Reading Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

From Pleasure to the Object

Philippe Van Haute, Herman Westerink

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000283846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Enseñanza de la salud y la sexualidad

Sigmund Freud's 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is a founding text of psychoanalysis and yet it remains to a large extent an "unknown" text. In this book Freud's 1905 theory of sexuality is reconstructed in its historical context, its systematic outline, and its actual relevance.

This reconstruction reveals a non-oedipal theory of sexuality defined in terms of autoerotic, non-objectal, physical-pleasurable activities originating from the "drive" and the excitability of erogenous zones. This book, consequently, not only calls for a reconsideration of the development of Freudian thinking and of the status of the Oedipus complex in psychoanalysis but also has a strong potential for supporting contemporary non-heteronormative theories of sexuality. It is as such that the 1905 edition of Three Essays becomes a highly relevant document in contemporary philosophical discussions of sexuality.

This book also explores the inconsistencies and problems in the original theory of sexuality, notably the unresolved question of the transition from autoerotic infantile sexuality to objectal adult sexuality, as well as the theoretical and methodological shifts present in later editions of Three Essays. It will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and those with an academic interest in the history of psychoanalysis and sexuality.

1
Hysteria and sexuality

Introduction

In this chapter, we will contextualize and reconstruct the various aspects of Freud’s 1905 theory of sexuality. Such contextualization, both historical and systematic, is necessary since Three Essays can only be properly understood when situated against the background of developments in contemporary neurology, sexology, and psychiatry and in relation to other texts and projects Freud was working on around 1905. This approach will make it possible to identify both the continuity and radicality of the 1905 Three Essays relative to an existing body of literature and thought. With regard to the reconstruction of the content of the text, we will show that in 1905, Freud clearly distinguished between two regimes of sexuality. On the one hand, we find infantile sexuality, which is described in terms of autoerotic, polymorphous perverse sexual activities without object or specific aim – activities that cannot be described in functional terms. On the other hand, Freud formulates his ideas on sexuality as it becomes organized in puberty. Here, the experience of pleasure is still an important element but now only within a structure in which “normal” sexuality is characterized by a heterosexual object choice with the final aim of reproduction. This distinction of regimes not only has important implications but also raises several questions and problems that force Freud to reconsider his original ideas in the later versions of the text.

Studies in sexuality

Our point of departure is linked to an issue introduced on the very first page of Three Essays: its place within the body of work on sexuality, perversion, and pathology established in late nineteenth-century psychiatry, neurology, and sexology. Does Freud continue the modes of reasoning and conceptual frameworks presented in the literature he refers to in the first endnote of the text – the major writings of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Albert Moll, Iwan Bloch, and others from the 1880s and 1890s and the contemporary literature published in the first years of the twentieth century; for example, in Magnus Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen? Or does he develop something radically new – so new that the relation to these predecessors must be described in terms of a radical break? It is part of Freud’s rhetorical strategy in the first pages of Three Essays to distance himself from the established body of thought on sexuality. Eminent predecessors are reduced to a footnote in a text that presents itself as opposed to “popular opinion” and “poetic fable” (Freud 1905a: 1). According to Freud, psychiatrists, neurologists, and sexologists had generally approached sexuality from a Darwinian perspective, focusing on the genital drive (Geschlechtstrieb¹) as the manifestation of the reproductive instinct in the service of the preservation of the species.² From this perspective, which underscored the functionality of the human drives, sexuality had its analogy in hunger as the expression of the need for ingestion in the service of self-preservation. Within this scheme, Freud identifies a number of mistaken views on sexuality; namely, that it is absent in childhood, gains momentum only in puberty after the sexual organs have come to full maturation, and aims at procreative sexual acts with heterosexual partners.

No doubt Freud is referring here to some key aspects of the contemporary scientific and societal consensus on the nature of sexuality. In the opening passages of Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), Krafft-Ebing had stated that sexuality ought to be defined in terms of its natural function in the service of reproduction. This reproduction should not be regarded as the result of individual sexual preferences, but as the necessary and normal expression of a strong natural instinct for the preservation of the mental and physical capacities of the individual (Krafft-Ebing 1886: 1).³ Formulated in this way, the Darwinian principles of the preservation of the individual and the species were closely related: preservation of the species was in fact motivated by the instinct of self-preservation. Reproduction was the means by which the life of the individual could be preserved beyond its intrinsic spatial and temporal limitations, as the individual’s traits and capacities were preserved in future generations.⁴ Sexuality was thus defined in purely functional terms as a means toward an end. It was reproduction in the service of preservation that defined normal sexual acts and the normal choice of sexual partners. Only procreative sexual acts were considered normal. This functional understanding of sexuality was the underlying conception for Krafft-Ebing’s views on pathology in general and sexual perversions in particular. It was likewise this functional understanding of sexuality that determined his identification of abnormal sexuality, or, in Krafft-Ebing’s words, the “anomalies of the sexual function”; that is, sexual deviations from the norm of reproduction (Ibid.: 32).⁵ He distinguished four categories of such functional anomalies. The first category was paradoxia. This was either the manifestation of the genital drive in early childhood, as evidenced in masturbation (often causing degenerative neuroses or psychoses), or the remanifestation of the genital drive in old age, most often in relation to senility. Krafft-Ebing defines this anomaly in terms of the sexual organs not yet or no longer properly functioning. The second category was sexual anesthesia, or absence of the genital drive, which mostly resulted from psychic degeneration or from cerebral or other anatomical defects. The third category was hyperesthesia, or abnormally increased genital drive, which was most often found in adults with a neuropathic constitution, as manifested in neurasthenia or hysteria, for example. The fourth functional anomaly was the one Krafft-Ebing was most interested in: paresthesia, or sexual perversion. He presents the following definition of perversion: “[w]ith opportunity for the natural satisfaction of the sexual instinct, every expression of it that does not correspond with the purpose of nature – i.e., propagation – must be regarded as perverse” (Ibid.: 52–53). Every non-procreative manifestation of the genital drive is a perversion. It is this criterion of the natural function of the genital drive that links the four main perversions to each other. After all, sadism, masochism, fetishism, and inversion (soon further differentiated into homosexuality and bisexuality) have nothing essential in common beyond their non-procreativity. They are different sexual activities and interests in which sexual pleasure and satisfaction are obtained while detached from the natural instinct of reproduction (Davidson 2001: 75–76).

