Freud begins by disagreeing with popular opinion about the nature of our "sexual instinct" (or libido): that it is absent in childhood, sets in at the time of puberty in connection with physical changes and is revealed in the manifestations of an irresistible attraction exercised by one sex upon the other. Freud then introduces two terms: 'sexual object' referring to the person from whom the sexual attraction proceeds; and 'sexual aim' referring to the act towards the instinct tends. The rest of the essay is then concerned with the relation between deviations in these and what is assumed to be normal.
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
By Sigmund Freud
- Table of contents
- Summary
- Biography
- Background
- Psychodynamic Theory and Psychoanalysis
- SYNOPSIS
- I The Sexual Aberrations
- Introduction
- Deviations in Respect of the Sexual Object
- a) Inversion
- b) Sexually Immature Persons And Animals As Sexual Objects
- c) Significance of Other Regions of the Body
- d) Fixations of Preliminary Sexual Aims
- e) The Sexual Instinct in Neurotics
- II Infantile Sexuality
- Introduction
- 1) The Period of Sexual Latency in Childhood and its Interruptions
- 2) The Manifestations Of Infantile Sexuality
- 3) The Sexual Aim of Infantile Sexuality
- 4) Masturbatory Sexual Manifestations
- 5) The Sexual Researches of Childhood
- 6) The Phases of Development of the Sexual Organization
- 7) The Sources of Infantile Sexuality
- III The Transformations of Puberty
- Introduction
- 1) The Primacy of the Sexual Zone and Fore-Pleasure
- 2) The Problem of Sexual Excitation
- 3) The Libido Theory
- 4) The Differentiation Between Men and Women
- 5) The Finding of an Object
- Freud's Summary
- Critical Approaches
- Sample Questions
- Further Reading