ABSTRACT
This chapter is dedicated to an analysis of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, filtered through the interpretations that Jacques Derrida, Jean Laplanche, and Leo Bersani have given of this foundational psychoanalytic text. It is here that Freud introduces the concept of the sexual drive to designate a “perverse” force (different from reproductive sexual instinct) that pushes the human to the jouissance of masturbatory and masochistic excitation since infancy—an excitement which carries one beyond the pleasure principle. The discovery was disturbing even for him, so much so that he reworked the text several times, and in the subsequent editions, he introduced some integrations in an attempt to reconcile the sexual drive with heterosexual reproductivity.