We find a similar train of thought regarding the relation between sexuality and reproduction in the writings of the Berlin neurologist and sexologist Albert Moll. Like Krafft-Ebing’s, his work was an important point of reference in Three Essays and was recognized in the 1905 edition for its contribution to the scientific study of contrary sexual feeling (inversion) and infantile sexuality. In his book on the sexual libido (1898), Moll paid a lot of attention to the relation between the genital drive and reproduction. Reflecting on the basic principles of Darwinism, he argued that the sole function of the genital drive of men and women was procreation. In nature, heterosexuality is therefore the normal inherited disposition in service of what Moll calls “the principle of teleology” – reproduction (Moll 1898: 241ff). The individual development and feeling of sexuality were merely the subjective side of the objective reproduction instinct. All individual physiological and psychological sexual processes could be explained by this instinct. According to Moll, the genital drive was composed of two complementary impulses. The “detumescence impulse” was a natural urge that produced the transformation of the genitals (with the aim of ejaculation during coitus), including the increase of feeling in the genitals (with the aim of sexual satisfaction). The “contrectation impulse” paralleled the first and consisted of an inclination to gently approach, touch, and kiss a person of the opposite sex.⁶ It was theories such as Moll’s, in which the combination of physiological developments and mental processes (desire, attachment) during and after puberty was in the service of reproduction, that Freud called “poetic fables.”

By opposing the “popular opinion,” Freud distanced himself from an authoritative medical opinion shared by the main contemporary experts in the field of the scientific study of sexuality (Westerink 2009: 58ff). Before we take a closer look at Freud’s 1905 theory of sexuality, however, we should put his relation to his predecessors in perspective. There are, after all, very good reasons not to regard Freud’s work as radically opposing a whole body of medical thought on sexuality. It is most important to recognize that Krafft-Ebing, Moll, and others paved the way for Freud’s Three Essays. In fact, these scholars had anticipated many of his ideas, including first of all the conceptualization of sexuality as a prevailing natural drive that is also the most powerful force in cultural development, notably in social bonding and family life, morality, religion, and art (Krafft-Ebing 1886: 1–17). This conceptualization implied that the medical study of sexuality could never be limited to pathological deviations originating from inherited and degenerative dispositions. Even though Krafft-Ebing was primarily interested in the etiology of the perversions, he realized that his study of pathological sexual deviations contributed to a much broader insight into the role of human sexual impulses in culture and throughout history. This idea was a precursor to Freud’s insight that any theory of sexuality would have a general anthropological dimension, and that the sexual drive and its sublimation were culturally productive. It was his predecessors who had put sexuality on the map as a fundamental aspect of both human nature and cultural life.

This broader view of sexuality and culture, together with the conceptualization of sexuality in terms of a “natural drive,” imbued the writings of Freud’s predecessors with a powerful emancipatory potential. This was evidenced not only in the writings of Krafft-Ebing and Moll but also and especially in the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen. Here we find a marked tendency toward a critique of the criminalization of so-called sexual perverts. After all, when sexual pathology could no longer be thought of as resulting from perverse sexual acts and, conversely, perverse sexual acts were understood as originating from a neuropathic disposition, homosexuals could no longer be regarded as morally responsible for their sexual inclinations. Instead of having juridical procedures invoked against them, they should receive therapeutic treatment. This is a typical train of thought in the literature on sexual perversions (for example, Fuchs 1902). And although Freud does not devote himself to juridical issues in Three Essays, his text on cultural sexual morality written a few years later closely connects with such ideas on abnormal dispositions and the way society should deal with the variety of sexual urges and aims (Freud 1908b).

The second area in which earlier scholars anticipated Freud’s ideas concerns the identification of the four basic types of sexual deviations: sadism, masochism, fetishism, and inversion. Krafft-Ebing had in fact invented the categories of sadism and masochism and had introduced them as two of the four fundamental forms of deviation from normal sexuality; that is, as non-procreative sexual activities. It was also Krafft-Ebing and Moll who had pioneered the concepts of homosexuality and pedophilia in the 1890s. It is fair to say that their Darwinian, functional approach led to the identification of these sexual perversions as the non-functional counterparts to normal sexuality. In the first of the three essays, on sexual aberrations, Freud approvingly identifies these four fundamental forms as the main sexual perversions. Nevertheless, as we will see later, Freud will strongly oppose the functional approach of his predecessors, which leads him to a fundamentally new perspective on the relation between pathology and normality. This brings us to the third development that paved the way for Freud’s Three Essays.

Krafft-Ebing, Moll, and others had implicitly undermined their own basic assumptions regarding the opposition between sexuality and the perversions. Although they would never abando...