Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Any discussion of sexuality in modern times would need to acknowledge the unparalleled contributions made by Sigmund Freud, even though the nature of those contributions remains controversial. Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is considered by many critics to be his most important statement on the subject and, together with The Interpretation of Dreams , constitutes the centrepiece of Freud's writings on human existence. In the Three Essays , Freud makes the well-known argument that human sexuality is traceable to infancy and childhood and that it is manifest in the numerous forms of what are considered sexual aberrations. A disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct’, he writes ( Freud 1975 : 97), and this instinct is fundamentally different from that of animals in that it is not, in and of itself, oriented towards the biological end of procreation. As Steven Marcus (1975) comments, in his ‘Introduction’ to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality , the ground-breaking point advanced by Freud is that ‘the sexual instinct is plastic and labile, that it can be displaced, that it is not entirely dependent upon its object—or the object world—and that it may indeed be at first independent and without an object’ (1975: xxviii). In this plastic and labile condition, sexuality is inextricably bound up with the unconscious, ... log in or subscribe to read full text