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Remembered for having developed and popularized the field of psychoanalysis virtually singlehandedly, Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud is regarded as one of the most significant thinkers of the early twentieth century. Psychosexual development is a key area of Freud's body of work. This volume brings together in-depth discussions of three of Freud's most innovative ideas about sex, sexual development, and their impact on the human psyche: sexual deviance, infantile sexuality, and psychosexual development during adolescence.

Sujets

Sociologie, société et politique

Psychology

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Publié par	The Floating Press
Date de parution	01 février 2014
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781776531875
Langue	English

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THREE CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE THEORY OF SEX
* * *
SIGMUND FREUD
Translated by
ABRAHAM BRILL

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Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex First published in 1910 Epub ISBN 978-1-77653-187-5 Also available: PDF ISBN 978-1-77653-188-2 © 2013 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
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Introduction to Translation Author's Preface to the Second Edition Author's Preface to the Third Edition I - The Sexual Aberrations II - The Infantile Sexuality III - The Transformation of Puberty Endnotes
Introduction to Translation
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The somewhat famous "Three Essays," which Dr. Brill is here bringing tothe attention of an English-reading public, occupy—brief as theyare—an important position among the achievements of their author, agreat investigator and pioneer in an important line. It is not claimedthat the facts here gathered are altogether new. The subject of thesexual instinct and its aberrations has long been before the scientificworld and the names of many effective toilers in this vast field areknown to every student. When one passes beyond the strict domains ofscience and considers what is reported of the sexual life in folkwaysand art-lore and the history of primitive culture and in romance, thesources of information are immense. Freud has made considerableadditions to this stock of knowledge, but he has done also something offar greater consequence than this. He has worked out, with incrediblepenetration, the part which this instinct plays in every phase of humanlife and in the development of human character, and has been able toestablish on a firm footing the remarkable thesis that psychoneuroticillnesses never occur with a perfectly normal sexual life. Other sortsof emotions contribute to the result, but some aberration of the sexuallife is always present, as the cause of especially insistent emotionsand repressions.
The instincts with which every child is born furnish desires or cravingswhich must be dealt with in some fashion. They may be refined("sublimated"), so far as is necessary and desirable, into energies ofother sorts—as happens readily with the play-instinct—or they mayremain as the source of perversions and inversions, and of cravings ofnew sorts substituted for those of the more primitive kinds under thepressure of a conventional civilization. The symptoms of the functionalpsychoneuroses represent, after a fashion, some of these distortedattempts to find a substitute for the imperative cravings born of thesexual instincts, and their form often depends, in part at least, on thepeculiarities of the sexual life in infancy and early childhood. It isFreud's service to have investigated this inadequately chronicled periodof existence with extraordinary acumen. In so doing he made it plainthat the "perversions" and "inversions," which reappear later under suchstriking shapes, belong to the normal sexual life of the young child andare seen, in veiled forms, in almost every case of nervous illness.
It cannot too often be repeated that these discoveries represent nofanciful deductions, but are the outcome of rigidly careful observationswhich any one who will sufficiently prepare himself can verify. Criticsfret over the amount of "sexuality" that Freud finds evidence of in thehistories of his patients, and assume that he puts it there. But suchcriticisms are evidences of misunderstandings and proofs of ignorance.
Freud had learned that the amnesias of hypnosis and of hysteria were notabsolute but relative and that in covering the lost memories, much more,of unexpected sort, was often found. Others, too, had gone as far asthis, and stopped. But this investigator determined that nothing but theabsolute impossibility of going further should make him cease fromurging his patients into an inexorable scrutiny of the unconsciousregions of their memories and thoughts, such as never had been madebefore. Every species of forgetfulness, even the forgetfulness ofchildhood's years, was made to yield its hidden stores of knowledge;dreams, even though apparently absurd, were found to be interpreters ofa varied class of thoughts, active, although repressed as out of harmonywith the selected life of consciousness; layer after layer, new sets ofmotives underlying motives were laid bare, and each patient's interestwas strongly enlisted in the task of learning to know himself in ordermore truly and wisely to "sublimate" himself. Gradually other workersjoined patiently in this laborious undertaking, which now stands, forthose who have taken pains to comprehend it, as by far the mostimportant movement in psychopathology.
