Reading Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: From Pleasure to the Object

Sigmund Freud’s 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is a founding text of psychoanalysis and yet it remains to a large extent an "unknown" text. In this book Freud’s 1905 theory of sexuality is reconstructed in its historical context, its systematic outline, and its actual relevance.

This reconstruction reveals a non-oedipal theory of sexuality defined in terms of autoerotic, non-objectal, physical-pleasurable activities originating from the "drive" and the excitability of erogenous...