The Concept of Sexuality in Freud’s “Three Essays”—Between Sequence and Distinct Ontologies

The Freudian concept of sexuality is primarily identified with a developmental, teleological-oriented process, culminating in genital dominance. This Freudian account of sexuality is of a “firm organization,” unified and hierarchically structured in the service of reproduction. There is, though, another ontology of sexuality in Freud’s writing, infantile perverse sexuality, in which the emphasis is not on the unity of the organism, but on polymorphous perverse expressions that subvert that unity. In fact, one of the achievements of Freudian psychoanalysis is to have made this infantile-perverse sexuality theoretically and clinically central. This article, focusing on an analysis of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), puts forward a critical reading of that text, examining its professed position on infantile and adult sexuality as establishing a single phenomenal continuum. What are the ramifications, one might ask, of this developmental view, which positions genital, heterosexual sexuality as the telos of its sequential movement, on the status of Freud’s great discovery of infantile-perverse sexuality? What are the costs associated with this sequential view, and what are the alternatives to it? Freudian sexuality is, then, discussed on two levels: the formal plane—a dialectical unity of the sequential view versus separate ontologies disrupting any such unity; and that of content—genital dominance and object specificity as against multiple erotogenic zones and object contingency.