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Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
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Themes
Childhood Sexuality and Psychosexual Development
Freud mentions more than once that the common assumption that sexuality is absent in human children until puberty is an error:
One feature of the popular view of the sexual instinct is that it is absent in childhood and only awakens in the period of life described as puberty. This, however, is not merely a simple error but one that has had grave consequences, for it is mainly to this idea that we owe our present ignorance of the fundamental conditions of sexual life. A thorough study of the sexual manifestations of childhood would probably reveal the essential characters of the sexual instinct and would show us the course of its development and the way in which it is put together from various sources (39).
For his part, Freud argues that childhood is actually fundamental to the development of human sexuality. Conversely, childhood sexuality is fundamental to the psychological development of a human adult.
According to Freud’s psychosexual theory of development, several distinct phases of sexual development are experienced in infancy and early childhood. Infants start by indulging in what Freud calls autoerotic acts, such as thumb-sucking (74-75), which is a means by which infants recreate the experience of breastfeeding when they are left alone. Infants pass through the pregenital phase in which their sexual impulses are varied and unformed and connected to excitations in the lips, mouth, and anus—what Freud calls the erotogenic zones of the body. Around the age of six, children enter the latent phase. Here, overt sexual interest is reduced and largely sublimated. It is only later, with the onset of puberty, that the human individual starts to develop a mature sexuality directed outside of the family, and toward sexual union with a member of the opposite sex (if, that is, they are not “inverted” individuals who prefer members of their own sex).
Childhood is also when, according to Freud, the seeds of not only sexual dysfunction but all psychological dysfunctions are sown. In Freud’s thought, these dysfunctions are a relic of an arrested development, a sign that somewhere along the contorted path to adult sexuality and normal psychology, something went amiss, was disrupted, or was diverted from its proper course.
The Continuity of Normal and Abnormal
One of the most intriguing elements of Freud’s thought lies in his insistence that disorders like perversion or neuroticism are continuous with ordinary, normal psychological makeups. As Freud writes, “No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim; and the universality of this finding is in itself enough to show how inappropriate it is to use the word perversion as a term of reproach” (26). The difference between normality and perversion, Freud argues, is therefore less one of inherent nature and more of relative degree. In other words, what distinguishes sexual dysfunction from normal traits and desires is the excess and intensity of it, or as Freud puts it, “the exclusiveness and fixation” of the perversion (46) rather than the impulse itself. For example, Freud suggests that fetishization is commonplace, at least in a minor form: someone newly in love with another person might become fixated on some nonsexual part of the beloved’s body, such as a neck or an ear or legs, or on some item that belongs to him or her. What turns the fetish into a mark of sexual dysfunction is when it becomes an obsession that supplants normal human sexual relations.
Freud also writes that homosexuality cannot really be separated from “normal” heterosexuality. He asserts that, “Psychoanalytic research is most decidedly opposed to any attempt at separating off homosexuals from the rest of mankind as a group of a special character” (11). This is the case because a study of unconscious “sexual excitations” in normal humans, he says, has revealed that “all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious” (11).
Finally, Freud goes out of his way to blur the distinctions between a neurotic and a pervert and between a neurotic and a normal person. A neurotic, he discloses, is dealing with thwarted perverted impulses, and thus the count of perverts in the world goes up considerably: “By demonstrating the part played by perverse impulses in the formation of symptoms in the psychoneuroses, we have quite remarkably increased the number of people who might be regarded as perverts” (37). He then adds that we are all to some extent neurotics—ergo perverts—too.
The Difficulty of Investigation
Freud acknowledges that psychoanalysis was still in its early stages, and as such still based largely on guesswork and his own first-hand observations with patients. He laments that many important components in his investigations—the nature of perversion, the link between childhood sexual development and maturity, the puzzle of masochism—were still imperfectly understood. Freud summarizes the dilemma in the second essay as follows: “Psychology is still so much in the dark in questions of pleasure and unpleasure that the most cautious assumption is the one most to be recommended” (49).
Freud does, however, take pride in psychoanalysis and its potential, even boasting on some occasions that some insights are only possible through psychoanalytical methods, such as divining the role of the sexual instinct or drive in producing cases of perversion. Elsewhere, Freud notes that he championed the need to understand childhood sexual development as early as 1896 (68). Overall, the newness of Freud’s investigational methods are both a source of pride and frustration to him; from one angle, he knows that he is hampered by a lack of wider research, but from another angle, he understands that his work is significant.
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By Sigmund Freud
