2 - Sexuality and its vicissitudes

Summary

Introduction: why sexuality?

If psychoanalysis had a dime for every time someone asked “why is sexuality so central to your metapsychology?”, the “impossible profession” (Freud) might be as lucrative as many critics imply it is. Freud knew his 1905 Three Essays on Sexuality would provoke outrage. Attitudes towards sexuality were much more austere in the “Victorian” era than they now are, however much ink Victorians spilt upon it. Yet the spontaneous disgust Freud's hypotheses about sexuality provoke remains. There is something comforting and “commonsensical” about Jung's break with Freud, which turned centrally around this issue. Jung thought psychoanalysis should not accord primacy to the sexual drives. Why should sexuality be singled out, given the panoply of symptoms exhibited by the mentally ill (cf. ON: 79–81)? Others have raised different questions: does not Freud's focus on sexuality reflect his own fixations? Was not the “Oedipus complex” discovered in Freud's selfanalysis, a circumstance Freud is otherwise dubious about? If Freud is the “father” of psychoanalysis, did he not bequeath to the movement of ideas he spawned many of his own neuroses?

In this chapter we shall examine Freud's controversial views on sexuality. Freud held on to these views until at least 1919, when he introduced the hypothesis of the death drive (Chapters 4 and 7). In this chapter we shall see that, whether we finally agree with them or not, Freud's views on sexuality are neither simplistic nor simply vulgar. Indeed, these views are arguably so challenging less because they cynically reduce everything spiritual to sexuality than because they show the many ways “a person's sexuality reaches up to the highest peaks of their spirituality”, as Nietzsche once opined.