Philippe Van Haute[1]
Herman Westerink[2]
[This paper was published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (2016) 97:563–589. doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12480]
Introduction
Some of Freud’s crucial texts exist in different versions that were issued over a shorter or longer period of time. Most evident examples of this are The Interpretation of Dreams, The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Recently interesting and important work has been done on the genesis and composition of Beyond the pleasure principle. In ‘The third Step in Drive Theory: On the Genesis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ Ulrike May shows the importance of studying the different revisions that led to the final version of this one text, for a proper understanding of the development of Freud’s thought and of his psychoanalytic theory (May 2015). The present article connects to May’s approach in that it examines the internal logic of the first edition of Three Essays in its historical context. As such it prepares for a confrontation between the different editions of this text as they testify of the evolution of Freud’s thought on sexuality.[3]
The 1905 edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality only has 83 pages.[4] In the following decades Freud reissued the text four times, each time inserting additional elements containing new theoretical material fundamentally disrupting the original ideas and perspectives. Thus the transformations in Freud’s psychoanalytic thought found their way into the various editions. The end result of 1924 presents itself in many ways as a different text than the first edition. In this article we will focus on Freud’s understanding of sexuality and its relation to the object in the 1905 edition of the Three Essays.
The first edition is characterized by a strict structural dichotomy between the infantile sexuality and the object related puberal and adult sexuality. Within this structure Freud defines infantile sexuality as a non-functional autoerotic pleasure, whereas he defines puberal and adult sexuality in terms of a functional object related pleasure. We will discuss this dichotomy – its consequences and problems – in detail. We will argue that it is exactly this dichotomy that forces Freud in the later editions to reconsider the relation between these two regimes of sexuality in developmental and objectal terms. It is in this context that Freud systematizes his earlier references to the Oedipus myth into a psychological complex, and introduces the concept of narcissism in order to establish a developmental continuity between autoerotism and adult sexuality.[5]
But before going into this problematic it is important to reconstruct the intellectual context of Freud’s text. The Three Essays can only be properly read and understood in relation to developments in the contemporary German sexology and psychiatry and against the background of Freud’s own theories on hysteria. It is in reference to this context that we will both highlight the continuity and radicality of the 1905 text and be able to understand later developments that lead Freud to fundamentally reconsider his ideas.
Studies in Sexuality
Our point of departure is linked to the very first page of Three Essays: the question of the place of the text in the context of a body of thought 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 writings of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Albert Moll, Iwan Bloch and others from the 1880s and 1890s? 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 rhetoric in the first pages of Three Essays to distance himself from this body of thought on sexuality. Eminent predecessors are reduced to a footnote in a text that presents itself as opposed to “the popular view” and “the poetic fable” (Freud, 1905, 1-2/135-136).[6] According to Freud, psychiatrists, neurologists and sexologists had generally approached sexuality from a Darwinian perspective focusing on the sexual instinct as the reproduction instinct in the service of the preservation of the species. From this perspective, which underscored the functionality of the human instincts, 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: it was seen as absent in childhood, supposedly only first gained momentum in puberty after the sexual organs had come to full maturation, and was regarded to be aimed 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 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). Sexuality was thus defined in purely functional terms as a means towards an end, and only procreative sexual acts were considered normal. It was this functional understanding of sexuality that determined his identification of abnormal sexuality, i.e. sexual deviations from the norm of reproduction. This is clearly expressed in his definition of perversion: “With 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” (Idem, 52-53). Every manifestation of the sexual instinct that is non-procreative is a perversion. It is this criterion of the natural function of the sexual instinct that links the four main perversions to each other. After all, sadism, masochism, fetishism and contrary sexual instinct, i.e. inversion, have nothing else essential in common but their non-procreativity. They are also very different sexual activities and interests in which sexual pleasure and satisfaction is obtained while detached from the natural instinct of reproduction (Davidson, 2001, 76).
We find a similar train of thought about the relation between sexuality and reproduction in the writings of the Berlin neurologist and sexologist Albert Moll. In his book on the sexual libido (1898) Moll had paid a lot of attention to the relation between the sexual instinct, mental development and reproduction. According to Moll, the sexual instinct was composed of two complementary impulses. The detumescence impulse (Detumeszenztrieb) was a natural impulse that produced the transformation of the genitals (with the aim of ejaculation during coitus). The contrectation impulse (Kontrektationstrieb) paralleled the first and consisted of an inclination to gently approach, touch and kiss a person of the opposite sex. It was theories such as Moll’s that Freud now calls “the poetic fable”: the combination of physiological developments and mental processes (desire, attachment) during and after puberty in the service of reproduction.
By opposing “the popular view” 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, 58 ff). However, we cannot simply oppose Freud radically to a whole body of medical thought on sexuality. In fact, Krafft-Ebing cum suis had paved the way for Freud’s Three Essays (Sulloway, 1979, Oosterhuis, 2000 and 2012, Davidson, 2001). These scholars had anticipated many of his ideas. This first of all concerns the conceptualization of sexuality as a prevailing natural instinct 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 ff; Oosterhuis, 2012, 141-143). This implied that the medical study of sexuality could never be simply limited to pathological deviations originating from inherited and degenerative dispositions. Krafft-Ebing, for example, 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. The idea that the sexual instinct was a general human instinct with a huge impact on the organization of normal human life already preluded Freud’s insight that any theory of sexuality would have a general anthropological dimension and that the sexual drive was a culturally productive drive through sublimation.
The second issue 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, i.e. as non-procreative sexual activities. It was also Krafft-Ebing and Moll who had pioneered the concepts of homosexuality and paedophilia in the 1890s. It is fair to say that their Darwinian, functional approach to normal sexuality necessarily led to the identification of these sexual perversions as the non-functional counterparts. In the first essay on sexual aberrations these four fundamental forms are also officially approved of by Freud as the main sexual perversions.
The third development that preluded Freud’s Three Essays was that Krafft-Ebing, Moll and others had implicitly undermined their own basic assumptions about the opposition between sexuality and the perversions. Although they would never abandon the strict distinction between the normal sexual instinct and its perverse pathological deviations, both Krafft-Ebing and Moll increasingly shifted their attention towards the gradual differences between normal and abnormal. In Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia sexualis this shift can already be detected. When describing sadism, for example, he argued that the close relation between pleasure and cruelty was not specific to sadism or masochism but should in fact be regarded as originating from general human physiological and psychological characteristics, such as the opposition between the active male and passive female roles in sexual relations. He also recognized a close relation between certain aggressive acts (such as biting) and the nature of sexual excitation. The conclusion Krafft-Ebing drew from this in fact undermined his basic assumptions. “Sadism is thus nothing else than an excessive and monstrous pathological intensification of phenomena – possible, too, in normal conditions in rudimental forms – which accompany the psychical sexual life, particularly in males” (Krafft-Ebing, 1886, 56). Clinical case material shows that it is virtually impossible to make sharp qualitative distinctions between the normal and the pathological. Perversions like sadism can be seen as exaggerations and intensifications of normal sexual impulses and acts. In general we can say that the clinical evidence showed that sexuality could not simply be differentiated or categorized in terms of a functional, natural instinct as opposed to its degenerative deviations. Iwan Bloch concluded from this that the perversions do not originate from an abnormal neuropathic constitution, but should be seen as general human intensifications of impulses that may or may not develop into approved folk customs (Bloch, 1902, 6-7; Davidson, 2001, 80-82). It was Freud who recognized the revolutionary potential of this statement: most sexual aberrations cannot be isolated from normal sexual life. If sexual aberrations cannot be explained in terms of a neuropathic (inherited, degenerative) disposition, then they can only be defined relative to a general human sexual disposition – described by Bloch and others in terms of an increase or intensification of certain sexual impulses. In this train of thought, in which the difference between normal and abnormal sexuality is merely quantitative, these increased sexual impulses not only inform us about pathologies, but also more importantly about human nature in general. This is the direction in which Freud will proceed.
