Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)

Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)

1: The Sexual Aberrations

l   Sexual object and sexual aim: Let us call the person from whom sexual attraction proceeds the sexual object and the act towards which the instinct tends the sexual aim (1-2 italics original).

l   Nature of Inversion⇔Degeenracy: Several facts go to show that in this legitimate sense of the word inverts cannot be regarded as degenerate (4). [homosexualityは他の面ではnormalな人々、ひいては優れた知性をもつ人々にも見られる。そしてAccount must be taken of the fact that inversion was a frequent phenomenon—one might almost say an institution charged with important functions—among the peoples of antiquity at the height of their civilization. iIt is remarkably widespread among many savage and primitive races, whereas the concept of degeneracy is usually restricted to states of high civilization (5)]

l   Hermaphroditism and bisexuality (everyone): It is popularly believed that a human being is either a man or a woman. Science, however, knows of cases in which the sexual characters are obscured, and in which it is consequently difficult to determine sex. . . . The importance of these abnormalities lies in the unexpected fact that they facilitate out understanding of normal development. For it appears that a certain degree of anatomical hermaphroditism occurs normally. In every normal male or female individual, traces are found of the apparatus of the opposite sex. →The long-familiar facts of anatomy lead us to suppose that an originally bisexual physical disposition . . . the expression of a psychical hermaphroditism. (7)

l   Against invert theory (against psychological heterosexuality): 10

l   Normalization of homosexuality (problematization of heterosexuality): (footnote added 1915) Psycho-analytic research is most decidedly opposed to any attempt at separating off homosexuals from the rest of mankind as a group of a special character. By studying sexual excitations other than those that are manifestly displayed, it has found that all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious. . . . One the contrary, psychoanalysis considers that a choice of an object independently of its sex. . . is the original basis from which, as a result of restriction in one direction or the other, both the normal and inverted types develop. Thus from the point of view of psycho-analysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately chemical nature (12).

l   Normalization of “perversion”—perversion defined: The normal sexual aim is regarded as being the union of the genitals in the act known as copulation, which leads to a relases of the sexual tension and a temporary extinction of the sexual instinct—a satisfaction analogous to the sating of hunger. But even in the most normal sexual process we may detect rudiments which, if they had developed, would have led to the deviations described as ‘perversions.’ For there are certain intermediate relations to the sexual object, such as touching and looking at it, which lie on the road towards copulation and are recognized as being preliminary sexual aims. (15) Perversions are sexual activities which either (a) extends, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim. (16) instead of being preparatory to the normal sexual aim, it supplants it. (23) If a perversion, instead of appearing merely alongside the normal sexual aim and object, and only when circumstances are unfavorable to them and favorable to it—if, instead of this, it ousts them completely and takes their place in all circumstances—if, in short, a perversion has the characteristics of exclusiveness and fixation—then we shall usually be justified in regarding it as a pathological symptom. (27) The conclusion now presents itself to us that there is indeed something innacte lying behind the perversions but that it is somehitng innate in everyone, though as a disposition it may vary in its intensity and maybe increased by the influences of actual life (37). a disposition to perversions is an original and universal deiposition of the human sexual instinct and that normal sexual behavious is developed out of it as a result of organic changes and psychical inhibitions occurring in the course of maturation (97)

l   Neurosis and perversion: Thus symptoms are formed in part at the cost of abnormal sexuality; neuroses are, so to say, the negative of perversions. (31)

l   Erotogenic zones: Certain regions of the body, such as the mucous membrane of the mouth and anus, which are constantly appearing in these practices, seem, as it were, to be claiming that they should themselves be regarded and treated as genitals. (19) The part played by the erotogenic zone is immediately obvious in the case of those perversions which assign a sexual respect like a portion of the sexual apparatus. In hysteria these parts of the body and the neighboring tracts of mucous membrane become the seat of new sensations and of changes in innervation—indeed, of processes that can be compared to erection—in just the same way as do the actual genitalia under the excitations of the normal sexual processes. (35) このあたりはとてもよくて、性器とされているorgan以外のもの、目や皮膚などを性器と捉えられるのではないか、と。そうなるとセックスとはなにかという話にもちろんなるのだけれど。It seems probable that any part of the skin and any sense-organ—probably, indeed, any organ—can function as an erotogenic zone, thought there are some particularly marked erotogenic zones whose excitation would seem to secured from the very first by certain organic contrivance. (99)

