ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Freud’s account of human sexuality is dramatically different from the ordinary conception. Freud treats sexuality as a drive which differs in important respects from our image of an animal instinct. The human sexual drive is highly variable – both in terms of its characteristic activities, and in terms of the persons and things towards which it is directed. Most important, human sexuality essentially entangles the imagination. Because of this imaginative variability, a person can form symptoms and disorders that do not look at all like sexual life. But this also raises a challenge: if Freud is trying to bring about a paradigm change in our conception of sexuality, why should we think of this new paradigm as sexual? Freud offers an answer to this question in 1905 with a theory of sexuality which gives a detailed account of how the sexual drive works. Much of this chapter is devoted to exploring the new meaning Freud gives to sexuality. In particular, there is an exploration of infantile mental life and why Freud thought of it as infantile sexuality. But by 1920 he is himself ready