The Dismissal of the Functional Approach to Sexuality
Freud’s 1905 Three Essays is inscribed in these developments within the scientific study of sexuality. But he immediately makes clear that he radical rejects the premises and paradigms which his predecessors never fundamentally questioned, despite the fact that their clinical material provided the opportunities for them to do so. Freud dismisses the functional approach to sexuality as “fable” and starts where his predecessors had left off: the multitude of variations in human sexual life. In order to get a grip on these variations, Freud’s own starting point is the distinction between the sexual object (“the person from whom sexual attraction proceeds”) and the sexual aim (“the act towards which the instinct tends”). In taking this starting point, Freud turned the approach of his predecessors upside down. They had categorized the deviations from the perspective of the natural sexual instinct that served as the norm for the distinction between normal and pathological objects and aims. Freud instead wants to study the sexual instinct from the perspective of the variety of sexual objects and aims. Since the human sexual drive is not naturally organized by an inherent norm or according to some innate functional principle, there is indeed nothing but a variety of sexual activities and orientations in which there is no purely normal or absolutely abnormal sexuality. Let us have a closer look at Freud’s first essay in order to explore this.
After the introductory remarks, Freud continues his chapter on sexual aberrations with a discussion of the deviations in respect of the sexual object. He primarily concentrates on homosexuality (inversion) (Geyskens, 2002, 11-15). Whereas Krafft-Ebing et al. had been primarily interested in the question of the aetiology of innate and acquired homosexuality, Freud is not particularly interested in solving this riddle. On the contrary, he argues that inversion cannot be strictly separated from other forms of sexuality because of the large spectrum of variations (Freud, 1905, 3-7/137-141). Instead of formulating alternative approaches and answers to the question of aetiology, Freud focuses on the observation of homosexuality in and outside of the clinical setting. These observations are as follows. Firstly, homosexuality can be found in many persons that hardly deviate from the common sexual norm. Secondly, homosexuality does not disturb a person’s achievements – on the contrary, homosexuals are often highly advanced in intellectuality and morality. Thirdly, homosexuality can be found in all civilizations, however, the moral evaluation of homosexuality in different cultural contexts varies. From this he concludes that homosexuality as such cannot be classified as abnormal. This means that the established views on the distinction between normal and abnormal sexuality need to be reconsidered. Homosexuality cannot be interpreted in terms of a neuropathic deviation, but should actually be seen as a modus of sexuality. The most important conclusion from the observations of homosexuality is the one that opens up a whole new theoretical realm: the relation between the sexual instinct and the sexual object needs to be reconsidered. The sexual instinct is most likely in the first instance independent of its object (Idem, 10/148). The idea that the sexual instinct is originally without an object, i.e. it expresses itself in a non-intersubjective way and does not in any way depend on the presence of an object, is a conclusion that concerns sexuality in general. The implication is that originally all human sexuality is strictly non-functional. After all, all references to the reproduction instinct, self-preservation and preservation of the species implied the notion of the inherent object of the natural reproduction instinct.[7]
Perversion, the Need of Variation, and Reaction Formations
Having discussed the deviations in respect of the sexual object, Freud turns his attention to sexual aims. Freud immediately states that these so-called perverse activities can actually be recognized as present in all normal sexual activities. The observation of sexual activities and relationships shows that the sexual aim is hardly ever limited to the genitals but involves the whole body as a surface of excitation and pleasure. It is not without irony and a sense for provocation that he mentions kissing (defined by Freud as the contact between the mucous membrane of the lips that constitute the entrance to the digestive tract) as a perverse act generally regarded to be an aspect of every normal sexual relationship and therefore held in great esteem in civilized societies (Idem, 12/150). Kissing is perverse just like oral-genital activities, anal-genital activities, fetishism, sadomasochism, voyeurism and exhibitionism – the “classical” perversions. In all these activities parts of the body are involved that do not belong to the sexual apparatus strictu sensu. He adds that the various sexual activities express a certain general human need for variation (Bedürfnis nach Variation) – a remark deleted from the 1920 edition onwards (Idem, 13/151). Such a need for variation collides with cultural conventions on normal and abnormal sexual activities. Such conventions manifest themselves as disgust for certain sexual activities. Freud seems to suggest here that disgust is an expression of cultural morality, but he actually argues that this is not the case. Drawing upon his studies of hysteria he writes that shame and disgust are to be regarded as reaction formations. These reaction formations are psychic counter forces that are spontaneously constructed in order to repress the unpleasure that somehow results from sexual excitation. The crucial point here is that shame and disgust are seen as the organically determined limitation of the sexual drive without the involvement of external objects, norms and principles. In 1906 Freud writes that his views on organic sexual repression were a crucial aspect of his theory of sexuality, that is to say, a theory in which the essence of sexuality could be described in terms of pure physiological processes (Freud, 1906, 278-279). Shame and disgust are therefore not the earliest manifestations of internalized cultural morality. The relation between the two is actually the other way around: cultural morality can only follow and impress the psychic lines which have already been laid down organically (Freud, 1905, 34-35/178-179). Although Freud could not deliver the answers to all the open questions on infantile sexuality, unpleasure and repression, it was clear that repression could be thought of without references to external influences. Infantile experience of pleasure and the later repression of the memories of these pleasurable experiences should be understood in terms of organic (biological) processes and subsequent psychic formations. It is such formations that provide the basic patterns and outline with which cultural morality can connect. Cultural morality follows organic processes, not the other way around.
According to Freud, disgust determines the identification of a certain sexual aim as perverse (Idem, 14/152). From the perspective of organic processes this claim can be read according to the argumentation we have just described: disgust is an organically determined limitation of the sexual impulse (“Eek, dirty!”). This disgust is the psychic dam later strengthened by cultural moral views. From the perspective of cultural morality the qualification “perverse” is only a matter of consensus, because there is no natural norm for distinguishing between normal and abnormal sexual aims (“That dirty … is perverse!”). The perversions can therefore only be defined in relation to what adults generally consider normal. Freud writes that certain perverse acts (licking excrements, necrophilia) are so detached from normal sexual behaviour that one should categorize them as pathological in contrast to normality (Idem, 19-21/160-162). Such detachment from normality is in fact the main criterion for identifying certain acts as perverse. But more importantly he stresses the fact that most perverse sexual activities are part of normal sexual behaviour – remember what we said about kissing – or can be found in persons who lead a perfectly normal life in all other respects. In fact, clinical evidence shows that most perversions are a composition of “pathological” and “normal” sexual aims. The main conclusion from this discussion of the variety of sexual acts is that most likely the sexual instinct is put together from components (Idem, 21/162). If the sexual activities are composites, maybe the source from which they spring (the sexual drive) is also something composed. It is from this conclusion that Freud makes the step towards a theory of the perverse polymorphous nature of infantile sexuality, the partial drives and the erogenous zones. As regards the perversion, the ultimate conclusion to be drawn from Freud’s views on the perverse polymorphous nature of infantile sexuality is already foreshadowed in his elaborations on the sexual aim: strictly speaking there are no perversions, since what we use to call the perversions are in fact merely sexual activities in continuity (through exclusiveness and fixation) with the sexual disposition original to all human beings.
