episodes of sexual arousal. Ellis published a second paper in 1898 linking the symptoms of hysteria to autoerotism, citing Freud and Joseph Breuer, and he sent an off-print to Freud. Freud adopted the term autoerotism a year later in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, in which he describes autoerotism as "the lowest of the sexual strata, which dispenses with any psychosexual aim and seeks only locally gratifying sensations." Even at this point, Freud defined the term differently than Ellis, as he later put it: "The essential point is not the genesis of the excitation, but the question of its relation to an object."
Freud made not published reference to autoerotism until the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905, in which he cited Ellis's work and distinguished Ellis's views from his own. This was in 1905. Freud distanced himself from Ellis's inclusion of the whole of hysteria and all the manifestations of masturbation under autoerotism. Freud later made explicit both hysterical symptoms and many examples of masturbation involve fantasized sexual objects, whereas autoerotism is not directed towards any object, as he wrote in 1908.
In 1905, Freud believed the entire period of infantile sexuality to be predominantly autoerotic, although not exclusively so, with object choice prevailing only once puberty is reached. Although over the next few years he began to qualify this emphasis on the autoerotic character of infantile sexuality. Children, said Freud, initially stimulate their anal and genital zones to obtain pleasure without reference to a real or fantasy fantasized object. Unlike early general and anal impulses, the oral drive is an object from the beginning, the breast, and only later becomes autoerotic. Autoerotic activities become object-related by being brought into association with the psychological attitudes towards others or by the attachment of sexual instincts to vital self-preservative activities requiring objects. During the autoerotic phase, the components of the sexual drive behave autonomously, seeking gratification independently of one another. Each of them goes its own way to obtain pleasure, said Freud. In 1916, it is only at puberty that these drives are subordinated to the genital organization into reproduction, and this feature of autoerotism, in conjunction with its object-lessness, determines the perverse character of infantile sexuality.
In 1911, Freud introduced a modification into his developmental model of a stage: autoerotism giving way to object-related sexuality in puberty. So, the modification was this: Originally, Freud said that there is a stage of autoerotism in infantile sexuality, and it gives way, it disappears and is replaced by object-related sexuality more or less in adolescence. But now Freud introduced a stage of narcissism. He interposed the stage of narcissism, self-love, between autoerotic mature and mature sexuality. So, now there are three phases: autoerotism, narcissism, and object sexuality. During the narcissistic stage, the child takes himself as his first love object, and only later learns to love other people. Freud so distinguished between obtaining sexual pleasure from one's body without recourse to a real or imagined sexual object, and that is autoerotism, and being sexually excited by one's body as a sexual object, narcissism. Freud went on to claim that paranoiacs are fixated in the stage of narcissism, whereas schizophrenics are fixated in the stage of autoerotism. He said this in 1911, and luckily for him, he never repeated it because it's sheer nonsense.
The unification of the sexual drive, which Freud had earlier claimed occurred only at puberty, is now described as a characteristic of the narcissistic. The problem posed by Freud's 1911 thesis of the stages of autoerotism and narcissism as the respective fixation points for schizophrenia and paranoia was dealt with by abandoning the nostological distinction in the disposition to obsessional neurosis, published in 1913. Freud propounded the idea of a pre-genital organization of the libido, the anal sadistic stage, that forms the narcissistic state. During this period, the component instincts centroid have already come together for the choice of an object. The object is already something extraneous. Autoerotism was now implicitly confined only to the earliest phase of infancy.
And then, of course, in 1914, the famous essay on narcissism, an introduction. Again, Freud changes his mind. He altered his scheme by describing the original oral relation to the breast as an autoerotic sexual activity. "The first autoerotic sexual satisfactions," wrote Freud, "are experiencing connection with vital functions which serve the purpose of self-preservation. The object-less oral sexual drive finds satisfaction through the necessarily object-directed self-preservative impulse to feed."
In 1915, another essay, "The Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," Freud wrote that "the stage of autoerotism is abruptly gun." In other words, in this essay, he doesn't mention autoerotism at all. Autoerotism becomes the characteristic mode of sexual activity during the narcissistic stage. So, he unifies the autoerotic with the narcissistic, the same way, by the way, I do. Autoerotism becomes the characteristic mode of sexual activity during the narcissistic stage. Freud does not spell out the implications of this change for his earlier concept of the disunity of sexuality during the stage of autoerotism, and the view that autoerotism is a phenomenon of the narcissistic stage seems to preclude the existence of truly object-less sexuality. In other words, by unifying autoerotism with narcissism, Freud destroyed the very concept, undermined the very concept of autoerotism, because narcissism is object-oriented. The object is oneself.
In the 1915 edition of the Three Essays on Theory of Sexuality, Freud emphasized that "the choice of an object, such as we have shown to be characteristic of the pubertal phase of development, has already been frequently or habitually affected during childhood; that is to say, the whole of the sexual currents have become directed towards a single person in relation to whom they seek to achieve their aims." Freud drops completely autoerotism. He just distinguishes between two types of objects: self-object, the self as an object, and other people as objects.
In Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1916, Freud again reverted to his earlier position of the primary object-directedness of the oral drug, a view that he reiterated seven years later in 1923. In the latter texts, 1923, he also maintains the view that autoerotism is directed at the child's own body, in other words, that is narcissistic. He writes: "In the first instance, the oral component instinct finds satisfaction by attaching itself to the stating of the desire for nourishment, and its object is the mother's breast. It then detaches itself, becomes independent, at the same time autoerotic, that is, it finds an object in the child's own body."
Freud's last major statement concerning autoerotism is found in an autobiographical study. He returns to the notion of a non-centralized stage of autoerotism, but describes this as preceding the oral state. This was a logical outcome of Freud's thesis of oral, anal, and phallic organizations of the libido, published in 1925. Its earlier concept of anarchic and structured sexual activity is not compatible with the concept of infantile sexual organization unless it is taken to precedent. Freud regards it as likely that the infant does not distinguish the breast from his own body during the oral phase, and therefore it becomes a self-object.
Freud's account of autoerotism became more and more contradictory and ambiguous during the course of his career. There is an ambiguity, for example, it is use of the term object. Does it refer to a real object out there or a physiological, a psychological object, an introject? This equivocation and confusion have been discussed by several psychoanalytic commentators, notably Compton and Macmillan.
So, as we see, autoerotism in the Freudian sense is a problem. I choose to define autoerotism as a libidinal or sexual or emotional investment either in one's own body or in an introject.