Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

Freud begins by remarking that knowledge of human sexuality has been characterized by fixed ideas and errors. The biggest error that Freud will challenge is the belief that children and infants are not sexual beings. Freud also disputes the common notions that the sex drive is fundamentally an instinct toward or an attraction to the opposite sex, that sexual pleasure and functions pertain primarily to the genitals, and that sex is innately procreative in nature.

Freud is, in fact, arguing for a radical expansion of our understanding of what constitutes sexuality, sexual experience, and a person’s sex life. He proceeds methodically. First, he establishes a conceptual framework by naming two distinct aspects of the sexual impulse or instinct: sexual objects and sexual aims. The sexual object is the other person (or, in certain kinds of perversions, not a person but an animal or a thing) whom the sex instinct leads us to find attractive. The sexual aim is the satisfaction sought through interaction with the sexual object.

Having established these distinctions, Freud will argue that the sexual instinct exists entirely independently of any normative sexual object or sexual aim. To establish this, he turns to the sexual perversions. The first so-called aberration that he discusses is homosexuality. Freud points out that some people—he uses the term “inverts,” prevalent among sexologists at that time—do not desire members of the opposite sex, preferring members of their own sex instead. Freud dismisses the idea that inverts are degenerate, which was not only a popular stereotype of sexual perverts but also an idea elaborated by some sexologists as the cause of sexual inversion. Freud contradicts this theory by noting that inverts are, in fact, often cultured and accomplished people with high ethical development and with no neurotic hang-ups about their sexuality. Freud also mentions that inversion was practiced and even highly esteemed in some ancient societies.

Next, he addresses another then-common explanation for inversion proposed by prominent sexologists in his day. The theory was that inversion exists because of a primary bisexuality or hermaphroditism in the human mind (also in the human body). According to this theory, an invert has a predominance of some quality of the opposite sex, and this determines their object choice. A second version of the innate bisexuality theory suggested that the human mind has two centers, a masculine one and a feminine one. In the case of a male invert, the feminine center was dominant. Freud shows that this theory contains within it the normative view that the innate sexual object is the opposite sex. He gives many examples that complicate and confuse the innate bisexuality theory, and he ultimately rejects it.

Freud also makes clear that he wants to refute the common notion that there is a clear distinction between the homosexual and the heterosexual. He asserts that all human beings are capable of a homosexual “object choice.” Moreover, he claims that in the unconscious, all of us have already chosen a homosexual object.

Freud then discusses other forms of sexual perversion under the element of the sexual aim, ranging from fetishes to bestiality to oral sex, reflecting upon the use of nongenital body parts (and other things, too) in the service of pleasure or as a fixation for the sexual drive. Freud writes about sadomasochism, speculating on the role of aggressiveness in the psyche. Throughout, Freud stresses that sexual perversions exist in continuity with so-called normal sexual drives and practices. He discusses the role of disgust in these perversions, suggesting that one way we can know what falls into the category of a perversion is that it will commonly provoke disgust.

Freud concludes this section on deviations with respect to sexual aim with a discussion of the primitive components that are analyzable in sexual instinct. He speculates that the sexual instinct is itself various and nonunitary. But its components come together or amalgamate in various ways, in one form in what we call normal, but in another form in what we call a perversion.

He then turns to the subject of neurotics and hysterics. Unlike perverts, these people typically experience dysfunction because of their repression of sexuality when the occasion arises to experience it. (Not mentioned here, Freud’s Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria is an exemplary and famous case study that illustrates this.) By contrast, perverts are not repressed, and they do not typically experience neurotic dysfunction. Freud speculates that the neurotic maintains his or her symptoms by expending sexual energy on them. He even says that “the symptoms constitute the sexual activity of the patient” (29). Freud points out that the neurotic is often repressing a perverted desire, and he writes in a famous phrase that the “neuroses are, so to say, the negative of the perversions” (31). In other words, the neurotic symptom forms at the cost of the abnormal sexual impulse.

Having thus deconstructed or analyzed sexuality into something much more fluid and nonunitary than is normally understood, Freud writes about the component instincts and the erotogenic zones of the body. Component instincts, sometimes also called partial instincts, refer to the many possible kinds of erotically charged excitations that can emerge in a body. The erotogenic zones are the several locations where these excitations arise. Freud names the anus, the mouth, and the genitals as erotogenic zones, and he also suggests that even the eye can be an erotogenic zone (in so-called scopophilia), or the skin.

Freud concludes the essay by observing that there is “indeed something innate lying behind the perversions” but “it is something innate in everyone” (37). He writes that it will be necessary to turn to the sex lives of children—to their experiences of the component instincts and the erotogenic zones—to understand the amalgamated forms of adult sexuality that he has been discussing (whether perversions, neuroses, or normal sexual life).