Before we proceed commenting on the rest of the first essay, let us add a few remarks on sadism and masochism. In his discussion of the sexual aim Freud is clearly guided by Krafft-Ebing’s categorization of the perversions (Idem, 18/157-158). In the context of Three Essays, however, these two perversions are problematic. With masochism and sadism two aspects of psychic life are introduced that are difficult to relate to infantile sexuality, namely aggression and pain. We will limit ourselves to two short remarks. As regards pain (and the experience of pleasure in pain) Freud writes that we should understand pain analogous to shame and disgust as a reaction formation. Nevertheless, it is difficult to see how pain could be a psychic counter force, and, indeed, Freud does not and cannot explain his statement. Later in the text he will mention compassion as a reaction formation against the pleasure of causing an object pain (Idem, 46/193), but of course this second statement does not answer the question of how pain can be a counter force. Aggression and cruelty are equally difficult to understand. As we will see below, Freud will define infantile sexuality as the experience of pleasure through erogenous zones (corporeal excitation). From this perspective it is difficult to imagine aggression and cruelty being “sexual” (pleasurable) or components of the sexual instinct. In other words, there is the question of (1) the origin of aggressive and cruel impulses and (2) the relation between aggression and sexuality. Freud will argue that aggression and cruelty originate from another source than the erogenous zones. The alliance between aggression/cruelty and sexual life is established relatively late in childhood (Idem, 45; De Vleminck, 2013, ch. 1). This observation, however, does not answer the two central questions. Freud therefore concludes that the perversions of sadism and masochism remain unsolved mysteries and that the study of obsessional neurosis is most likely the key to understanding the sadistic component of the libido. In 1905, however, Freud’s theory of sexuality is mainly formulated from the perspective of hysteria (more precisely, conversion hysteria). This brings us to Freud’s discussion of the sexual drive in the psychoneuroses.
Hysteria as a Model for Understanding Sexuality
Freud subsequently turns his attention to the psychoneuroses in general and hysteria in particular. He claims that hysteria will provide the main model for the further conceptualization of sexuality (Freud 1905, 23/165). With regard to this turn to hysteria we wish to highlight two important developments, the implications of which will lead to the idea of taking hysteria as the model for the study of human sexuality. Until 1905 Freud’s clinical work had been mainly concerned with hysteria. In his psychoanalytic practice Freud had discovered that the origin of hysteria could be found in early childhood sexual experiences that had later been repressed from consciousness. The first major theory on the aetiology of hysteria – the seduction theory (see below) – was still formulated in line with the general approach discussed above. In this theory the neuroses were regarded as a deviation from “normality” because they originated from an “abnormal” (traumatic) moment in early childhood. When Freud started to question these accidental influences, he fell back on the most common interpretative scheme, namely the influence of constitutional and hereditary factors. Nevertheless, there is a major difference between Freud and his predecessors, which can be seen in his 1906 claim that “the ‘sexual constitution’ took the place of a ‘general neuropathic disposition’” (Freud, 1906, 276). And in Three Essays he writes: “The conclusion now presents itself to us that there is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but that it is something innate in everyone, though as a disposition it may vary in its intensity and may be increased by the influences of actual life” (Freud, 1905d, 171). In others words, Freud does not want to explain hysteria or perversion as resulting from an abnormal neuropathic disposition, but from a general human sexual disposition.[8] The key questions in the study of hysteria were thus no longer, “What is the specific accidental moment in the aetiology of hysteria?” or “What is the neuropathic constitution from which we can explain hysteria?”, but “How does hysteria originate from the general human sexual disposition?” and “What is sexuality?” Freud’s views on organic repression had played a key role in this change of perspective: (infantile) sexuality and repression could be explained in terms of generally human physiological processes. The study of hysteria was apparently impossible without reference to a general human sexual constitution. Conversely, however, it could no longer be argued that the analysis of the psychopathologies should be limited to the field of pathology alone. This called for a redefinition of the relation between pathology and normality, and Freud provided this in line with a train of thought we have already identified in the clinical studies of Krafft-Ebing et al., namely the idea that pathologies can be seen as exaggerations and intensifications of normal sexual impulses and acts. For this reason the model pathology in Three Essays is hysteria. In hysteria we find constitutionally higher-than-average sexual energy and subsequently we find repression of sexual impulses “in excess of the normal quantity” (Freud, 1905, 23/165). Hence, in a magnified way hysteria gives insight into general human physiological process – sexuality, its repression and also the symptom formations that result from the unresolved conflict between the sexual impulses and repression. Freud now makes a further important step: Human life can best be studied from the perspective of a certain group of pathologies (namely the psychoneuroses) because these pathologies display exaggerations of normal physiological and psychic processes and mechanisms, and are not as estranged from normality as some other pathologies. If we are all to a certain extend hysterical, then hysteria can inform us about who we are (Idem, 29/171). From this train of thought in Freud’s studies of hysteria we can understand the introduction of hysteria as the model for the study of sexuality in Three Essays. Hysteria is a pathology “at least approximate” to normality, Freud claims, and at the same time it is characterized by higher than average quantities of sexual energy, by intensified and excessive repression and by corporeal symptom formations that appear to be magnifications of normal corporeal expressions of the always more or less unstable human emotional life. For these reasons hysteria presents itself as suitable for an anthropological approach to sexuality and hence to human nature as such. The study of pathology becomes what we call a pathoanalysis of human existence. Human nature as such can best and probably only be studied from the perspective of the psychopathological variations. In the 1905 Three Essays, hysteria is the one variation that becomes the model for understanding all human sexuality and, beyond that, human nature (Van Haute, 2005).
Sexuality and/as Pleasure
What, then, is sexuality when its model is hysteria? What aspects of human existence can be highlighted via the study of hysteria? In order to answer such questions Freud first relates hysteria to the perversions by arguing that the hysterical symptoms are nothing but the converted expressions of the drives that can be described as “perverse” by nature. After all, from his analyses of the sexual objects and aims and his dismissal of a functional interpretation of the drives, Freud deduces that the sexual drive in fact consists of an amalgam of components manifesting itself in the variety of “perverse” objects and aims. It is the non-functional, non-normative interpretation of sexuality that makes it possible to name the “normal” sexual drive “perverse”, and it is the study of hysteria that substantiates this claim. Hysteria highlights the same psychic processes and mechanisms we find in normal human existence, and the hysteric symptoms are expressions of the perverse nature of the sexual drive. Freud writes in this respect that “…neuroses are … the negative of perversions” (Freud, 1905, 24/165). In hysteria we can witness the manifestation of the perverse nature of sexuality, i.e, those so-called aberrations that we recognize as variations of so-called normal sexuality. According to Freud, the hysterical constitution highlights three central aspects of sexuality (Van Haute and Geyskens, 2012, ch. 1). Firstly, there is the bisexual disposition (Freud, 1905, 25/166, 62/220). Freud’s clinical findings in the study of hysteria had shown that (non-anatomical) bisexuality is constitutive of hysteria. Notably the Dora case had (once again) shown the hysteric’s random switching between male and female roles and male and female objects. A few years earlier Freud had already concluded from this that there were always four individuals involved in the hysteric’s sexual acts: the male/female subject orientation and the male/female object (Freud, 1962, 249). In spite of this and the fact that he originally intended to give his text on the theory of sexuality the title Die menschliche Bisexualität (Idem, 287), Freud does not provide a comprehensive theory of bisexuality in Three Essays. Secondly, there are the “tendencies to every kind of anatomical extension of sexual activity” which one finds in hysteria more often and more intensely in comparison with normal sexuality (Freud, 1905, 25/166). Freud is referring here to another aspect of his clinical experience with hysterical patients. Their symptom formations always pointed at an inclination towards the oral or anal erogenous zones that produced pleasure in early childhood and were then repressed through disgust and shame. These inclinations referred to the fact that the (partial) sexual drives were still exerting pressure, but now only produced unpleasure. Eating disorders or feelings of suffocation, for instance, were the typical symptoms that could be traced back to oral sexual pleasure and disgust (Idem, 25/166, 38/182). Thirdly, in this same context Freud develops the idea that human sexuality has to overcome its initial mixing with excremental functions. In Three Essays Freud only mentions this idea in passing (Idem, 14/152), but he develops it in more detail in his text on Dora. The separation between sexuality and the excremental functions can, according to Freud, only be realized through the introduction of the typically human affects of disgust and shame (and guilt), and through a complex process of idealization. More specifically, the hysterical problematic is characterized by the imminent and insurmountable threat of a contamination of the sexual by the excremental (Freud, 1905e, 32).
