ABSTRACT
The great sexological tradition of Krafft-Ebing and his contemporaries meets the psychiatric reflection on hysteria. The evolution of Freudian thinking cannot be understood on the basis of internal motives alone. This evolution is also determined by external elements particularly in the history of psychiatry that need to be evaluated. Freud makes a sharp distinction between two regimes of sexual pleasure: autoerotic pleasure that characterizes infantile sexuality and adult sexuality that sets in at the beginning of puberty. In Freud's later work, more concretely, perversion is considered to be a defence against the traumatic confrontation with sexual difference. This idea became the standard psychoanalytic theory of perversion from Stoller to Lacan. Freud identifies sexuality with non-functional bodily pleasures. In this, sexuality is conceptualized without any reference to sexual difference. This approach allows Freud to conceive of the different sexual orientations as mere variations, thus preventing them from being in one way or another rejected.
