Book
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie
Freud's three essays, published by Deuticke in 1905, deal with the sexual aberrations, with infantile sexuality and with the transformations of puberty. Together they argue that the sexual drive is present from infancy, that it is made up of component drives bound to erotogenic zones, and that it reaches its adult genital form only through a course of development. Later editions added an account of the pregenital organisations of the libido.
Main ideas
- The sexual drive is present from infancy.
- The drive is composed of component drives tied to erotogenic zones.
- Adult genital sexuality is reached only through development, by way of puberty.
- Later editions add the pregenital organisations of the libido.
What it shows
- 1905
Sigmund Freud introduced Psychosexual development
Freud laid out infantile sexuality and its organization by body zones in the second of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905); the oral, anal and phallic phases were added in later editions and papers.
- 1905
Sigmund Freud introduced Leaning-on
In the second of the Three Essays, Freud describes infantile sexual activity as at first attaching itself to the functions that serve self-preservation. His example is the child's sucking, which begins with feeding at the breast and only later becomes independent of it.
Sigmund Freud introduced Penis envy
Freud first described the girl's envy of the penis in "On the Sexual Theories of Children" (1908), used the word Penisneid from 1913, and set it out in the section on children's sexual researches that he added to the Three Essays in 1915.
- 1905
Sigmund Freud introduced Sublimation
In the Three Essays Freud names sublimation as the diversion of sexual drive energy from sexual aims to other, culturally valued ones. It begins in the latency period, and Freud makes it a source of artistic activity and of character.
- 1914
Sigmund Freud introduced Idealization
Freud speaks of an idealization of the drive in the perversions in 1905. In 1914 he defines idealization as a process acting on the object, possible with ego-libido as with object-libido, as in the sexual overvaluation of the loved object, and he ties it to the forming of the ego ideal.
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- 1908
Sigmund Freud introduced Anal erotism
Freud counted the anal zone among the erotogenic zones in the Three Essays (1905) and named anal erotism in ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ (1908), where he derived orderliness, parsimony and obstinacy from its transformation.
- 1905
Sigmund Freud introduced Drive
In the Three Essays Freud introduces the drive (Trieb) as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, whose object is not fixed in advance. Triebe und Triebschicksale (1915) gives it its classic definition, as a constant pressure with a source, an aim and an object, and lists its vicissitudes.
- 1905
Sigmund Freud introduced Libido
The word was in use among sexologists, and Freud had used it in his papers on anxiety neurosis in the 1890s; the Three Essays make it the psychoanalytic name for the energy of the sexual drive, which the 1915 section on the libido theory and the 1914 paper on narcissism divide into ego-libido and object-libido.