AUTOEROTISM

Sexual pleasure derived from one’s own body.The term was invented by Havelock Ellis and is most frequently used as a synonym for masturbation. However, it covers a wider range, including satisfaction from genital play, self-stimulation of the lips (as in smacking the lips or making sucking movements), and anal stimulation, as well as sexual pleasure from observing one’s own masturbation and from fantasies involving self-gratification. Psychoanalysts believe autoerotic tendencies make their first appearance in the earliest phase of psychosexual development, the oral sucking stage, before the child can distinguish between himself and the outer world. “The libido is directed along one main channel, namely toward the individual’s own body at the time when there is no sensing of T or ‘it’” (Healy, Bronner, and Bowers, 1930).