Synopsis
Freud's first essay, on "The Sexual Aberrations", designated 'the person from whom sexual attraction proceeds the sexual object and the act towards which the instinct tends the sexual aim ', and stressed that 'numerous deviations appear in respect of both of these - the sexual object and the sexual aim'. Turning to neurotics, Freud emphasised that 'in them tendencies to every kind of perversion can be shown to exist as unconscious forces...neurosis is, as it were, the negative of perversion'. In one section "The Sexually immature and animals as sexual objects" he discusses pedophilia and bestiality, although he does not use the terms. He says in the section that only rarely are prepubescent children a preferred object, generally it occurs more in cases where an impotent or cowardly person cannot gain satisfaction from adults or adolescents. However he also mentions that there are cases where teachers have molested their students, and he also says sexual relations with animals are "not at all rare among farmers". He says in this section that most people would prefer to limit these perversions to the insane "on aesthetic grounds" but that they exist in the normal people also. He says that people who are behaviorally abnormal are always sexually abnormal in his experience but that many people who are normal behaviorally otherwise are sexually abnormal also. Freud concluded that 'a disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and that...this postulated constitution, containing the germs of all the perversions, will only be demonstrable in children '.
His second essay, on "Infantile Sexuality", demonstrated that 'children are born with sexual urges, which undergo a complicated development before they attain the familiar adult form'. Freud argued thereby that "perversion" was present even among the healthy, and that the path towards a mature and normal sexual attitude began not at puberty but at early childhood (see psychosexual development). Looking at children, Freud claimed that 'infantile sexual emotions and desires take many and varied forms, not all of them palpably erotic: thumb sucking and other displays of autoeroticism, retention of feces, sibling rivalry, masturbation'.
'The years of puberty and adolescence, to which Freud devoted the last of his three essays...consolidate sexual identity, revive long-buried oedipal attachments, establish the dominance of the genitals for the attainment of sexual gratification'. In "The Transformations of Puberty" Freud also formalised the distinction between the pleasures of infantile sexuality which 'may be suitably described as "fore-pleasure" in contrast to the "end-pleasure" or pleasure of satisfaction derived from the sexual act'.
Freud sought to link to his theory of the unconscious put forward in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and his work on hysteria by means of positing sexuality as the driving force of both neuroses (through repression) and perversion. In its final version, the "Three Essays" also included the concepts of penis envy, castration anxiety, and the Oedipus complex.
Read more about this topic: Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality