Sigmund Freud - Deviant Love

Translated by SHAUN WHITESIDE

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Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie first published 1905 (Leipzig, Vienna)

ber einen besonderen Typus Objektwahl beim Manne first published in 1910 (Leipzig, Vienna) in Jahrbuch fr psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen

Das Tabu der Virginitt first published in 1918 (Leipzig) in Sigmund Freud, Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre

Ein Kind wird geschlagen: Beitrag zur Kenntnis der Enstellung sexueller Perversionen first published in 1919 (Leipzig) in Internationale Zeitschrift fr rztliche Psychoanalyse

berdie wiebliche Sexualitt first published in 1931 (Leipzig) in Internationale Zeitschrift fr rztliche Psychoanalyse

Published in Penguin Classics as The Psychology of Love 2006

This selection published in Penguin Books 2007

Sigmund Freuds German texts collected in Gesammelte Werke (194052) copyright Imago Publishing Co., Ltd, London, 1905, 1908, 1910, 1912, 1918, 1919, 1931

Translation and editorial matter copyright Shaun Whiteside, 2006

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-196402-7

Sigmund Freud (18561939) was born in Moravia. Between the ages of four and eighty-two his home was in Vienna, but in 1938 Hitlers invasion forced him to seek asylum in London where he died the following year. His career began with several years of brilliant work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris, his interests first turned to psychology; and after ten years of clinical work in Vienna (at first in collaboration with Breuer, an older colleague) he invented what was to become psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients through talking, but it quickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings of the mind in general. Freud was thus able to demonstrate the development of the sexual instinct in childhood, and largely on the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions. His illuminating discussions of the ways in which sexuality is always psychosexuality that there is no sexuality without fantasy, conscious or unconscious have changed the ways we think about erotic life and the psychology of love.

In the past, we have left it to the poets to depict for us the conditions of love, according to which people make their object-choices, and how they reconcile the demands of their fantasy with reality. Poets have certain qualities that enable them to solve such a task, in particular a great sensitivity in the perception of hidden mental impulses in others, and the courage to make their own unconscious speak. But one factor reduces the value of their communications. Poets are bound to the condition of achieving intellectual and aesthetic pleasure as well as certain emotional effects, and for that reason they cannot represent the stuff of reality unaltered, but are obliged to isolate fragments of it, dissolve obstructive connections, soften the whole and fill any gaps. These are the privileges of what is known as poetic licence. In addition, they can express only a small degree of interest in the origin and development of such mental states, which they describe as complete. As a result, however, it is inevitable that science should use a heavier hand, bringing a smaller gain in pleasure, when dealing with the same material, whose poetic treatment has been delighting people for thousands of years. These observations may also serve to justify a strictly scientific treatment of human erotic life. Science is, in fact, the most complete renunciation of the pleasure principle of which our psychical work is capable.

During psychoanalytic treatment one has ample opportunity to glean impressions from the erotic life of neurotics, while at the same time bearing in mind that one has also observed or experienced similar behaviour among people of average health, or even among exceptional people. When favourable material permits the accumulation of impressions, individual types clearly emerge. Here I should first like to describe one such type of male object-choice, both because it presents itself as a series of conditions of love, whose coexistence is not comprehensible in fact it is frankly alarming and because it permits simple psychoanalytical explanation.

1) The first of these conditions of love should be identified as being effectively specific; as soon as one comes across it, one can seek the presence of the other characteristics of this type. One might refer to it as the condition of the damaged third; its content leads the person concerned never to choose as a love object a woman who is free, a girl or a single woman, but only a woman to whom another man can apply property rights, whether as husband, fianc or friend. In some cases this condition proves so potent that the same woman can at first be ignored or even despised as long as she does not belong to anyone, while she immediately becomes the object of passionate love as soon as she enters one of the aforementioned relationships with another man.

2) The second condition is perhaps less constant, but none the less striking. This type is only fulfilled by its coincidence with the first, while the first also appears to occur in great frequency on its own. According to this second condition, the modest and unimpeachable woman never exerts the charm that raises her to become a love object; that charm will only be exerted by a woman who has somehow acquired a bad sexual reputation, and about whose fidelity and dependability there might be some doubt. This latter characteristic may vary significantly, from the faint shadow cast upon the reputation of a wife who is not disinclined to flirt to the openly polygamous conduct of a coquette or an adept in the art of love; at any rate, it is something of this kind that men belonging to our type cannot do without. To put it a little coarsely, we might call this condition love of whores.

Just as the first condition gives rise to the satisfaction of agonistic and hostile impulses against the man from whom one is seizing the beloved woman, the second condition, which requires the woman to behave in some way like a prostitute, is related to the activation of