These three aspects of the hysterical constitution confirm what Freud had already hinted at: What we call the sexual drive is actually a composition or bundle of partial drives. When discussing the partial drives he writes that these are susceptible to further analysis. He then writes a few sentences that were deleted from the 1915 edition onwards: “We can distinguish in them (in addition to an ‘instinct’ which is not sexual and which has its source in motor impulses) a contribution from an organ capable of receiving stimuli (e.g. the skin, the mucous membrane or a sense organ). An organ of this kind will be described in this connection as an ‘erotogenic zone’ – as being the organ whose excitations lends the instinct a sexual character” (Freud 1905, 26/168). The passage can be read in (at least) two ways. The first reading would argue that according to Freud there is one primal drive that may become sexual through the erogenous zones. The idea would then be that Freud proposes one primal drive that is differentiated into various domains and functions of which the sexual function is one. The second reading of the passage would argue that there is some impulse that we can first identify as a sexual drive through its link with the erogenous zones. In 1905, while distancing himself from the perspective of his predecessors who gave a strictly functional interpretation of the sexual instinct (preservation of the species), Freud was still uncertain about the exact nature and status of the drives. This did not prevent him, however, from maintaining the Darwinian idea that psychic life is characterized by two – and only two[9] – fundamental tendencies: sexuality and self-preservation (Nahrungsaufnahme). In the famous passage on thumb-sucking (see below) Freud will distinguish between sexual pleasure and satisfaction on the one hand and the need for taking nourishment on the other. He does not speak there of a nutrition drive (or instinct for self-preservation), but he does distinguish between the sexual and the non-sexual, associating the latter with hunger and the need for nutrition. Hence, since thumb-sucking seems completely independent from the need for nutrition, according to Freud, we have no choice but to consider it sexual.
The excitation of bodily zones such as the skin or mucous membranes determines the sexual character of the drive. The question now arises as to what Freud means by sexual when it is defined relative to the excitation of zones and organs. In the second essay Freud addresses the question of the origin and nature of sexuality in a section on the autoerotic manifestations of infantile sexuality. The starting point and model for his discussion of these manifestations is the phenomenon of Ludeln or Wonnesaugen, a rhythmic oral activity (often combined with “rubbing some sensitive part of the body”) that he describes as a sexual activity. Why and in what sense is thumb-sucking sexual? Freud observes that thumbsucking “leads either to sleep or even to a motor reaction in the nature of an orgasm” (Idem, 36; Geyskens, 2002, 21-28). This hardly seems to answer our question. Freud’s main argument is that this pleasure is sexual because it is essentially autoerotic and non-functional.[10] It has indeed nothing to do with the taking of nourishment and hence it is not related to self-preservation, the need for food or the satisfaction of hunger. Freud here mainly applies his basic Darwinian scheme that whatever is not related to self-preservation is for that very reason sexual.
It was Havelock Ellis who first coined the term autoerotism. In Ellis’ view autoerotism always presupposed an object (person) and was in fact basically characterized by phantasies, daydreams, et cetera, about this absent object (Ellis, 1918, 161 ff). In Freud’s view autoerotism does not include or presuppose the presence of an object – on the contrary, it is strictly without object. Autoerotism is also not about sexual phantasies, since phantasy always implies an object (see below).[11] It is nothing but a physical-pleasurable activity originating from the “drive” and the excitability of erogenous zones.[12] Nevertheless, Freud says that there is a primal activity that triggers thumbsucking, and this activity is breast-sucking. At first sight, it might appear as if thumbsucking therefore does depend on the presence and absence of an object, but this is strictly speaking not the case. The breast, or as a matter of fact one of its surrogates such as a milk bottle, is only a thing by means of which the infant discovers that sucking is pleasurable. Or more concretely, while sucking at the mother’s breast, the lips of the infant behave as an erogenous zone and the warm milk creates a pleasurable excitation that the infant will later try to reproduce (Freud, 1905, 37/181). This implies that the relation to the breast or, as a matter fact, the attachment to the object providing the milk is not essential to sexuality. Breasts or bottles are only instrumental in the discovery of autoerotic pleasure. The paradigm for infantile sexuality, Freud writes, is the lips kissing themselves (Idem, 38/182).
Nonetheless, Freud is not as clear on this topic as it at first seems. Further on in the text he writes that while sexual satisfaction was still linked to ingestion, the sexual drive had a sexual object outside of the body, namely the mother’s breast, and it is for this reason, Freud adds, that breast-sucking is the model for all later object relations. This would imply that “The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it” (Idem, 63-64/222). But this statement only apparently contradicts what we said about the autoerotic character of infantile sexuality. We know already that it is not so much the breast but the warm milk that creates the pleasurable excitation the child is actively looking for. More generally, according to Freud sexuality only gets directed towards an object as such at the beginning of puberty (Idem, 53/207). Only from puberty onwards is pleasure sought in relation to the object that can provide it. Once this is the case the erogenous zones are re-invested from the perspective of adult object-related sexuality (see below). The breast can now acquire a meaning that it could not have before. Hence, it is only retrospectively that breast-sucking gets its paradigmatic value in puberty. The irrevocable distance between infantile sexuality and its reinvestment at the beginning of puberty cannot be made undone.
This interpretation allows us to further deepen Freud’s insights into the nature of infantile sexuality and into its relation to the object and to phantasy. One should not deduce all too quickly from the fact that infantile sexuality is essentially autoerotic and should be described in physiological terms that phantasies do not play an essential role in pathogenesis. In “My views on the Part played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses” (Freud 1906e) Freud writes that in the years before the publication of Three Essays he not only became progressively aware of the importance of a sexual constitution and of hereditary factors, but also of the role phantasies play in the creation of neurotic symptoms. Freud’s text on the Dora case which was published in the same year as Three Essays and which serves as its clinical counterpart, can here help us to better understand what Freud is thinking of. Indeed, in this text Freud links Dora’s symptomatic cough when she is sixteen to a phantasy of fellatio that she finds repulsive and for that same reason represses. However, Freud is very clear about the fact that this phantasy is only created during puberty. Mr. K’s declaration of his love for Dora during a trip to the lake when she is sixteen years old reminds her of an earlier seduction by the same Mr K. On the latter occasion he tried to embrace and kiss her in his grocery shop, and she felt, at that moment, his erected penis against her body. The unpleasurable affect that accompanies this feeling is displaced and manifests itself as disgust (Freud, 1905e, 47). Freud links this displacement from the genital to the oral zone to the fact that as a child Dora was an enthusiastic thumb-sucker and that this disposed the oral zone to playing a crucial role in her adult life. In Dora’s sexuality the oral zone (and its repression) plays a predominant role (Idem, 30). The displacement of the affective rejection of Mr. K’s aggressive advances from the genital to the oral zone clearly testifies to this. It also illustrates what Freud means when he writes that the erogenous zones are identical to the hysterogenic zones and that they show the same characteristics (Idem, 39).
