Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

Freud defines a fetish as an abnormal fixation on a part of the body not usually considered sexual (e.g., feet, hair), or an object connected in some way with the body of the desired person (such as their underwear). Freud suggests that there exists a degree of fetishization even in normal relationships—especially in the early stages of courting, where sexual contact may be limited or forbidden. Like other perversions, fetishization can become an obsessive fixation and may interfere with the pursuit of normal sexual ends.

Since a child’s first strong emotional attachment is to his or her parents, Freud believes that the child’s first sensations of bodily pleasure are connected to the love and care it receives from its primary caregiver, especially the mother figure (through acts such as breastfeeding, for example). In normal sexual development, the child transfers his or desire to persons outside of the family unit. The incest barrier is Freud’s name for the social, cultural, and biological instincts that promote this transference.

Freud believes that early childhood events play a determining role in the development of an individual’s psychology, but these events form a kind of “prehistory” for us in later life. They are forgotten but remain as memories buried in the unconscious. Freud calls this forgetting infantile amnesia. He compares it to hysterical amnesia, caused by repression and producing neurotic symptoms. The goal of psychoanalysis is to uncover this forgotten material and so effect a cure. Freud speculates that there can be no hysterical amnesia without infantile amnesia—they are continuous.

Instincts, or drives, play a prominent role in psychoanalytic theory. In the biological sciences, the word instinct has come to mean something like an innate pattern of behavior or inherent inclination. Etymologically, however, the word is related to instigate, and the psychoanalytic use of the word retains this instigating or impulsive component. For this reason, many modern writers prefer the term drive. Freud once explained (in a short work called My Contact with Josef Popper-Lynkeus): “The whole flux of our mental life and everything that finds expression in our thoughts are derivations and representatives of the multifarious instincts [drives] that are innate in our physical constitution.”

Drives are assumed to be linked to the body and physiological processes. In Three Essays, Freud discusses partial drives (component instincts) in relation to the erotogenic zones of the body where they appear as excitations. He develops the idea that the sexual instinct is not a “basic drive or urge to preserve the species through mating.” (This happens to be the definition of the American Psychological Association in their dictionary of psychological terms.) Instead, Freud argues that the sexual instinct itself lacks any fixed object (such as an opposite sex partner) and any fixed aim (such as reproductive activity).

Finally, later in his career, Freud developed a drive theory that postulated two fundamental drives that he called Eros and Thanatos. These are sometimes called the life drive and the death drive, respectively.

In the first essay of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, “The Sexual Aberrations,” Freud uses the term inverts to describe homosexuals. Not his own coinage, it was a common technical term among researchers in the 19th century. The term derives from the idea that instead of experiencing desire focused outward, toward the opposite sex, a homosexual person experiences an inverted desire that attracts them to other persons of their own sex.

Freud believes that when little girls discover that boys and men have different genitalia, they develop something Freud calls penis envy. This envy is rooted in dissatisfaction with their own female genitalia in comparison to the male genitalia, although Freud does not fully elaborate, in these essays, why exactly a little girl would feel such envy. The suggestion appears to be that the lack of a penis leaves the little girl feeling inadequate and incomplete in comparison to the male.

Freud writes in “Infantile Sexuality” that young children who have been abused, or have become sexually precocious “under the influence of seduction” (57), are capable of indiscriminate sexual irregularities and perversions. He attributes this to the weakness of the forces of repression of the sexual instinct in them. Responses likes shame or disgust, but also the more complex mechanisms that he describes, necessary for normal development, are still weakly developed in them because of their age. Freud suggests that this disposition to “polymorphous perversity” persists in humans into adulthood. It is a fundamental feature of our makeup. He points to prostitutes who have an ability to “find every sort of perversion to [their] taste” (57) as an example of an adult manifestation of our fundamental polymorphously perverse disposition.

Freud refers to early childhood phases of sexual development as pregenital, meaning that latent sexual desire and sensation, derived from the sexual instinct, is not centered upon the actual so-called sex organs (as is the case with normally developed adults), but with other parts of the body, such as the lips and mouth, or the anus. An example of pregenital activity is thumb-sucking, which Freud discusses in the second essay, “Infantile Sexuality.” In the Three Essays, Freud posits two distinct pregenital stages: the oral and anal-aggressive. He later added a third, called the phallic.

Psychoanalysis is the discipline founded by Freud. It exerted an enormous influence not only on 20th-century psychology and psychotherapy but on the arts and culture generally. Many concepts derived from psychoanalysis are familiar even today: the unconscious, repression, projection, neurosis, the Oedipus complex, the “Freudian slip.”

Psychoanalysis can refer to two different but related things. On one hand, it is a method for bringing repressed mental material to a patient’s consciousness, relying on things like free association and the analysis of fantasy and dreams. It can also refer to the sophisticated body of theory that underpins the method.

Psychoanalysis underwent enormous developments after Freud. For a time in middle of the 20th century, it was the leading framework for psychological treatment, but it was also, sometimes, something more: an overarching theory that functioned as nearly a belief system for many intellectuals.

Today, psychoanalysis is still vital, even if it has a much smaller footprint. Psychoanalytic training institutes exist in most major cities around the globe, and psychoanalysis also informs a less rigorous style of therapy called psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

Repression is the exclusion of uncomfortable memories or thoughts from the conscious part of the mind. Freud argues that patients who seem to suffer from an aversion to sexuality or sexual acts—namely, neurotics and hysterics—have not managed to entirely reject their sexuality. Rather, they have only managed (without much success) to repress it with damaging results. As Freud explains, repression leads to other forms of psychological malfunctioning, such as the over-excitability and nervousness of both neuroticism and hysteria. In Freud’s thought, repression stands in contrast to outright perversion in the sense that while perverts openly enjoy their sexual impulses, those who are repressed try to avoid expressing their sexuality.