It must, however, be recognized that these essays, of which Dr. Brillhas given a translation that cannot but be timely, concern a subjectwhich is not only important but unpopular. Few physicians read the worksof v. Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Moll, and others of like sort.The remarkable volumes of Havelock Ellis were refused publication in hisnative England. The sentiments which inspired this hostile attitudetowards the study of the sexual life are still active, though growingsteadily less common. One may easily believe that if the facts whichFreud's truth-seeking researches forced him to recognize and to publishhad not been of an unpopular sort, his rich and abundant contributionsto observational psychology, to the significance of dreams, to theetiology and therapeutics of the psychoneuroses, to the interpretationof mythology, would have won for him, by universal acclaim, the samerecognition among all physicians that he has received from a rapidlyincreasing band of followers and colleagues.
May Dr. Brill's translation help toward this end.
There are two further points on which some comments should be made. Thefirst is this, that those who conscientiously desire to learn all thatthey can from Freud's remarkable contributions should not be content toread any one of them alone. His various publications, such as "TheSelected Papers on Hysteria and Other Psychoneuroses," [1] "TheInterpretation of Dreams," [2] "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life," [3] "Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious," [4] the analysis of the caseof the little boy called Hans, the study of Leonardo da Vinci, [5] andthe various short essays in the four Sammlungen kleiner Schriften, notonly all hang together, but supplement each other to a remarkableextent. Unless a course of study such as this is undertaken many criticsmay think various statements and inferences in this volume to be farfetched or find them too obscure for comprehension.
The other point is the following: One frequently hears thepsychoanalytic method referred to as if it was customary for thosepracticing it to exploit the sexual experiences of their patients andnothing more, and the insistence on the details of the sexual life,presented in this book, is likely to emphasize that notion. But the factis, as every thoughtful inquirer is aware, that the whole progress ofcivilization, whether in the individual or the race, consists largely ina "sublimation" of infantile instincts, and especially certain portionsof the sexual instinct, to other ends than those which they seemeddesigned to serve. Art and poetry are fed on this fuel and the evolutionof character and mental force is largely of the same origin. All theforms which this sublimation, or the abortive attempts at sublimation,may take in any given case, should come out in the course of a thoroughpsychoanalysis. It is not the sexual life alone, but every interest andevery motive, that must be inquired into by the physician who is seekingto obtain all the data about the patient, necessary for his reeducationand his cure. But all the thoughts and emotions and desires and motiveswhich appear in the man or woman of adult years were once crudelyrepresented in the obscure instincts of the infant, and among theseinstincts those which were concerned directly or indirectly with thesexual emotions, in a wide sense, are certain to be found in every caseto have been the most important for the end-result.
JAMES J. PUTNAM.
BOSTON, August 23, 1910.
Author's Preface to the Second Edition
*
Although the author is fully aware of the gaps and obscurities containedin this small volume, he has, nevertheless, resisted a temptation to addto it the results obtained from the investigations of the last fiveyears, fearing that thus its unified and documentary character would bedestroyed. He accordingly reproduces the original text with but slightmodifications, contenting himself with the addition of a few footnotes.For the rest, it is his ardent wish that this book may speedily becomeantiquated—to the end that the new material brought forward in it maybe universally accepted, while the shortcomings it displays may giveplace to juster views.
VIENNA, December, 1909.
Author's Preface to the Third Edition
*
After watching for ten years the reception accorded to this book and theeffect it has produced, I wish to provide the third edition of it withsome prefatory remarks dealing with the misunderstandings of the bookand the demands, insusceptible of fulfillment, made against it. Let meemphasize in the first place that whatever is here presented is derivedentirely from every-day medical experience which is to be made moreprofound and scientifically important through the results ofpsychoanalytic investigation. The "Three Contributions to the Theory ofSex" can contain nothing except what psycho