Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex. Sigmund Freud

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       Sigmund Freud

      Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4057664157591

Table of Contents

       INTRODUCTION TO TRANSLATION

       AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

       AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

       I

       1. DEVIATION IN REFERENCE TO THE SEXUAL OBJECT

       2. DEVIATION IN REFERENCE TO THE SEXUAL AIM

       3. GENERAL STATEMENTS APPLICABLE TO ALL PERVERSIONS

       4. THE SEXUAL IMPULSE IN NEUROTICS

       PARTIAL IMPULSES AND EROGENOUS ZONES

       EXPLANATION OF THE MANIFEST PREPONDERANCE OF SEXUAL PERVERSIONS IN THE PSYCHONEUROSES

       REFERENCE TO THE INFANTILISM OF SEXUALITY

       II

       THE INFANTILE SEXUALITY

       THE SEXUAL LATENCY PERIOD OF CHILDHOOD AND ITS INTERRUPTIONS

       THE MANIFESTATIONS OF THE INFANTILE SEXUALITY

       THE SEXUAL AIM OF THE INFANTILE SEXUALITY

       THE MASTURBATIC SEXUAL MANIFESTATIONS [13]

       THE INFANTILE SEXUAL INVESTIGATION

       THE SOURCES OF THE INFANTILE SEXUALITY

       III

       THE TRANSFORMATION OF PUBERTY

       THE PRIMACY OF THE GENITAL ZONES AND THE FORE-PLEASURE

       THE PROBLEM OF SEXUAL EXCITEMENT

       THE THEORY OF THE LIBIDO

       DIFFERENTIATION BETWEEN MAN AND WOMAN

       THE OBJECT-FINDING

       SUMMARY

       INDEX

       The Psychoanalytic Review

       A Journal Devoted to an Understanding of Human Conduct

      INTRODUCTION TO TRANSLATION

       Table of Contents

      The somewhat famous "Three Essays," which Dr. Brill is here bringing to the attention of an English-reading public, occupy—brief as they are—an important position among the achievements of their author, a great investigator and pioneer in an important line. It is not claimed that the facts here gathered are altogether new. The subject of the sexual instinct and its aberrations has long been before the scientific world and the names of many effective toilers in this vast field are known to every student. When one passes beyond the strict domains of science and considers what is reported of the sexual life in folkways and art-lore and the history of primitive culture and in romance, the sources of information are immense. Freud has made considerable additions to this stock of knowledge, but he has done also something of far greater consequence than this. He has worked out, with incredible penetration, the part which this instinct plays in every phase of human life and in the development of human character, and has been able to establish on a firm footing the remarkable thesis that psychoneurotic illnesses never occur with a perfectly normal sexual life. Other sorts of emotions contribute to the result, but some aberration of the sexual life is always present, as the cause of especially insistent emotions and repressions.

      The instincts with which every child is born furnish desires or cravings which must be dealt with in some fashion. They may be refined ("sublimated"), so far as is necessary and desirable, into energies of other sorts—as happens readily with the play-instinct—or they may remain as the source of perversions and inversions, and of cravings of new sorts substituted for those of the more primitive kinds under the pressure of a conventional civilization. The symptoms of the functional psychoneuroses represent, after a fashion, some of these distorted attempts to find a substitute for the imperative cravings born of the sexual instincts, and their form often depends, in part at least, on the peculiarities of the sexual life in infancy and early childhood. It is Freud's service to have investigated this inadequately chronicled period of existence with extraordinary acumen. In so doing he made it plain that the "perversions" and "inversions," which reappear later under such striking shapes, belong to the normal sexual life of the young child and are seen, in veiled forms, in almost every case of nervous illness.

      It cannot too often be repeated that these discoveries represent no fanciful deductions, but are the outcome of rigidly careful observations which any one who will sufficiently prepare himself can verify. Critics fret over the amount of "sexuality" that Freud finds evidence of in the histories of his patients, and assume that he puts it there. But such criticisms are evidences of misunderstandings and proofs of ignorance.

Freud had learned that the amnesias of hypnosis and of hysteria were not absolute but relative and that in covering the lost memories, much more, of unexpected sort, was often found. Others, too, had gone as far as this, and stopped. But this investigator determined that nothing but the absolute impossibility of going further should make him cease