On Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

This book is great. I read the 1905 edition, and it’s an attempt by Freud to understand the phases of psychosexual development before the introduction of concepts like the Oedipus conflict. In some ways he’s strikingly progressive here: he pushes back on the idea that homosexuality is a “perversion” and argues that most sexual behavior isn’t worth classifying as pathological — we’d simply been thinking about it the wrong way. Sexuality, he argues, isn’t just a function of reproduction, and it begins in infancy, with sucking, hugging, being softly caressed; what we understand as the “pure love” of parents is, on Freud’s account, experienced by the young child as sexual attraction. After early childhood, sexuality enters a “latency period,” with some notable exceptions, and by the time a child reaches sexual maturity at puberty, their behaviors have already been shaped by how they experienced sexuality as a child, even though they won’t remember it as such. The essays represent an idea just beginning to germinate, and I think Freud may be right in a lot of ways.