Be Careful What You Wish For! the Surrender of Gender

Abstract

Close examination of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905a) reveals an ambiguity in Freud’s language as he simultaneously tries to escape 19th-century psychiatric paradigms concerning sexuality and perversion while also retaining a normative approach to adult sexuality that created new categories of pathology. The result is an ambivalent legacy that has both hampered and helped contemporary clinicians as they deal with a diverse array of presentations of gender and sexual orientation in today’s world.

• Sexuality
• gender
• cultural influences
• social change
• sexual aberrations
• perversion
• libido
• homosexuality
• neurosis
• repression
• seduction
• normativity
• bisexualism