2: Infantile Sexuality

l   Normalization of Sexual aims and objects by civilization: It is during this period of total or only partial latency that are built up the mental forces which are later to impede the course of the sexual instinct and, like dams, restricts its flow—disgust, feeling of shame and the claims of aesthetic and moral ideals. One gets an impression from civilized children that the construction of these dams is a product of education. (43)

l   Deferred sexual desire: it would seem the sexual instinct cannot be utilized during these years if childhood, since the reproductive functions have been deferred—a fact which constitutes the main feature of the period of latency. On the other hand, these impulses would seem in themselves to be perverse—that is, to arise from erotogenic zones and to derive their activity from instincts which, in view of the direction of the subject’s development, can only arouse unpleasurable feelings. They consequently evoke opposing mental forces (reacting impulses) which, in order to suppress this unpleasure effectively, build up the mental dams that I have already mentioned—disgust, shame and morality. (44)

l   Confusion between “sexual” and “genital” (46): the analysis of the perversions and psychoneuroses has shown us that this sexual excitation is derived not from the so-called sexual parts alone, but from all the bodily organs (83)

l   Autoeroticism (coined by Havelock Ellis, 1910): 乳を吸う（the purpose of self-preservation）からthumb suckingへ。The child does not make use of an extraneous body for his sucking, but prefers a part of his own skin because it is more convenient, because it makes him independent of the external world, which he is not yet able to control, and because in that way he provides himself, as it were, with a second erotogenic zone, though one of an inferior kind. (48)

l   Re-definition of Sexual aim: the sexual aim of the infantile instinct consists in obtaining satisfaction by means of an appropriate stimulation of the erotogenic zone which has been selected in one way or another. . . . We can therefore formulate a sexual aim in another way: it consists in replacing the projected sensation of stimulation in the erotogenic zone by an external stimulus which removes that sensation by producing a feeling of satisfaction. (50) これは「彼岸」につながる。sensationのremovalがsexual aim

l   Anal retentive (52)

l   Polymorphously perverse disposition (57): in this respect children behave in the same kind of way as an average uncultivated woman in whom the same polymorphously perverse disposition persists. . . Prostitutes exploit the same polymorphous, that is, infantile, disposition for the purpose of their profession (57)これは不思議な一節で、なぜかprostitutionとpolymorphous perversionが結ばれている。Reproductionに資さないセックスを「売り物」にしているということ？

l   Castration complex and penis envy (61): [footnote added 1920] We are justified in speaking of a castration complex in women as well. Both male and female children form a theory that women no less than men originally had a penis, but that they have lost it by castration. これもまた不思議な一節で、女は「去勢された」ものとして自らを認識する、ということ？最初からないものを「失ったもの」として捉えるというのは極めてモダンな身振りではある。

l   Development of the sexual organization (63): The final outcome of sexual development lies in what is know as the normal sexual life of the adult, in which the pursuit of pleasure comes under the sway of the reproductive function and in which the component instincts, under the primacy of a single erotogenic zone, form a firm organization directed towards a sexual aim attached to some extraneous sexual object. (63)

l   Pregenital organization (59): we shall give the name of ‘pregenital’ to organizations of sexual life in which the genital zones have not yet taken over their predominant part. (64) the first: oral, or as it might be calledm cannibalistic pregenital sexual organization. . . sexual aim consists in the incorporation of the object. the second: the sadistic-anal organization. . . Thus the establishment of that primacy in the service of reproduction is the last phase through which the organization of sexuality passes (65)

l   Erotogenic effect of negative feeling (69-70): The sexually exciting effect of many emotions which are in themselves unpleasurable, such as feelings of apprehension, fright or horror, persists in a freat number of people throughout their adult life (69) これも彼岸に繋がるか―sex is fundamentally unpleasuarable

