ABSTRACT

The focus of Sigmund Freud’s clinical work was upon something other than cure. It was upon something that drove him far and wide—to the study of antiquity, and to the findings of archaeological sites. Freud’s understanding that as a subject one is both speaker and spoken throws into disarray any simple approach to the vagaries of human existence. Freud worked from the basis of his hypothesis concerning the sexual aetiology of the neuroses to provide a new perspective on the sexual dimension of human subjectivity. Freud’s emphasis on sexuality is of a particular quality. It is an interest that bears the marks of a mind with a reach of the breadth and depth of the human circumstance. The Freudian subject is, then, one who desires pleasure but simultaneously one who, subjected to forces—psychical, physiological, and interpersonal—works constantly to sustain none other than a sense of his or her own being.