It is this first scene and the unpleasant affect that goes along with it that is re-activated through Mr. K’s declaration of love at the lake. But whereas Dora at the moment of the first trauma had not yet entered puberty and for that reason could not link this event to concrete sexual representations, she is now in puberty and knows that parts of the body other than just the genitals can be used for sexual gratification and sexual intercourse (Idem, 47). Dora was at that stage of her life very preoccupied with the relationship between her father and Frau K. and she actively participated in it in many ways. It comes as no surprise, then, “that with her spasmodic cough, which, as is usual, was referred for its exciting stimulus to a tickling in her throat, she pictured to herself a scene of sexual gratification per os between the two people whose love-affair occupied her mind so incessantly” (Idem, 48). It is this phantasy that is expressed in the spasmodic cough, which is one of Dora’s most characteristic symptoms. Once again we see that it is only at the beginning of puberty that sexuality receives an object and becomes phantasmatic, and hence that only from puberty onwards will phantasies play a role in pathogenesis.[13]
Seduction and the Traumatic Confrontation with a Sexual Object
Most classical historiographical interpretations of Freudian thinking want us to believe that Freud gave up his seduction theory of psychopathology in general, and hysteria in particular in 1897 (Freud, 1986, 283). However, a close reading of Freud’s statements on seduction in the Three Essays shows that things are not as simple as that. Freud summarizes the evolution of his insights on the aetiological significance of sexual traumas for the genesis of the neuroses as follows: “…I cannot admit that that in my paper on ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ (1896c) I exaggerated the frequency or importance of that influence, though I did not then know that persons who remain normal may have had the same experiences in their childhood, and though I consequently overrated the importance of seduction in comparison with the factors of sexual constitution and development” (Freud, 1905, 44/190). Obviously, Freud’s disbelief in his ‘neurotica’ did not simply mean that he would henceforth think that the traumas patients told him about were imaginings in need of an (oedipal?) explanation or that he would refuse to accept the frequent character of sexual seduction between adults and children (or between children). The statement that he did not overestimate the frequency of seduction in “The Aetiology of Hysteria” also relativizes the idea that Freud gave up his traumatic theory of neurosis because he could not admit that there were as many perverted adults and fathers as his theory presupposed.[14]
The abandonment of the seduction theory means that Freud no longer believes in the exclusively traumatic origin of all psychopathology. Or in other words, what Freud no longer believes in is the aetiological significance of traumas and not their truth-value. Indeed, the Three Essays thematises the disposition that is at the basis of hysteria. It explains how the hereditary or acquired exaggeration of some of the characteristics of this disposition leads to the development of hysterical symptoms (Freud, 1906, 276). Seduction is traumatic for Freud because it confronts the child with a sexual object at a time when it is physiologically not yet ready for it. In other words, seduction does not respect the autoerotic character of infantile sexuality. This explains why sexual traumas can have all kinds of devastating effects, but Freud no longer considers these traumas to be a necessary or sufficient cause for the genesis of hysterical pathology. In short, in the 1905 Three Essays seduction has lost its aetiological significance, but remains important for Freud as it provides him an extra argument to underscore the strictly autoerotic character of infantile sexuality.
Oedipal Relations and the Incest Barrier
In the first edition of the Three Essays Freud at no point takes the infantile Oedipus complex into account as a possible explanation for psychopathology. Instead, as we have seen, he defends an organic or dispositional theory of neurosis in which trauma still plays a significant role. The absence of any reference to the Oedipus complex is not just a matter of fact.[15] At this point of Freud’s intellectual development an infantile Oedipus complex is a theoretical impossibility. The Oedipus complex primarily consists of the positive and negative sexual ties towards the child’s parents. It presupposes therefore that infantile sexuality has become objectal and is no longer strictly autoerotic.[16] This only happens at the beginning of puberty. It follows from this that the oedipal themes that we find in culture and that Freud discovers in the stories of his patients are characteristic of puberty. The parents are likely to be the first (phantasmatic) objects of the libido, but the investment of these objects occurs at a moment – after the latency period – when the incest barrier is put in place (Freud, 1905, 67/227). Freud states that the incest barrier is – in contradistinction with the reaction formations – a cultural demand of society that forces young people to turn their interests, which are needed for the establishment of higher social units, outside of the family.[17]
But how then should we understand the references to Oedipus that occur in Freud’s earlier work? Freud mentions e.g. his love for his own mother in the letters to Fliess (Freud 1985, XX). In The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900a, 257 ff.) and in ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (Freud 1905e, 56) he calls the Oedipus legend a poetical elaboration of what is typical for the relation of children to their parents. We can e.g. still be moved by Sophocles’ tragedy because it reminds us of an important aspect of our own childhood relation with our parents. But this does not imply that in these texts Freud already understands neurosis from the perspective of a psychological Oedipus complex that would explain its nuclear structure. In the study on Dora for instance he explicitly writes that Dora’s infantile relation to her father is summed up in puberty to protect her from her love for Mr. K. An old love is reactivated to protect her from an actual love. One can hardly call this an ‘oedipal interpretation’ in the classical sense of the word, since the latter would understand the actual love for Mr. K as a disguised repetition of the old (oedipal) one for the father and not the other way around (Blass 1992; Van Haute & Geyskens 2012, 54-56). Rather in the early work king Oedipus functions as an ‘archetype’ for the modern (neurotic) subject. The figure of king Oedipus has an emblematic value for our tragic destiny (Roudinesco 2014, passim).[18] But, moreover, this reference is still far removed from the idea of a psychological complex that structures the development of the human psyche in the infantile period and that regulates our progressive inscription in the world of culture. It is only when Freud gives up the strict dichotomy between infantile (autoerotic) sexuality and puberal objectal sexuality in the years following his case study of Little Hans (see below) that such a psychological complex and its place in the developmental process becomes theoretically conceivable. It is only when the genesis and the status of the object in child and adult life becomes an explicit problematic issue for Freud that the Oedipus complex can and will receive a structural role in the development of the psyche.[19]
All of this does not prevent Freud in the 1905 edition from remaining quite ambiguous as regards the status of objects and object relations in early infancy. He writes that even at the moment when sexual activity proper becomes independent from ingestion and turns autoerotic, an important part of the sexual relations (sic!) remains present in the relation with the persons who take care of the vital needs of the infant (Freud, 1905, 64/223). Freud is thinking here about the tender relationships of the child with its caregivers. The problem we are confronted with is already a familiar one: since Freud only mentions two fundamental tendencies that govern the human psyche – a sexual drive and an instinct for nutrition (“Trieb nach Nahrungsaufnahme”) – all relations to the surrounding world have to be explained in terms of either one or the other. Nevertheless, it is very hard to situate tenderness within this dichotomy: it can neither be reduced to the vital needs of hunger and thirst, but nor is it merely sexual. Freud solves this problem by linking tenderness to inhibited sexuality. Tenderness is essentially a modus of sexuality. It is ‘damped-down’ libido (“abgedämpften Libido”) (Freud, 1905, 66/225). In other words, Freud seems to explain all relations to objects (persons) in terms of libidinal ties, not in terms of self-preservation.
Puberty and the Organization of Pleasure
Let us return once more to the text of Three Essays, specifically to the third essay “The transformations of puberty”. In the first edition of the text Freud hardly mentions the developmental perspective that is so characteristic of both his own later works and most psychoanalytic theory. Freud only distinguishes here between two developmental ‘phases’: infantile masturbation and its return at the age of 3 or 4 years. All emphasis is on the structural changes that occur at the beginning of puberty. We are already familiar with some of these structural changes. In general, the beginning of puberty marks the moment in which ‘the erotogenic zones become subordinated to the primacy of the genital zone’ (Freud, 1905, 53/207). During the infantile period the genital zone functions like any other erogenous zone. In this period the different erogenous zones seek pleasure independently of one another. It is only at the beginning of puberty that the genital zone becomes predominant. Freud is quite unclear about how we should understand this change and how it comes about. It primarily means that orgastic pleasure – Freud calls it end-pleasure – can bring a halt to the preliminary pleasures that we experience at the different erogenous zones. What does this mean?
