three essays on the theory of sexuality pdf free download

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

Sigmund freud.

Available to download for free in PDF, epub, and Kindle (mobi and AZW3) ebook formats. Or read online. Skip straight to downloads.

Description

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is a work by the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. It was first published in 1905 and is sometimes titled Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex. In the work, Freud explores his theories surrounding sexual perversions, childhood sexuality, and puberty. The first essay is The Sexual Aberrations, in which he discusses perversions such as pedophilia and bestiality. The second essay, Infantile Sexuality, talks about how in his theory, things like thumb sucking and sibling rivalry, are forms of sexual emotions. In the final essay, The Transformations of Puberty, he explores the connection between what he calls the 'fore-pleasures' of infantile sexuality and the 'end-pleasure' of sexual intercourse.

This book has 35,235 words, 56 pages in the PDF version, and was originally published in 1905. This translation by A. A. Brill was first published in 1920.

Production notes: This ebook of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality was published by Global Grey in 2021, and updated on the 10th January 2024. The artwork used for the cover is 'Heroic Movement' by Theo van Doesburg.

Download for ereaders (below donate buttons)

The donate buttons below are in British Pounds, click here if you would prefer to donate in USD, EUR, CAD, or AUD .

Donate with PayPal (yellow button) or Stripe (via Donorbox) (blue button)

Related ebooks...

Copyright © 2012-2024 Global Grey

Book Sections

• Freud, S. (1890) Psychical (or Mental) Treatment (1890). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 7:281-302 Add to favorites Add to read later
• Freud, S. (1905) Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905 [1901]). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 7:1-122 Add to favorites Add to read later
• Freud, S. (1905) On Psychotherapy (1905 [1904]). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 7:255-268 Add to favorites Add to read later
• Freud, S. (1905) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 7:123-246 Add to favorites Add to read later
• Freud, S. (1906) My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses (1906 [1905]). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 7:269-279 Add to favorites Add to read later
• Freud, S. (1906) Psychopathic Characters on the Stage (1942 [1905 or 1906]). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 7:303-310 Add to favorites Add to read later
• Strachey, J. (1904) Freud's Psycho-Analytic Procedure (1904 [1903]). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 7:247-254 Add to favorites Add to read later
• Strachey, J. (1953) Bibliography. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 7:311-320 Add to favorites Add to read later
• Strachey, J., Freud, A., Strachey, A. & Tyson, A. (1953) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901-1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 7:i-vi Add to favorites Add to read later

Freud, S. (1905) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 7:123-246

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

Three essays on the theory of sexuality

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

1,426 Views

30 Favorites

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by YoshikoM on October 19, 2010

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

The Problem of Sex as Instinct

Cite this chapter

• Helen Block Lewis 4  

Part of the book series: Emotions, Personality, and Psychotherapy ((EPPS))

421 Accesses

Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Interpretation of Dreams (1900), and Studies on Hysteria (Breuer & Freud, 1893–1895) are publications in which he set down his discovery that forbidden sexual longings were somehow transformed into neurotic symptoms. Although Freud’s theorizing in Three Essays emphasized the primacy of instincts, the outcome of this work has been to focus attention on the primacy of human emotional—specifically, affectional-social—bonds as governors of human behavior.

• Sexual Arousal
• Sexual Life
• Penile Erection
• Sexual Object
• Adult Sexuality

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Unable to display preview.  Download preview PDF.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA

Helen Block Lewis

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 1983 Plenum Press, New York

About this chapter

Lewis, H.B. (1983). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In: Freud and Modern Psychology. Emotions, Personality, and Psychotherapy. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-4532-9_4

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-4532-9_4

Publisher Name : Springer, Boston, MA

Print ISBN : 978-1-4684-4534-3

Online ISBN : 978-1-4684-4532-9

eBook Packages : Springer Book Archive

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

39 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality was first published in 1905. Freud expanded it several times in later editions, and it reached its final form in 1924. The book occupies a major place in Freud’s body of work, but it was controversial when it first appeared. Freud pointedly blurs the line between perversions and normal sexual behaviors, and he develops a radically new and surprising theory of human sexuality—in particular, of childhood sexuality. The essays present some of Freud’s most famous ideas, including the stages of psychosexual development, polymorphous perversity, drive theory, and the Oedipus complex. Finally, the book makes contributions to Freud’s thinking about aggression, ambivalence, sublimation , and more.

In 1953, the multivolume Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Freud appeared in English with a translation of the Three Essays by James Strachey. This version remains definitive, although though there is a long history of disputing some of Strachey’s translations of key terms. Strachey’s annotations and footnotes explain the position of the Three Essays in the overall development of Freud’s thought. Strachey’s notes also explain the development of the book over time, describing its expansions and revisions between 1905 and 1924.

Get access to this full Study Guide and much more!

• 7,350+ In-Depth Study Guides
• 4,950+ Quick-Read Plot Summaries
• Downloadable PDFs

Most English editions reproduce Strachey’s translation including his notes. (Some e-book editions rely on an outdated, although sometimes elegant, English translation from 1915 by A. A. Brill.) This guide relies on the Basic Books edition of Strachey’s translation published in 2000. Still in print, it is also available for free at the Internet Archive. Citations refer to the page numbers in that edition.

The SuperSummary difference

• 8x more resources than SparkNotes and CliffsNotes combined
• Study Guides you won ' t find anywhere else
• 100+ new titles every month

The first essay, “The Sexual Aberrations,” analyzes various perversions to challenge commonplace ideas about human sexuality. These commonplaces are, first, that infants and children do not have sex lives because the sexual impulse only arrives with puberty and, second, that sexual instincts are naturally directed to the opposite sex and procreation.

