| Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Sigmund Freud |
| Genre(s) | psychoanalysis |
| Publication date | 1905 |
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is a 1905 work by Sigmund Freud which advanced his theory of sexuality, in particular its relation to childhood.
Contents |
Freud's first essay, on "The Sexual Aberrations", designated 'the person from whom sexual attraction proceeds the sexual object and the act towards which the instinct tends the sexual aim ', and stressed that 'numerous deviations appear in respect of both of these - the sexual object and the sexual aim'.[1] Turning to neurotics, Freud emphasised that 'in them tendencies to every kind of perversion can be shown to exist as unconscious forces...neurosis is, as it were, the negative of perversion'.[2] Freud concluded that 'a disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and that...this postulated constitution, containing the germs of all the perversions, will only be demonstrable in children '.[3]
His second essay, on "Infantile Sexuality", demonstrated that 'children are born with sexual urges, which undergo a complicated development before they attain the familiar adult form'.[4] Freud argued thereby that "perversion" was present even among the healthy, and that the path towards a mature and normal sexual attitude began not at puberty but at early childhood (see psychosexual development). Looking at children, Freud claimed that 'infantile sexual emotions and desires take many and varied forms, not all of them palpably erotic: thumb sucking and other displays of autoeroticism, retention of feces, sibling rivalry, masturbation'.[5]
'The years of puberty and adolescence, to which Freud devoted the last of his three essays...consolidate sexual identity, revive long-buried oedipal attachments, establish the dominance of the genitals for the attainment of sexual gratification'.[6] In "The Transformations of Puberty" Freud also formalised the distinction between the pleasures of infantile sexuality which 'may be suitably described as "fore-pleasure" in contrast to the "end-pleasure" or pleasure of satisfaction derived from the sexual act'.[7]
Freud sought to link to his theory of the unconscious put forward in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and his work on hysteria by means of positing sexuality as the driving force of both neuroses (through repression) and perversion. In its final version, the "Three Essays" also included the concepts of penis envy, castration anxiety, and the Oedipus complex.
The Three Essays were 'submitted by their author, in the course of a succession of editions over a period of twenty years, to more modifications and additions than any other of his writings, with the exception of, perhaps, The Interpretation of Dreams '.[8] Whereas 'in its first edition, the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality was a small book of 80-odd pages, little more tham a pamphlet...by 1925, when it had reached its sixth edition, the last to appear in Freud's lifetime, it had grown to 120 pages'.[9]
Thus for readers of the final text it 'will probably come as a surprise to learn, for instance, that the entire sections on the sexual theories of children and on the pregenital organizations of the libido (both in the second essay) were only added in 1915, ten years after the book was first published'.[10] Similarly, Freud's 'first explicit mention of the "castration complex"...of "envy for the penis"...[&] of the actual term Oedipus complex'[11] all postdate the first Three Essays of 1905.
As Freud himself conceded in 1923, the result was that 'it may often have happened that what was old and what was more recent did not admit of being merged into an entirely uncontradictory whole'.[12] Thus whereas at first 'the accent was on a portrayal of the fundamental difference between the sexual life of children and of adults; later, the pregenital organizations of the libido made their way into the foreground, and also...the sexual researches of children; and from this we were able to recognize the far-reaching approximation of the final outcome of sexuality in children (in about the fifth year) to the definitive form taken by it in adults'.[13]
He was still making to make additional refinements to his theory even at that late date, however; and we may perhaps (if we wish) regard all such changes as further evidence of the way that 'Freud's thought is the most perennially open to revision...a thought in motion'.[14]