The human oral organ, namely, the mouth, which includes the lips, teeth, and tongue, is a quintessential agent which played a key role in infantile sexuality and has a substantial bearing on neurotic behaviors such as neurosis, eating disorder, fetishism, etc. in the adulthood.

According to Freudian pleasure principle, man is a selfish, pleasure-seeking, and pain-avoiding animal, and this all begins at the very initial stage of his life. Upon birth, the mouth is the initial organ in exercising its physiological faculty for an infant, who obtained nourishment by it in order to survive, as a result, pleasure is derived, and thus the infant is pleased, and demands more. This natural biological behavior then perverts on itself by repetition and thus fetishism occurred. Most often then not, an infant sucks on his mother’s nipple or the nursing bottle not solely for the purpose of obtaining nourishment, but simply for the pleasure and enjoyment of the act of sucking, kissing, nibbling itself. It is here that commenced our long journey of human sexuality.

Then the infant can even unconsciously learn to transfer this fetishistic behavior by psychological substitution, such as sucking on his thumbs, or pretty much anything he can get a hold on and he will put it in his mouth. Here we have the first sign of sophistication. As he grows up, the objective of the mouth to derive sexual pleasure gets repressed and transferred to other bodily organs and the so-called “normal” sexual behavior starts to take shape. Nevertheless, the mouth is still very much in the game. In normal sexual behavior, kissing between partners and the passionate act of French-kissing is almost always the initiator for further erotic arousal. Since one cannot find himself copulating 24 hours a day, in most of other times when he’s not having sex, the desire for sexual pleasure is mainly being carried out unconsciously by the oral agent, to wit, the mouth. One often finds himself unwittingly chewing on the tip of a pen, or obsessively biting on his finger nails. Even the obsession of chewing gum, smoking, drinking, eating all have some bearing for the mouth in carrying out the pleasure principled act, a repressed form of infantile sexuality.

So next time if you find yourself chewing on the tip of a pen, or eating excessively when you really don’t need to, or chewing a gum strenuously just for what-the-hell, or kissing your sweetheart amorously, or tonguing your lover all over passionately, you know it’s really the baby inside you, craving for breastfeeding or the nursing bottle.