September 14, 2005
Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Basic Books, 2000.
Initially published in 1905, this text radicalized Western understandings of sexuality, neurosis, and civilization. Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is divided into “The Sexual Aberrations,” “Infantile Sexuality,” and “The Transformations of Puberty,” and by linking his essays together in this single text, Freud implicitly draws a connection—uncomfortable to some and ignored by many to this day—between “aberrations” and more “normal” sexual development. As Nancy Chodorow writes in her “Foreword,” Freud begins with “what ‘we’ have traditionally believed” and subsequently “marshals every argument and all the evidence in his power to puncture the conventional assumptions” (vii). While the book as a whole is, as a monumental contribution to twentieth century thought, worth detailed consideration, this abstract will only address the first essay on “The Sexual Aberrations.” Insofar as it attends to the psychic construction of masochism and sadism, Freud’s first essay on the theory of sexuality is valuable background for many of the works abstracted in The Pleasures of Teaching Race. Freud does not attend to race in this book, but his theorization about the connection between sadism and masochism has led to numerous analyses of race and its relation to psychic structures of pleasure and pain.
“The Sexual Aberrations” are defined as deviations from either the sexual object or the sexual aim. Sexual object deviation includes inversion and the selection of sexually immature persons or animals. Yet rather than truly pathologizing these deviations, Freud announces “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,” and he concludes that “the nature and importance of the sexual object recedes into the background. What is essential and constant in the sexual instinct is something else”—something like deviations from the sexual aim (11, 15).
Sexual perversions are characterized as disruptions in the “normal” sexual aim, but Freud is quick to note that “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’” (15). Thus, perversions such as overvaluation of the sexual object, sexual use of the mucous membrane of the lips and mouth, sexual use of the anal orifice, fetishism, touching and looking, and sadism and masochism are linked organizationally and placed on a continuum from “normal” to “pathological” according to the “exclusiveness and fixation” of the “perversion” (27). Furthermore, it is the socially induced repression of “abnormal” sexuality that leads to hysteria as well as neurosis.
Sadism and masochism are described as “The most common and the most significant of all the perversion,” receiving special attention because of “the contrast between activity and passivity which lies behind them is among the universal characteristics of sexual life” (23, 25). Whereas masochism is characterized by a passive attitude, sadism corresponds to an aggressively active instinct. However, Freud concludes that, just as bisexuality is perhaps more “natural” than any exclusive sexual object choice, so too are activity and passivity “habitually found to occur together in the same individual” (25). As a consequence, “A sadist is always at the same time a masochist,” a conclusion that can be expanded to the general population through the observation that “every pain contains in itself the possibility of a feeling of pleasure” (25). The ramifications of this statement are of vital import to contemporary gender, sexual, and racial politics.
For a direct counter to Freud’s formulation of the selfsame sadist/masochist, see:
Deleuze, Gilles. Coldness and Cruelty. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991.
For additional psychoanalytically informed readings on sadism and masochism, see:
Freud, Sigmund. “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIX. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1961. 159-70.
Lacan, Jacques. “Kant with Sade.” 1963. Trans. James B. Swenson, Jr. October 51 (1989): 55-75.
Silverman, Kaja. “Masochism and Male Subjectivity.” Male Trouble. Ed. Constance Penley and Sharon Willis. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1993. 33-64.
Zizek, Slavoj. “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing.” The Metastases of Enjoyment. London: Verson, 1994. 89-112.
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