Review Of The Psychoanalytic Theory Of Sexuality: Comments On The Assault Against It

I am grateful though somewhat surprised to have been invited to present an opening discussion to review the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality. So much has been written in this century since Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality that it would be absurd to attempt, in an abbreviated way, to encompass the subtractions and additions made over the years by Freud himself, much less those of his followers and opponents to this day. I shall limit the introductory remarks to a very general survey of the theory, confining it to specific psychoanalysts. This in no way demeans the other disciplines involved in any future general theory, for example psychiatry, biology, sociology, anthropology etc. I will not explore gender disorders, for instance, the multifarious effects of major bodily disasters such as congenital blindness or the effects of genetic mistakes. That will make it possible to focus on the curious history of our theory of sexuality since Freud's book: the fact that it has been abandoned by not only many non-analysts, but by many colleagues who consider themselves psychoanalysts.

Freud was hardly surprised about how the book would be received by non-psychoanalysts. He ended his preface to the Fourth Edition this way:

It must … be remembered … that some of what this book contains—its insistence on the importance of sexuality in all human achievements and the attempt that it makes at enlarging the concept of sexuality—has from the first provided the strongest motives for the resistance against psychoanalysis. People have gone so far in their search for high-sounding catch-words as to talk of the ‘pan-sexualism’ of psycho-analysis and to raise the senseless charge against it of explaining ‘everything’ by sex. We might be astonished at this, if we ourselves could forget the way in which emotional factors make people confused and forgetful … (1905, p. 134, my italics).

To the alterations Freud made to the 1900 text, and his many important papers subsequently, St