Before going deeper into this question, we should remember that the link between the drive and its objects is essentially contingent. The reference to ‘fore-pleasure’ (“Vorlust”) and ‘end-pleasure’ (“Endlust”) in a certain sense strengthens this idea even further (Freud, 1905, 56/210-211). As long as the difference between the genital zone and the other erogenous zones is exclusively thematised as a difference between two types of pleasure, Freud is not obliged to postulate an essential relation between the drive and a specific object. Both a homo- and a heterosexual object, for instance, can be involved in the production of end-pleasure. From the perspective of pleasure the nature of the object is irrelevant. This would be consistent with Freud’s earlier statements on the status of the object and it would allow him to continue the deconstruction of the relation between ‘normality’ and pathology that he already began in the two previous chapters of our text. Yet this is not what Freud does. On the contrary, Freud links the notion of end-pleasure that belongs to the genital zone and to genitality immediately with the idea of a heterosexual object choice (Freud, 1905, 53/207). Freud suddenly seems to think that in principle the possibility of end-pleasure goes together or should go together with the choice of a heterosexual object. Nothing in his text obliged him to give a privileged theoretical status to this choice. Quite the contrary, his whole argumentation up to this point should have prevented him from doing so. In this way Freud re-introduces the functionalist approach that characterized the psychiatric style of reasoning that we discussed earlier.
How do the different erogenous zones enter into the new structure that is dominated by the genital zone? According to Freud they deliver the preliminary pleasure that makes the orgiastic pleasure possible (Freud, 1905, 56/210). More concretely, they show the drive the way towards its fundamental aim: orgasm and (in the case of the male subject) the ejaculation that goes along with it.[20] Freud identifies pleasure fundamentally with a release of tension: an increase of tension is felt as unpleasure, a release of tension is felt as pleasure. What characterizes the preliminary pleasures is that they are paradoxically accompanied by an increase of sexual tension. It is precisely this increase in tension – that in principle is felt as unpleasure – that compels us to continue until we reach the final outcome of this process: orgasm. Indeed, it is only orgasm that allows for a complete release of tension. From the perspective of pleasure the primacy that the genital zone receives in puberty has nothing to do with the type of object that causes it, but with the fact that it allows for a different and more intense type of pleasure. The idea that in puberty pleasure is explicitly sought out in relation to an object – this is what differentiates infantile sexuality from adult (puberal) sexuality – does not imply that this object should in principle be a heterosexual one. This claim contradicts the general outline of Freud’s argument.
Not only is it unclear why the object of the genital drive should be a heterosexual one, but following Freud’s line of thinking it is also unclear why we should give any privilege to the genital zone as such. Freud conceives the sexual drive in infancy as an amalgamation of components. The genital zone is one of these components but has no natural privilege. Affirming this privilege seems to re-introduce the identification of sexuality with the genital drive – paradoxically, it was this very identification Freud explicitly criticizes throughout the essays. And yet this identification is implied in the following passage that we find in the summary of Freud’s text, which is meant to explain the origin of the perversions. “Writers on the subject … have asserted that the necessary precondition of a whole number of perverse fixations lies in an innate weakness of the sexual instinct. In this form the view seems to me untenable. It makes sense, however, if what is meant is a constitutional weakness of one particular factor in the sexual instinct, namely the genital zone – a zone which takes over the function of combining the separate sexual activities for the purposes of reproduction. For if the genital zone is weak, this combination, which is required to take place in puberty, is bound to fail, and the strongest of other components of sexuality will continue its activity as a perversion” (Freud, 1905, 75/237). Freud links the different perversions with a weakness of the genital zone or of the genital drive. When the preliminary pleasures become too strong (and the genital zone in comparison to weak) and the accompanying tension is not strong enough the sexual process can come to a standstill, which is exactly what happens in perversion. Davidson notes for good reasons that this statement about the sexologists of Freud’s day is quite astonishing. Freud criticizes them because they claim that the perversions are the effect of a weakness of the sexual drive and not of the genital component of this drive. But this is exactly what these sexologists always maintained and had to maintain in light of their interpretation of the sexual drive as reproductive function. It is Freud who cannot say what he says given the conceptuality that he introduces in his text. The only thing Freud could have written while remaining consistent with his own thinking, Davidson concludes, is the following: “For if the genital zone is weak, this combination which often takes place at puberty (instead of: ‘in der Pubertät geforderte…’), will fail, and the strongest of the other components of sexuality will continue its activity (instead of: ‘wird ihre Betätigung als Perversion durchsetzen’)” (Davidson, 2001, 89). Freud not only struggles in this text with the limits of his own paradigm, but also with this paradigm itself. There are clearly instances in which it looks as if Freud does not want to accept the consequences of his own reasoning.
There is yet another crucial element that we have to highlight here. We discussed earlier in this text the idea that finding the object (in puberty) is essentially re-finding it and we stressed in this context the paradoxical logic according to which re-finding implies a distance or a difference between what is found and what was initially lost. Something similar is at work with the pleasure that we get from the different erogenous zones. In order to understand this we have to look at the study on jokes that Freud published in the same year as the Three Essays and his study on Dora. Freud refers to this text when explaining the nature and functioning of preliminary pleasures (Freud, 1905, 57/211). What seems to interest Freud most in it is the idea that we can only laugh at our own jokes through the laugh of the other (Freud, 1905c, 174). It is only the laugh of the other that allows us to overcome the inhibitions that stand in the way of our pleasure. Freud seems to think now that in a similar way we can only find the autoerotic pleasures of our early childhood through the use of the pleasure of the other. What does this mean?
The paradigm of infantile sexuality, so we were told, is not so much the child at its mother’s breast, but the lips kissing themselves. The oral drive loses its force after some time; the infant stops sucking its thumb even when not forced by adults to do so. The development of the genital zone at the beginning of puberty accompanies a renewed strengthening of the oral zone which leads to a nervous tension that can be reduced by smoking and drinking or by hysterical vomiting. In these phenomena the oral drive shows its new strength without giving any new pleasure. But some ferocious thumb suckers, says Freud, manage to become as adults not only heavy smokers or drinkers, but (also) epicures in kissing (“Kussfeinschmecker”) with a tendency towards ‘perverse kissing’ (Freud 1905, 38/182). In this way the old oral pleasures are brought to life again through the pleasure of the other which is the new aim of sexual activity. Preliminary pleasure is first and foremost pleasure at the pleasure of the other. Once again we find an irrevocable distance between infantile sexuality and its re-investment at the beginning of puberty.
This logic of preliminary pleasure, together with the idea of infantile auto-eroticism being radically without object, determines Freud’s theory of aesthetics: the a-social (non-objectal) pleasures of early childhood can only be retrieved in a social activity that aims at the pleasure of the other. In theatre, for instance, we repeat the playful activity of children. However, the child’s play is a-social, it is not essentially directed towards an audience (Freud, 1908e, 144). Theatre, on the contrary, is unthinkable apart from a constitutive reference to the audience for which it is performed.[21]
Deconstructing Normativity
Freud’s theory as we discovered it in the first version of the “Three Essays” differs on many points from the image we have of his thinking and the genesis thereof. This first version contains a radical deconstruction of the normative distinction between pathology and normality. But does this mean that Freud – assuming for a moment that he had remained consistent with his own starting points – would have said that in sexualibus anything goes? We doubt it. Indeed, Freud explains why sexuality is intrinsically conflictual. The reaction formations he is talking about (shame, disgust, guilt…) imply that the experience of sexuality is never without inherent limitations. The need for variation also always involves potential conflict. In our opinion this can also explain why sexuality is inevitably subject to a (historical and contingent) law. Indeed Freud not only says that experiences of shame, guilt, disgust et cetera belong to the very nature of sexuality, but also that the content of these experiences – what it is exactly we consider to be disgusting or shameful – depends to a high degree on the social and cultural circumstances in which we live (Freud, 1905, 13/151). This implies that every culture is confronted with the inevitable task of providing concrete content to these experiences. Or in other words, no culture can escape from imposing concrete regulations on sexuality, but these regulations are not prescribed by nature. Culture is inscribed in already existing psychic patterns and dams and is thus not the ‘radical other’ of nature (Freud, 1905, 34/178), but this does not mean that nature can legitimize culture either. Indeed, what Freud wants to show is not so much that sexuality does not need regulation or legislation – perhaps the opposite – but that ultimately no such concrete regulation has a fundamentum in re. In this respect Freud is fundamentally anti-aristotelian.
