Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

Contributors

By Sigmund Freud

Formats and Prices

On Sale
Feb 18, 2000
Page Count
192 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9780465097081

Price

$17.99

Format

Trade Paperback

Format:

Trade Paperback $17.99

The standard edition of Freud’s seminal theory of the psychology of sexuality

These three essays — “The Sexual Aberrations,” “Infantile Sexuality,” and “The Transformations of Puberty” — are among Sigmund Freud’s most important works. Here, Freud outlines the core features of libido theory, his grand view of the psychology of sexuality: sexual perversion is a matter of human nature and “normal” sexual behavior only appears later in life, sexual urges begin in infancy, and these urges turn their attention outward as we mature through puberty.

Freud first wrote Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905 and spent the next two decades making major revisions to the text. This edition offers Freud’s complete vision of the sexual self, in the definitive James Strachey translation.

  • "Publishing the Three Essays in a new accessible edition is exciting in and of itself; the commentaries by Marcus and Chodorow make it an historic volume. It is fitting to have a contemporary thinker such as Chodorow help the next generation understand its monumental contributions."
    Steven J. Ellman
  • "At the turn of the last century, Freud produced the Three Essays and The Interpretation of Dreams, the two pillars upon which the whole of his psychoanalysis sits like a lintel. Of the two, it is the Three Essays, with its outline of 'the libido theory,' that has again and again attracted controversy and spurred the later development of psychoanalysis."
    Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Sigmund Freud

About the Author

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 and grew up in Vienna. He began developing the theory and technique of psychoanalysis when he undertook the study and treatment of patients with neurological and emotional disorders. A master of German prose style and a winner of the Goethe Prize, Freud is the author of Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays in the Theory of Sexuality, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. He moved to London in 1938 to escape the persecution of the Nazis, and died the following year, widely celebrated as the founder of the international psychoanalytic movement.

Learn more about this author