While contemporary studies have paid renewed attention to the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality and routinely reference Sigmund Freud, they seldom engage directly with his work.
Freud and the Problem of Sexuality returns to Freud’s writings to argue that there is still something revolutionary and novel to be found there—something that will come to challenge both philosophical and popular understandings of sexuality. In lively, accessible prose, Bradley Ramos revisits some of the most difficult, even troubling aspects of Freud’s work and sheds fresh light on foundational concepts such as
Trieb (drive or instinct), perversion, infantile sexuality, and the Oedipus complex. Reading Freud alongside Jean Laplanche, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Derrida, we can begin to see why sexuality becomes for us, as it did for Freud,
a problem in and by its nature. However, to take this problem of sexuality seriously, Ramos argues, we must dare to do what most refuse: renounce our persistent fantasies and assumptions about sexuality.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Citation Conventions and Abbreviations
Preface: Sexuality without Teleology
Introduction: The Problem of Sexuality
Part 1: Sexual Problems: Complicating Trieb and Instinct
1. The Problem with Popular Opinion
2. The Problem with the Instinct: Strachey’s Revenge
3. The ‘Impossible Difference’ between
Trieb and Instinct
Part 2: Three Essays on Freud’s Theory of Infantile Sexuality
4. The Role of the Other in the Genesis of Sexuality
5. Auto-Hetero-Erotism: Making Space and Time for the Object in Freud’s Infantile Sexuality
6. Perversion and Pervertibility of the Instinct
Conclusion: No Exceptions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Bradley Ramos is an analysand at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute and independent scholar who received his Ph D in Philosophy from De Paul University.
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