Despite the critical potential of his theory, Freud on several occasions falls back into the ‘popular opinion’ that he at the same time rejects. We have already discussed several passages that illustrate this tendency. These passages reintroduce a heteronormative perspective or re-establish a strict (and ‘natural’) distinction between the normal and the pathological (in particular the perversions). What seems to be at stake is a certain mentality – a shared culture – from which Freud could not escape. Davidson defines a mentality as “a set of mental habits or automatisms that characterize the collective understanding and representations of a population” (Davidson, 2001, 91). Freud introduces a set of concepts that, at least in principle, enables a rupture with the psychiatric style of reasoning that supports the mentality of his day – a mentality in which he at the same time inevitably participates. Hence, it is the divergent temporality of the disappearance of an old mentality and the emergence of new concepts that undermine it that can explain Freud’s difficulty in grasping the radical character of his own thinking. The instability of his text seems to be a direct result of this state of affairs.
Little Hans and the Diphasic Choice of Object
As we have shown, one of the central ideas that structure the first edition of the Three Essays is the structural and essential difference with regard to the object between infantile sexuality and puberal and adult sexuality. In the original edition of the Three Essays, Freud seems to think that the change from autoerotic infantile sexuality to object related adult sexuality does not imply any special problem and that it comes about – on the basis of a spontaneous biological development – without difficulties in most cases. This is quite understandable when one realizes that Freud takes hysteria as a paradigm in this text. In hysteria the (finding of the libidinal) object doesn’t create a special problem. Unless there are external obstacles that hinder it, so it seems, the finding of the object in puberty is merely ‘natural’. We already indicated that for Freud this object is in principle a heterosexual one and that this heteronormative perspective is difficult to reconcile with Freud’s basic views on infantile sexuality. But this is not the only problem with regard to the status of the object in the 1905 edition. Indeed, Freud also had great difficulties maintaining that infantile sexuality was always and essentially autoerotic. Freud could not but admit that the sexual drive also consists of components that seem to contradict this claim. He mentions in this context the ‘Schautrieb’, the ‘Zeigetrieb’ and the ‘Grausamkeit’. Neither of these components can be thought without referrence to an object. Freud develops some ad hoc hypotheses to solve this problem – these components wouldn’t for instance be sexual from the outset, but only become sexual in a later stage e.g. through anastosmosis (Freud 1905, 46/193) – but all these hypotheses seem inadequate and this whole problematic is waiting for further elaboration. A first step was taken when Freud in the years immediately following the publication of the first version of the Three Essays published a short study on infantile sexual theories (Freud 1908c) and a case-study on a little boy (‘Little Hans’) who suffered from a phobia for horses (Freud 1909b). The latter study was explicitely meant to give empirical evidence for the theory of infantile sexuality that Freud had developed in the text we are discussing here. But Freud not only found empirical evidence for his theories. In a footnote from 1910 he writes that he learned from ‘Little Hans’ “that children between the ages of three and five are capable of every clear object choice, accompanied by strong affects” (Freud 1905d, 193-194). He further systematized the insights that he gained from the analysis of Little Hans in some new paragraphs on “The sexual researches of children” (Freud 1905d, 194-200) that he will insert in the 1915 edition of our text. He concludes from his insights gained from the case of Little Hans that the process of the choice of object is “diphasic” and “occurs in two waves”, the first taking part in the period between two and five years, the second setting in with puberty (Idem, 200). Puberal and adult sexuality can now be considered as the ‘persistance’ and ‘revival’ of the infantile object choices. The paragraph on the diphasic object choice marks a fundamental shift in Freud’s thinking on sexuality. No longer does he defend a strict dichotomy between an autoerotic infantile period and object related adult sexuality. This dichotomy became progressively problematic, if not untenable in light of Freuds research in the years after 1905. The new proposed continuity between infantile and adult sexuality has huge implications since it is only now that Freud will be able to progressively focus on the study of infantile object choices from the perspective of what was originally the structure of puberal sexuality. The original characteristics of infantile sexuality – autoerotic pleasure, the component instincts – become more and more secondary issues in Freud’s later discussions of sexual life, concealed behind its “affectionate current” i.e. the “affection, admiration and respect” for the sexual object (Idem).[22] He will shift attention from sexuality as pleasure towards the organization of sexuality in object relations relative to the constitutional ambivalent feelings of love and hate (Westerink, 2009). The paradigmatic model for studying this problematic – which includes the issue of “Grausamkeit” i.e. sexual agression aimed at an object – will be the obsessional neurosis – a nosographic category invented by Freud himself (May-Tolzmann, 1998). This invention can be situated in a broader context, namely that of the disappearance of hysteria.
The Disappearance of Hysteria
It is not just the case study of Little Hans and the increasing interest in obsessional neurosis that forced Freud to change his positions with regard to the nature and status of infantile sexuality. In the years after 1905 Freud begins an intense correspondence and a passionate debate with Jung on psychosis and the sexual nature of the libido. In 1907 Jung published his book on dementia praecox in which the memoirs of ‘Senatspräsident’ Schreber are mentioned for the first time in the history of psychoanalytic thinking (Jung, 1907). Freud would return to these famous memoirs in his case study on Schreber that was published in 1911 and contains his own most articulate theory of psychotic pathology (Freud, 1911c). It is also through Jung (and associates such as Bleuler and Abraham) that Freud was kept up to date with the contemporary developments in psychiatry. One of the main developments in this field was the ‘disappearance’ of hysteria (Micale, 1993). Whereas hysteria had been one of the main topics of psychiatry in the second part of the 19th century, it was rapidly ‘disappearing’ as an independent syndrome at the beginning of the 20th century. Its symptoms were redistributed among newer diagnostic categories of which schizophrenia was undoubtably one of the most important.[23]
The study of psychosis was one of the most important fields that soon forced Freud to reconsider his ideas on infantile sexuality. Indeed, psychosis confronted him with the fact that both the object and the ego that supports our relation to it can be absent or can be lost in the course of our existence. Whereas hysteria taught Freud about the importance of sexuality for human existence, psychosis now informed him about the uncertain status of our relation to reality as such. Freud had no choice but to tackle this problem, but at the same time he definitely did not want to give up the primacy of sexuality. In the context of his discussions with Jung, Freud introduces the concept of narcissism: the ego comes about by a ‘new psychic act’ that consists in an identification with one’s own body (Freud, 1914, 142). In his book on Schreber Freud writes the following on the concept of narcissism: “ … Their comes a time in the development of the individual at which he…begins by taking himself, his own body, as his love-object, and only subsequently proceeds from this…half-way phase between auto-eroticism and object-love…to heterosexuality” (Freud 1911c 60-61). Several things can be learned from this passage. First, it clearly indicates in what respect the introduction of narcissism is meant to orient (infantile) sexuality towards to the object. As a result, infantile sexuality is no longer without an object. Second, this introduction goes along with a developmental perspective that was almost completely absent from the 1905 edition of the Three Essays. Freud now thinks that the finding of the sexual object is the result of a psychic evolution that needs to be studied in great detail and in the course of which many things can go wrong. In this context Freud rethinks the status of the erogenous zones in a fundamental way. Whereas in the 1905 edition these zones and the drives of which they are the seats are considered to act anarchically until the primacy of the genital zone is put in place, Freud now orders them in a temporal (developmental) sequence.
