39 pages • 1 hour read
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
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Background
Authorial Context
Freud was both an innovator and a product of his time. His life was conventional and bourgeois, devoted to his private practice, his researches, and his wife and children. Despite the frank way in which he approached matters of sexuality, he regarded his investigations as practical and scientific, not scandalous for their own sake.
Freud’s personal attitudes were likewise a mix of the progressive and the conventional. The Three Essays was judged harshly when it was published, considered scandalous for its assertions about infantile sexuality. The book (and Freud’s ideas generally) inspired both radicals seeking sexual liberation and a form of ego psychology that was practiced in mid-20th-century America that was famously conservative and restrictive. The confusion is rooted in Freud’s own writings. For one thing, the text of the Three Essays is complicated by its history of additions and revisions. Moreover, most commentators interpret Freud’s later framework, particularly his focus on the Oedipus complex, to be inherently more normative and conservative than his earlier work.
Freud’s writings about women, reflecting the attitudes of his time, earned him the censure of feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir and others. Kate Millet pointed out that Freud defined women in terms that emphasized lack—their lack of a penis, for example—and in ways that reinforced misogynistic notions about female inferiority.
The ending of Freud’s life is another, more somber reminder of his relationship to his times. As a man of Jewish origins, Freud was at serious personal risk during the encroachment of the Nazis in the late 1930s. His exile in England, where he died shortly after arrival, parted him from the place where he had lived and produced his most important work. In some ways, Freud’s death marks the end of an era: the end of the 19th-century world of social conservatism and “gentlemanly” scientific investigation, and the beginning of the more modern, sexually liberal era that was to develop in the 20th century.
Socio-Historical Context
Freud’s ideas were controversial and taboo-breaking. The 19th century in which Freud was born and began his investigations was, by and large, a conservative place. Sex was considered a taboo subject, not fit for discussion in proper society. Because of this repressive atmosphere, not much was known about sexual dysfunctions or even human psychology in general.
It is important to keep this context in mind when reading Freud’s work. Many of Freud’s ideas were superseded by developments in psychoanalytic theory after Freud. Sometimes, the whole of psychoanalytic theory (Freudian or otherwise) is rejected as unscientific, disproven, or obsolete. Regardless of one’s stance, Freud’s ideas were groundbreaking and fertile in their time. Freud and his contemporaries helped to bring discussions of sexuality into the mainstream, and they addressed some fundamental issues about human development that had been neglected. They also occasionally faced backlash while pursuing their investigations, as when Ellis’s work ended up in a legal dispute over whether or not his writings on sexuality were obscene.
Freud’s influence since his own day has been persistent and remarkable. Ideas such as projecting or repressing or “Freudian slips”—these rang true in his own day, just as they do in ours.
Intellectual Context
Sigmund Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, but he was not working alone. A lively school sprung up around him in Vienna. His contemporaries played an important role in helping to establish psychoanalysis as a discipline.
The most famous of Freud’s colleagues is Carl Jung. While Jung and Freud worked closely together for a time, their differences later drove them apart. Both men also displayed differences of temperament and interest: Freud, although of Jewish origins, showed little patience for the mystical, whereas Jung became increasingly fascinated by spirituality throughout his life. Nevertheless, scholars tend to agree that the relationship was pivotal in the lives and work of both men, as each inspired and pushed the other in their theories and investigations.
In his Three Essays, Freud pays homage to his contemporaries whom he considers influences in his own work, such as Havelock Ellis. His references to such men is a reminder that Freud was not operating in a vacuum and that many of his ideas were developed in tandem with the research conducted by other early practitioners in the field. It is important to see Freud as part of a group of innovators who each contributed something to the knowledge of human sexuality.
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