Freud discusses “inversion,” or homosexuality, to demonstrate that the sexual instinct does not contain an innate sexual object (such as the opposite sex). Freud looks at various theories about inversion that were prevalent in his day and finds fatal problems with each of them. Next, under the category of the sexual aim, he discusses the perversions proper, like fetishes for feet or other body parts, and so on. Freud concludes that the sexual instinct is itself various and nonunitary, but that its primitive and partial components come together or amalgamate to produce various macro-level sexualities. In some cases, the result is an amalgamation that we call normal. In other cases, the result is a perversion.

Freud then turns to the topic of neurotics and their sexual lives. He writes that the sexual instinct is key to the formation and maintenance of a neurotic’s symptoms because sexual libido is what charges or gives energy to the neurotic’s symptoms. As a result, the neurotic’s sex life, he writes, is in some way really nothing more than the (unhappy) experience of their symptoms.

In the second essay, “Infantile Sexuality,” Freud turns to early childhood, which he argues plays a pivotal role not just in the development of adult sexual preferences but in human psychological development as a whole. Infantile sexuality is fundamentally autoerotic in nature and “polymorphously perverse” (115). Freud argues that the whole variety of neurotic and normal psychological structures emerge from the process of psychosexual development that begins with oral satisfaction and thumb-sucking and proceeds through the other so-called erotogenic zones, including the anal, arriving finally at genital sexuality. He discusses key ideas like the incest barrier and penis envy in this section.

In the final essay, “The Transformation of Puberty,” Freud discusses the changes ushered in by puberty following the latent stage—itself begun at around age five. In a normal case, the adolescent will discover an attraction to the opposite sex and begin to break away from the emotionally incestuous confines of the family unit. While some adolescents make the transition to adult sexuality in the normal way, others do so differently, leading to what we call perversions and to various neurotic formations that may not at first seem like they are related to sexual life.

Throughout the book, Freud emphasizes that perversion, neurosis, and normality are continuous and often overlapping categories. Drawing on an enormous wealth of observations about both neurotic and normal psychological experience, he connects his theory of psychosexual development, elaborated for the first time in this book, to the framework for psychoanalysis that he had already developed, in which repressed childhood experiences are found to be the causes of present-day psychological formations. To summarize most briefly, this is the book that made sex fundamental to Freudian theory.

Don't Miss Out!

Access Study Guide Now

Ready to dive in?

Get unlimited access to SuperSummary for only $ 0.70 /week

Related Titles

By Sigmund Freud

Civilization And Its Discontents

Sigmund Freud

Moses and Monotheism

The Freud Reader

The Future of an Illusion

The Interpretation of Dreams

The Uncanny

Featured Collections

Childhood & youth.

View Collection

What is ‘normality’ in Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.pdf

2018, What is ‘normality’ in Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

This essay takes a look at mainly the first chapter, 'The Sexual Aberrations', in Freud's 1905 edition of his seminal work on sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. It argues that Freud's work demonstrates in an exemplary way the theoretical inconsistency of maintaining any viable distinction between normal and abnormal (pathological; perverse) sexual constitution in the field of human sexuality, or, at least that this distinction hinges on profoundly arbitrary measures.

Related Papers

Psychology and Sexuality

Peter Cryle

Valentina Petrolini

The relation between normality and pathology has intrigued philosophers for centuries, but it has been recently revived by a number of researchers who have articulated and defended various versions of the continuity thesis (or CT, namely the idea that normal and pathological states are not categorically different). Despite a growing interest in the notion of continuity, CT is far from being the received view within philosophy of psychiatry, with many researchers still seeing normal and pathological states as being different in kind. In this article, I show that the core ideas underlying CT were already present in a sophisticated form in Freud's work. Indeed, Freud defends two interrelated theses that allow us to see him as an early defender of continuity. On the one hand, he is committed to the idea that healthy and mentally disordered subjects exhibit deep similarities in terms of mental functioning. On the other hand, he defends the possibility of describing with sufficient precision and generality what goes awry in pathological cases. The article is structured as follows: I first appeal to Freud's work to show that his account of psychopathology supports continuity; I then focus on two theoretical aspects of Freud's proposal that should be taken as desiderata for any refined account of mental disorders; and finally, I illustrate how the approach works in practice by analyzing one of Freud's clinical cases.

soukayna lakhsassi

Micheal McArdle

Freud greatly extended the range of phenomenon that would normally be considered 'sexual' Critically evaluate how he justifies this with reference to the relevant texts

Vasia Lekka

Sergio Benvenuto

Jessica Wren Butler

Ayla Michelle Demir

Ajith Dinakarlal

RELATED PAPERS

Lilia Trejo

Mathematical and Computational Applications

Prasert Sriboonchandr

BMC Molecular Biology

Mirele Poleti

Érico Bruno Viana Campos

Raditya Mahardika

International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

Social, Humanities, and Educational Studies (SHEs): Conference Series

Sukma Indrawati

Modeling and Numerical Simulation of Material Science

Seif-Eddine BENDAOUDI

Image and Vision Computing

Filippo Stanco

Les écrits du for privé en Europe (du Moyen Age à …

Raul mordenti

Geodynamics & Tectonophysics

Ievgen Poliachenko

Helder Henriques

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences

uzma batool

Fresenius Environmental Bulletin

Stanislav Franciskovic-Bilinski

Engineering Structures

Karun Klaycham

Materials Science and Engineering: A

olivier andreau

Frontiers in Psychiatry

Shiota Yuka

Jurnal Ilmiah PLATAX

Patrice Kalangi

Journal of Medical Virology

Salome Bandoh

Tina Lengar Verovnik

Thu Trang Nguyễn Thị

Ahmad Aditya

IE revista de investigación educativa de la REDIECH

Karen Liliana Jaimes Martinez

See More Documents Like This

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024