ABSTRACT
Of all his controversial theories, Freud believed, the one which most outraged society was his insistence upon the sexual nature of the child. The writers of the late eighteenth-century Romantic period helped forge the notion of the child as innocent, a blank slate waiting to be written on by experience. In contrast, Freud proposed that childhood fantasies formed a continuum with sexual desires, and that all children had an innate curiosity about sex and about their own origins. In the last chapter we looked at how Freud interpreted neurotic and hysterical symptoms as acting out repressed desires, and how he saw dreaming as a way of fulfilling these desires through the unconscious imagination. But what is the content of these desires? What is it about sexual desires that makes it necessary for them to be repressed? In this chapter we will explore the centrality of that dangerous topic, sexuality, to psychoanalysis and chart the ways in which Freud imagines that the spontaneous and far-
reaching desires of infancy become the neurotic and repressed desires of adulthood.
