Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
by Sigmund Freud
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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 show more psychosexual development during adolescence.. show less
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stevereads A contemporary reconsideration of the Freudian project and a great read.
Member Reviews
We are not in a position to give so much as a hint as to the causes of these temporal disturbances of the process of development. A prospect opens before us at this point upon a whole phalanx of biological and perhaps, too, of historical problems of which we have not even come within striking distance.
I admire Freud in a similar way to that which I encounter Augustine. Despite glaring mistakes, there is a pellucid grace to the prose. The reasoning in a local sense is wonderful, despite the conclusions being wrong. It always is an instance of application. The layered nature of conclusions is compelling in these Three Essays, the footnotes allude to the editing, insertion and omission which Freud adjusted his thoughts, all the while show more admitting that he was lost in the weeds and that we were all damaged goods The taxonomy of inversion and perversion is a ticklish curiosity. Such must have been dangerously transgressive at the time. Kinsey eventually told everyone that there isn't a normal and that we should all relax and self-medicate.
I read this as to bolster myself for further exploration and spelunking into Irigaray and Derrida show less
I admire Freud in a similar way to that which I encounter Augustine. Despite glaring mistakes, there is a pellucid grace to the prose. The reasoning in a local sense is wonderful, despite the conclusions being wrong. It always is an instance of application. The layered nature of conclusions is compelling in these Three Essays, the footnotes allude to the editing, insertion and omission which Freud adjusted his thoughts, all the while show more admitting that he was lost in the weeds and that we were all damaged goods The taxonomy of inversion and perversion is a ticklish curiosity. Such must have been dangerously transgressive at the time. Kinsey eventually told everyone that there isn't a normal and that we should all relax and self-medicate.
I read this as to bolster myself for further exploration and spelunking into Irigaray and Derrida show less
A única coisa que presta aqui é a teoria da sexualidade infantil, ironicamento uma das menos aceitas pelos detratores do Freud. O rol de perversões é risívelmente vitoriano e, óbvio, ultrapassadíssimo.
A slightly unsettling book; but obviously a revolutionary one.
Describes theories on the development, aberrations, and transformations of sexual instinct based in childhood.
Very interesting material.
150 FREU 6
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Sigmund Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis, simultaneously a theory of personality, a therapy, and an intellectual movement. He was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Freiburg, Moravia, now part of Czechoslovakia, but then a city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the age of 4, he moved to Vienna, where he spent nearly his entire life. show more In 1873 he entered the medical school at the University of Vienna and spent the following eight years pursuing a wide range of studies, including philosophy, in addition to the medical curriculum. After graduating, he worked in several clinics and went to Paris to study under Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist who used hypnosis to treat the symptoms of hysteria. When Freud returned to Vienna and set up practice as a clinical neurologist, he found orthodox therapies for nervous disorders ineffective for most of his patients, so he began to use a modified version of the hypnosis he had learned under Charcot. Gradually, however, he discovered that it was not necessary to put patients into a deep trance; rather, he would merely encourage them to talk freely, saying whatever came to mind without self-censorship, in order to bring unconscious material to the surface, where it could be analyzed. He found that this method of free association very often evoked memories of traumatic events in childhood, usually having to do with sex. This discovery led him, at first, to assume that most of his patients had actually been seduced as children by adult relatives and that this was the cause of their neuroses; later, however, he changed his mind and concluded that his patients' memories of childhood seduction were fantasies born of their childhood sexual desires for adults. (This reversal is a matter of some controversy today.) Out of this clinical material he constructed a theory of psychosexual development through oral, anal, phallic and genital stages. Freud considered his patients' dreams and his own to be "the royal road to the unconscious." In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), perhaps his most brilliant book, he theorized that dreams are heavily disguised expressions of deep-seated wishes and fears and can give great insight into personality. These investigations led him to his theory of a three-part structure of personality: the id (unconscious biological drives, especially for sex), the superego (the conscience, guided by moral principles), and the ego (the mediator between the id and superego, guided by reality). Freud's last years were plagued by severe illness and the rise of Nazism, which regarded psychoanalysis as a "Jewish pollution." Through the intervention of the British and U.S. governments, he was allowed to emigrate in 1938 to England, where he died 15 months later, widely honored for his original thinking. His theories have had a profound impact on psychology, anthropology, art, and literature, as well as on the thinking of millions of ordinary people about their own lives. Freud's daughter Anna Freud was the founder of the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic in London, where her specialty was applying psychoanalysis to children. Her major work was The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936). (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Original publication date
- 1905
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- Genres
- Nonfiction, General Nonfiction, Philosophy
- DDC/MDS
- 155.3 — Philosophy and Psychology Psychology Differential and developmental psychology Sexuality and Gender
- LCC
- HQ21 .F813 — Social sciences The family. Marriage, Women and Sexuality The Family. Marriage. Women Sexual life Sexual behavior and attitudes. Sexuality
- BISAC
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- 8
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- (3.62)
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- 16 — Albanian, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
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- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 124
- UPCs
- 1
- ASINs
- 50