3: The Transformation of Puberty

l   “Normal” development of sexual aim (coitus): The new sexual aim in men consists in the discharge of the sexual products. . . . The sexual instinct is now subordinated to the reproductive function: it becomes, so to say, altruistic (73) The process at puberty thus establish the primacy of the genital zones. (88)

l   Sexual tension as fundamentally unpleasuarable thing: I must insist that a feeling of tension necessarily involves unpleasure. What seems to me decisive is the fact that a feeling of this kind is accompanied by an impulsion to make a change in the psychological situation, that it operates in an urgent way which is wholly alien to the nature of the feeling of pleasure. . . . How, then , are this unpleasurable tension and this feeling of pleasure to be reconciled? (75)

l   Fore-pleasure and end-pleasure (76-): This distinction between the one kind of pleasure due to the excitation of erotogenic zones and the other kind due to the discharge of the sexual substances deserves, I think, to be made more concrete by a difference in nomenclature. The former may be suitably described as ‘fore-pleasure’ in contrast to the ‘end-pleasure’ or pleasure of satisfaction derived from the sexual act. Fore-pleasure is thus the same pleasure that has already been produced, although on a smaller scale, by the infantile sexual instinct. (76) Fore-pleasure: leads to an increase in tension which in its turn is responsible for producing the necessary motor energy for the conclusion of the sexual act. End-pleasure: is brought about entirely by discharge: it is wholly a pleasure of satisfaction and with it the tension of the libido is for the time being extinguished. これはとても大事な概念で、end-pleasureなしのfore-pleasureというものについて考えたくなる。資本主義というのはend-pleasureを永遠に先延ばしにするシステムなわけだ。そしてperversionというのはまさにこのfore-pleasureに対するfixationなのだ（such is in fact the mechanism of many perversions, which consist in a lingering over the preparatory acts of the sexual process 77）

l   The problem of sexual excitation (78-): The most obvious explanation, that this tension arises in some way out of the pleasure itself, is not only extremely improbable in itself but becomes untenable when we consider that in connection with the greatest pleasure of all, that which accompanies the discharge of the sexual products, no tension is produced, but on the contrary all tension is removed. Thus pleasure and sexual tension can only be connected in an indirect manner. (78) これもおもしろくて、こう考えるとorgasmに代表されるend-pleasureというのは、sensationの増大ではなくそれのremovalに向かうという意味で、極めて奇形的な快楽体系なのである。そしてこれは成人男性に特有のもの：these are the conditions in children, in females and in castrated males. In none of these three cases can there be any question of an accumulation of sexual products in the same sense as in males, and this makes a smooth application of the theory difficult. . . . Observation on castrated makes seem to show that sexual excitation can occur to a considerable degree independently of the production of the sexual substances (80) We were reluctantly obliged to admit that we could not satisfactorily explain the relation between sexual satisfaction and sexual excitation, or that between the activity of the genital zone and the activity of the other sources of sexuality (99)

l   The economics of the libido (84)—narcissism (object libido returns to ego libido)

l   Male/female—just nominal (meaning “active” and “passive”), not biological: libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women and irrespectively of whether its object is a man or a woman. (85) (see footnote added 1915 as well “Such observation shows that in human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not be found either in a psychological or a biological sense” 86) in order to become a woman a further stage of repression is necessary, which discards a portion of infantile masculinity and prepares the woman for changing her leading genital zone (101)

l   The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it (88): to restore the happiness that has been lost (88)

l   Incest taboo: Respect for this barrier is essentially a cultural demand made by society. Society must defend itself against the danger that the interests which it needs for the establishment of higher social units may be swallowed up by the family (91)

[Comments]
Universalization (and normalization) of pervasion is definitely the key here. Freud defines perversion, in a way, as an arrested development--where the subject's organization of pleasure does not evolve into "end-pleaasure," fixated onto "fore-pleasure." As Freud bitterly comments in conclusion, however, anomaly might be the end-pleasure: We were reluctantly obliged to admit that we could not satisfactorily explain the relation between sexual satisfaction and sexual excitation, or that between the activity of the genital zone and the activity of the other sources of sexuality (99) If fore-pleasure aims at endless increase of sensation and end-pleasure aims at the extermination there of, capitalism is on the side of fore-pleasure. Maybe that is one of the reasons Freud (unconsciously) take an example of a prostitute as "polymorphous perversion" in adult life, which  usually is observed in childhood.