ABSTRACT
This translation originally published in Strachey, J. (ed.) (1953) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 7, trans. J.Strachey, London: Hogarth Press. Reproduced by permission of Sigmund Freud © Copyrights, the Institute of PsychoAnalysis and the Hogarth Press, and in the US by permission of BasicBooks. The importance of the work of Sigmund Freud can hardly be overestimated, and his ideas remain as controversial as they are influential. This extract is from one of his earliest published discussions of sexuality. Freud repeatedly reworked the ‘Three Essays’ throughout his career, and the result is a richly layered text in which successive footnotes create an unusual and at times disorientating impression of ideas in perpetual motion.The impression is particularly strong in the discussion of bisexuality, where the footnotes are longer than the original text. This creates a peculiar situation, which psychoanalysis since Freud has never fully resolved: the concept of bisexuality is a corner-stone of Freudian thought, and yet it is itself never directly formulated as such (Bowie 1992). The extract below is Freud’s most sustained substantive discussion of the subject.
