Three Essays Plus Seventy

The year 1975 marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of one of Freud's most remarkable and original contributions to psychological understanding—the 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality' (1905). Probably no other of his works has had as significant an impact on the development of psychoanalytic theory, with the possible exception of the 'Interpretation of Dreams' (1900). Like the dream book, the 'Three Essays' have undergone numerous editions, in each of which Freud made significant modifications and additions to the text. In the present consideration we will limit our focus to the original edition published in 1905, since it contains the essentials of his theory of sexuality which has remained essentially unaltered.

The development of Freud's notion of sexuality has been carefully documented countless times and can be traced with considerable accuracy through the Fliess correspondence and related documents dated 1892–99 (Freud, 1950a). Apparently the elements of the theory of sexuality were already formulated to a certain degree in his early paper on anxiety neurosis (Freud, 1895) and in other documents dating from about that same time. Similarly, by the time of his writing of the 'Project' in 1895 (Freud, 1950b), Freud had evolved an explanation of hysteria based on the traumatic effects of sexual seduction in early childhood. His conviction of the importance of early sexual seduction dominated his thinking until 21 September 1897, when he finally announced to Fliess that he had begun to doubt his seduction theory (Freud, 1950a, letter 69). The realization that the sexual factor was not due to an actual historical seduction but rather represented the product of fantasy activity provided a significant and telling shift in Freud's approach to the understanding of mental phenomena. Freud's own self-analysis led shortly thereafter to an almost concurrent discovery of the Oedipus involvement which put his sexual theory on a relatively firm footing.

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