Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is a 1905 work by Sigmund Freud which advanced his theory of sexuality, in particular its relation to childhood. Together with Interpretations of Dreams, these essays are one of Freud's most momentous and original contributions to human knowledge. Freud's first essay, on "The Sexual Aberrations", designated 'the person from whom sexual attraction proceeds the sexual object and the act towards which the instinct tends the sexual aim ', and stressed that 'numerous deviations appear in respect of both of these - the sexual object and the sexual aim'. Turning to neurotics, Freud emphasised that 'in them tendencies to every kind of perversion can be shown to exist as unconscious forces...neurosis is, as it were, the negative of perversion'. Freud concluded that 'a disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and that...this postulated constitution, containing the germs of all the perversions, will only be demonstrable in children '. His second essay, on "Infantile Sexuality", demonstrated that 'children are born with sexual urges, which undergo a complicated development before they attain the familiar adult form'. Freud argued thereby that "perversion" was present even among the healthy, and that the path towards a mature and normal sexual attitude began not at puberty but at early childhood (see psychosexual development). Looking at children, Freud claimed that 'infantile sexual emotions and desires take many and varied forms, not all of them palpably erotic: thumb sucking and other displays of autoeroticism, retention of feces, sibling rivalry, masturbation'. 'The years of puberty and adolescence, to which Freud devoted the last of his three essays...consolidate sexual identity, revive long-buried oedipal attachments, establish the dominance of the genitals for the attainment of sexual gratification'. In "The Transformations of Puberty" Freud also formalised the distinction between the pleasures of infantile sexuality which 'may be suitably described as "fore-pleasure" in contrast to the "end-pleasure" or pleasure of satisfaction derived from the sexual act'. Freud sought to link to his theory of the unconscious put forward in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and his work on hysteria by means of positing sexuality as the driving force of both neuroses (through repression) and perversion. In its final version, the "Three Essays" also included the concepts of penis envy, castration anxiety, and the Oedipus complex. Sigmund Freud (German pronunciation: [ˈziːkmʊnt ˈfʁɔʏt]), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression, and for creating the clinical method of psychoanalysis for investigating the mind and treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient (or "analysand") and a psychoanalyst. Freud established sexual drives as the primary motivational forces of human life, developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association, discovered the phenomenon of transference in the therapeutic relationship and established its central role in the analytic process; he interpreted dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He was an early neurological researcher into cerebral palsy, aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy, and a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the history, interpretation and critique of culture.

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