Infants as sexually aware?

I completely disagree with Freud on the assertions he makes about “infantile sexuality” and infants’ pursuit of sexual satisfaction. These claims are nothing more than tenuous postulations, based not on empirical evidence (granted, it’s hard to gather data on thought processes, especially those of babies) but on the lack thereof. This gives him free reign to sexualize his own observations. For instance, he claims that since infants can’t remember events that occur during their first 3 or 4 years, there is no information to prove that they had no sexual impulses at the time; Freud, because of the absence of such data, takes it to mean that infants definitely have strong “sexual instinctual forces” in this blackout period (44).

Having established such a shaky foundation for his assertion, Freud proceeds to distort infantile behavior such as thumb sucking. What is astounding about his connection between thumb sucking and “sexual naughtiness” is that he links frequency of thumb sucking to masturbation later in life. In other words, one can tell how sexually active an infant will grow up to be from how often it turns to its thumb. In my opinion, infants, during their first few years of life, don’t really have physical or mental capacity to pinpoint innate sexual frustration and find an outlet for it. Babies are not the sexual beings Freud frames them as; it takes years recognize and articulate sexuality, an ability that is learned after people become cognizant of their bodies in the context of their surroundings. For infants, learning how to eat, talk, and walk definitely take place before this “epiphany” occurs.