Chapter 5 Sexuality and Perversion: Discovering what Freud Discovered

Streams that are drawn from the springheads of nature do not always run in the old channels.

The previous chapters have shown the importance of a freedom of imaginative movement up and down the trajectory of life: backward into the past and up to the present again, finding new meanings in one’s cumulative experience to date; and forward into the future and back again to the present, enlarging the possible ways of giving meaning to the rest of life. Not only individuals, but intellectual and artistic disciplines as well, need the same ability to keep understanding their history afresh, questioning how their concepts and practices have come to be the way they are, so as to broaden the possibilities of future development. About philosophy, for example, John Cottingham has written:

The philosophical illumination we get from ideas of the past is dependent on our placing them in the context of more recent developments; and conversely, any more than superficial understanding of our present predicament requires us to enter into a continuing dialogue with what has gone before. Adapting an idea loosely derived from Freud, one might say that fruitful philosophising operates at the locus of a dynamic interplay between Nachträglichkeit, the past that we struggle to recover and reinvent, and Zukünftigkeit, the ‘futurality’ towards which we strive, and which will bestow the ‘meaning to come’ on what we do now.

Psychoanalytic theory likewise needs to be considered après-coup so that creative apperception may give it new meaning in the present. If it can be considered avant-coup as well, so much the greater chance for it to find new meaning in the future.

The next three chapters take such an approach to the concepts, central to psychoanalysis, of sexuality, the Oedipus complex and narcissism.

The main themes of this chapter are the way that Freud’s original formulation of sexuality has evolved, and its potential to go