Three Essays on the Theory of SexualitySigmund Freud

Freud published the Three Essays in 1905, and revised them extensively through six editions until 1925. The book's argument was scandalous at the time and remains unsettling: human sexuality does not begin at puberty but is present from infancy, and the "normal" sexual aim (genital reproduction) is not a biological given but the precarious result of a long developmental process that can go in many directions.

The first essay examines sexual "aberrations" (homosexuality, fetishism, sadism, masochism) and argues that they are not degeneracies but variations that reveal the component instincts present in all sexuality. The sexual instinct is not a unity; it is assembled from partial drives, each with its own source, aim, and object.

The second essay introduces infantile sexuality. The child passes through oral, anal, and phallic phases, each organized around a different erogenous zone. Sexuality does not appear at puberty; it is repressed after childhood and then resurfaces. The "latency period" between childhood and adolescence is not the absence of sexuality but its temporary submersion.

The third essay traces the transformations of puberty, in which the partial drives are subordinated (more or less successfully) to genital primacy and directed toward an external object. Freud insists that this subordination is never complete. The perversions are not foreign to normal sexuality; they are its persistent, ineradicable components.