ABSTRACT
Sexology was simultaneously inventing and exploring a new continent of knowledge, assigning thereby a new significance to the 'sexual'. The construction of homosexuality in the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had as its necessary outcome the theoretical creation of the massive edifice of heterosexuality. To achieve a just society, each sex must follow 'the laws of its own nature'. The theorisatical explorations of the early sexologists were contradictory in their impact and this is clearly demonstrated in the work of Havelock Ellis, the greatest of the British writers on sexuality who emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, and during the inter-war years probably the most influential. While Ellis's life work was quite clearly to describe the social significance of sex, Sigmund Freud's major object of study and his greatest discovery was just as clearly the dynamic 'unconscious'.