In the 1915 edition of the Three Essays Freud adds a new paragraph on the “The phases of development of the sexual organisation” in which he recognizes the existence of an oral, cannibalistic organisation of the libido that precedes the anal phase (Freud, 1905d, 197 ff).[24]As has already become clear from the quote on narcissism from Freud’s Schreber case, Freud has a tendency to situate these ‘phases’ on a developmental line that starts with a homosexual object-choice and leads to a heterosexual one. The constitution of the sexual object is fundamentally identical to the constitution of a heterosexual object. This brings us to a third element that this passage can teach us about one of the most decisive aspects of the development of Freud’s thinking after 1905. The reference to a structural and invincible bisexuality which was central to the hysterical disposition loses much of its importance. It tends to be replaced by an opposition between hetero- and homosexuality in such a way that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that heterosexuality is the ‘normal’ (normative) outcome of the evolution at hand.
Conclusion
Our reading of the first edition of Freuds Three Essays shows in what respect Freud’s insights on the status and nature of (infantile) sexuality changed after 1905. In 1905 he defends the idea that infantile sexuality is ‘without an object’. Sexuality only gets an object at the beginning of puberty. Once Freud realised that the initial and essential dichotomy between infantile and adult sexuality couldn’t be maintained, there was room to actually introduce the Oedipus complex proper and the theory of narcissism in order to reformulate or redefine infantile sexual life. The later editions testify of this development. The fact that Freud never changed the original outline of the Three Essays, but choose to almost exclusively add new theoretical elements turns the text into an often inconsistent amalgamation of different theories of sexuality. This makes the Three Essays a highly complex but also fascinating read.
The last quarter of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century were the heyday of hysteria. Freud understands hysteria from the perspective of a disposition in which the ‘perverse nature’ of human sexuality plays a crucial role. Hence the importance of sexology for Freud’s early thinking. The Three Essays belongs to this tradition and at the same time breaks away from it. It is precisely for this reason that hysteria (and perversion) can get an anthropological significance and become a paradigm for the understanding of human existence. But by the time Freud published his text things were rapidly changing in the psychiatry of the day. Hysteria was disappearing as a possible diagnosis and other diagnostic categories – schizophrenia in particular – were introduced. Freud confronts these changes in his discussion and correspondence with Jung that started immediately after the publication of the Three Essays. From now new pathologies replaced hysteria as Freud’s main paradigm for the understanding of psychopathology and human existence (De Vleminck, 2013).[25] The 1905 edition of the Three Essays not only presents Freud’s first theory of sexuality, it also closes an era – the era of hysteria.
Literature
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[1] Department of philosophy University of Pretoria, private bag X20, Hatfield 0028h. p.vanhaute@ftr.ru.nl
[2] Department of Philosophy, Radboud University, PO. box 9103, 6500 HD, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. westerink@ftr.ru.nl
[3] We hope to publish a study that confronts the different editions of the Three Essays in a detailed way at the end of 2016.
[4] A new version of this text has recently been published by Vienna University Press: S. Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (Hrsg. Philippe Van Haute, Christian Huber & Herman Westerink), Vienna University Press, 2015.
[5] It is indeed very important to read Freud’s texts that were published in 1905 (e.g. the study on Dora) relative to the first edition of Three Essays and not from the perspective from the last edition (1924) as is usually the case. Such a reading sheds an interesting and new light on these texts. See on this e.g. Van Haute & Geyskens 2010.
[6] Since the first edition of Three Essays was never translated in any other language, we will in principle quote from the German original (Freud, 1905). We put the corresponding page of the 1924 edition that is published in the Standard Edition immediately after the page number of the original edition. When we quote from passages that were added in later editions we quote from the Standard Edition (Freud, 1905d).
[7] The implication is what Arnold Davidson has rightfully described as “a conceptually devastating blow to the entire structure of nineteenth-century theories of sexual psychopathology” (Davidson, 2001, 79).
[8] In the Three Essays this development in Freud’s thought is most clearly expressed in a footnote to the study of homosexuality: “the pathological approach to the study of inversion has been displaced by the anthropological” (Freud, 1905d, 139 footnote).
[9] Because of his critique of the functional approach in contemporary Darwinian thought, Freud basically dismisses all arguments for the Darwinian drive dichotomy. Interestingly, Freud does not provide any new arguments for the idea that psychic life is characterized by two fundamental tendencies or “drives”.
[10] There could be another argument that Freud doesn’t develop himself in the text we are commenting on. The infantile pleasures are clearly sexual when they are integrated in adult sexuality (kissing…). Since they are ‘sexual’ at the end of the development they must already have been sexual from the beginning.
[11] For a different interpretation see Lear, 2005, 70-82; Laplanche, 1987, 71.
[12] According to Freud, infantile sexuality is nothing but an organic inscription on the body (auto-eroticism). There is nothing dramatic about infantile sexuality. Freud compares it to ticklings that one can experience in different parts of the body (the erogenous zones).
[13] We also recognize here the structure of ‘deferred action’ (Nachträglichkeit):a first event receives a completely new meaning when it is remembered in a second moment after puberty (Freud, 1895; Freud, 1900a, 211).
[14] We have to read this statement together with another one from “My views…” that seems to contradict it: “At that time my material was still scanty, and it happened by chance to include a didproportionately large number of cases in which sexual seduction by an adult or by older children played the chief part in the history of he patient’s childhood. I thus over-estimated the frequency of such events (though in other respects they were not open to doubt)” (Freud, 1906a, 274). The contradiction is only apparent. What Freud says is that he didn’t overestimate the importance of seduction in the 18 cases he reported in “The Aetiology of Hysteria”. But since he didn’t realise at that time that sexual constitution can also arouse a child’s sex life, he overestimated its importance in general. For this interpretation and for a more detailed reading of these passages see Davidson,1984. For a different and more critical reading of the meaning of seduction in Freud’s work see Esterson, 2001.
[15] The few references to this complex were introduced in later editions, and more particularly in the footnotes to the edition of 1920.
[16] It is only in the edition from 1915 that Freud describes infantile sexuality as objectal in itself. From then on he speaks of a “diphasic choice of object” (see below).
[17] It seems clear from the context that the ‘interests’ that we need to build a community are, according to Freud, of a libidinal nature, but Freud doesn’t explain – or isn’t yet capable of explaining – in the first edition of Three Essays how the transformation of the libidinal investment of the parental figures gives rise to social feelings. The establishment of social bonds is not thematised in this text. We will have to wait for the publication of Totem and Taboo for a full account of this thematic.
[18] “Zijn noodlot ont- roert ons alleen omdat het ook het onze had kunnen worden, omdat het orakel vóór onze geboorte dezelfde vloek over ons heeft uitge- sproken als over hem.” (Freud 1900a, XX).
[19] We will come back to this later in our text.
[20] Freud conceives of infantile sexuality in this first edition to a large extent without any reference to sexual difference. The problematic of sexual difference only comes to the fore at the beginning of puberty, when sexuality finds its object.
[21] This reference to the theatre and hence culture inevitably introduces the psychoanalytic problem of sublimation that Freud mentions in the text we are commenting without paying much attention to it. In our text Freud considers sublimation within the context or even as a subcategory of the reaction-formations (Freud, 1905, 33-34/178).
[22] This line of thought is supported by other later inserted material such as “The Libido Theory” replacing the first definition of the drive (see above) now focussing on the object libido instead (Freud, 1905d, 217-219).
[23] It is quite telling in this context that Jung’s book on psychosis contains a chapter on ‘Hysteria und dementia praecox’ in which he shows among other things the large similarities between these two pathologies (Jung, 1907, 81-116).
[24] Finally, in “The Infantile Genital Organisation” Freud mentions the existence of a phallic phase that succeeds the two previous ones (Freud, 1923e, 142).
[25] We already mentionned psychosis and obsessional neurosis, but one should also think here of melancholia. A discussion of the reasons and effects of these changes would obviously lead us to far astray.