You can guess that the sexual activity of sucking (for its own sake) belongs to this stage; and you may admire the understanding of the ancient Egyptians in whose art a child, even the divine Horus, was represented with a finger in the mouth. Abraham has quite recently published work showing that traces of this primitive _oral_ phase of development survive in the sexual life of later years. I can indeed imagine that you will have found this last information about the sexual organizations less of an enlightenment than an infliction. Perhaps I have again gone too much into detail; but have patience! what you have just heard will be of more use when we employ it later. Keep in view at the moment the idea that the sexual life—the _Libido-function_, as we call it—does not first spring up in its final form, does not even expand along the lines of its earliest forms, but goes through a series of successive phases unlike one another; in short, that many changes occur in it, like those in the development of the caterpillar into the butterfly. The turning-point of this development is the _subordination of all the sexual component-instincts under the primacy of the genital zone_ and, together with this, the enrolment of sexuality in the service of the reproductive function. Before this happens the sexual life is, so to say, disparate—independent activities of single component-impulses each seeking _organ-pleasure_ (pleasure in a bodily organ). This anarchy is modified by attempts at _pre_-genital ‘organizations,’ of which the chief is the sadistic-anal phase, behind which is the oral, perhaps the most primitive. In addition there are the various processes, about which little is known as yet, which effect the transition from one stage of organization to the next above it. Of what significance this long journey over so many stages in the development of the Libido is for comprehension of the neuroses we shall learn later on.