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I am pleased to contribute an introduction to four discussions by leading psychoanalytic authors on Freud's canonical essay, “The Sexual Aberrations” (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905). For a contemporary psychoanalyst, the highly charged notion of sexual aberrations—now fiercely challenged by the very populations it once meant to identify—carries with it the additional unwanted freight of sexual norms. To think and write about the category, then, an analyst must find a way to both contend with those challenges and manage the freight.
Dealing simultaneously with both these tasks can easily feel intimidating. I think that most of us might well breathe sighs of relief year after year, if, looking back, we have been able to sidestep direct confrontation with the category while also effectively proceeding with our clinical/supervisory work and our writing projects. The authors of the four contributions collected here, then, have generously taken on something analogous to plumbers' work: a dirty job that must be done.
Freud, too, was in this sense a plumber, dealing with—as he might put it—not only clogged drains, backed-up pipes, and unhygienic practices, but also the excited and forbidden “dirty” fantasies that otherwise well-behaved citizens were able to keep contained. Perhaps we have come a long way since then, or perhaps not. It can certainly feel as though we have, but from Freud on, we are less confident that feelings provide a valid reading of reality. Songwriter Cole Porter gave voice to