ABSTRACT
It is easy enough to see from these early cases how Freud might have been led to think that his patients’ symptoms were pathologies of sexual life. But by the time Freud writes Three essays on the theory of sexuality (1905), he sees that these pathologies force us to re-think the nature of the sexual. ‘Popular opinion,’ Freud says,
has quite definite ideas about the nature and characteristics of the
sexual drive. It is generally understood to be absent in childhood, to
set in at the time of puberty in connection with the process of
coming to maturity and to be revealed in the manifestations of an
irresistible attraction exercised by one sex upon the other; whilst its
aim is presumed to be sexual union, or at all events actions leading
in that direction. We have every reason to believe, however, that
It is worth paying attention to Freud’s rhetoric. On the one hand, this is not just a revision of scientific theory, even a significant one. It is an argument for the revision of the ‘definite ideas’ of popular opinion. These are ideas about what we are like, so in re-thinking the nature of sexuality, we have to re-think ourselves. On the other hand, Freud is talking about the definite ideas of popular opinion, in much the same way that Aristotle talks of the beliefs of ‘the many’: it leaves the reader wondering what the wise should think. In short, Freud appeals to our intellectual narcissism to nudge us along in a transformation of our self-conception.
