A Brief History of Sexual Norms: Sigmund Freud and the Creation of Sexual Identity
How Freud laid the foundation for sexual identities
As I observed in a previous post, Romanticism emphasized the purity of the natural man, including his emotions, passions, and the pursuit of personal desires. For the Romantic thinker, society was the source of oppression and evil, and if the individual would only be set free from the constraints of society, they would be happier and healthier. This thinking was applied to the area of sexuality, creating the notion that people would be the most free if they could express and indulge their own desires however they wished without social constraints.
Romanticism was largely a reaction to the Enlightenment and its tendency to prioritize reason. The person who bridged this gap regarding sexuality and probably had the greatest influence in setting the trajectory to our contemporary views of sex was Sigmund Freud. Freud took the sexual values posited by the likes of Shelley and Blake and recast them in the scientific terms of psychology.[1] Sociologist Philip Rieff put it this way: “With Montaigne begins the modern distrust of civilization; with Freud, that distrust found its theoretician.”[2]
Making Sex Central to Everything
Most people are aware of how Freud introduced the sexual drive into most areas of psychology. In fact, Freud saw the sexual instinct as one of the primary instincts and, therefore, as having influence on almost all areas of human life.[3]
For Freud, the personality is composed of three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. Freud’s id is made up of the most basic desires and urges which are the unconscious urges, memories, and impressions. The ego is then the part of the personality that interacts with the world and moderates behavior. On top of these is the superego, which works as a form of conscience that brings guilt or approval to actions. Behind the id, however, are the basic life and death instincts that drive a person and compete within the individual. For Freud, the Libido is the great sexual instinct that is behind all human action.[4]
Rieff goes as far as to call Freud's work a "Deathwork" that destroyed sacred order of the world by making humanity only products of urges and offering no sacred order in its place.[5] Freud changed the understanding of human nature from that of a spiritual being to that of a sexual being. No longer are we understood as created in the image of God yet struggling with a fallen sinful nature; rather, we are just the products of our desires, particularly our sexual desires.
Freud then took this idea and built upon the Romantic notion that civilization limits human freedom and, most particularly, sexual expression. However, he saw civilization as built upon sexual frustration as this frustration creates a form of discontent that leads to creativity, not only in trying to find sexual fulfillment, but also in other areas of life. This means that progress comes as a product of this sexual frustration. So, while Freud agreed with the Romantic thinkers that primitive man was happier than modern man, he argued that the primitive man was also shorter lived than those in civilizations.[6]
Freud and the Sexualization of Children
In Freud’s thinking, sexuality is central to what it means to be human. For Freud to make sexuality normative for being human, and the source of happiness, he had to sexualize children in order to include them as human. This means shifting sexuality from an adult thing to something that is part of all aspects of life.[7]
When one looks at Freud’s theory of the stages of development, which he even called psychosexual stages, it becomes clear that these are truly sexual in nature. The Oral Stage (first year of life) describes the child’s mouth as an erogenous zone, at least partially connected with breastfeeding. For Freud, the Anal Stage (1 to 3 years) relates to the childish notion that a baby comes out of the mother’s anus, as well as the pleasure that comes from defecating. The Phallic Stage (3 to 6 years) is defined as sexual because this is when the child discovers their own genitals. Curiously, Freud’s Latent Stage (6 years to puberty) is so named because he could not find sexual expression during this stage. Finally, the Genital Stage (puberty to adult) is then the final stage that is based on sexual intercourse.[8]
Freud then combined his sexually based psychology with his atheistic beliefs to argue that the education of children should be shifted away from religious education and should now include sexual education. Since he saw sexuality as central to human life, he argued that there was no good reason for withholding information about sex from children. He went as far as to praise France for replacing the catechism with a primer on citizenship as central to the education of children, but he also criticized it for not including sex education. [9] Here we can see how Freud’s thinking has had a major impact on the modern education system.
Divergent Sexual Practice as Identity
Prior to Freud, aberrant sexual behavior was seen as that: a behavior. For instance, “homosexual” would refer to an act, not a person who engaged in that act. As I have previously described, homosexual behavior was far from rare in the ancient world, but this was not seen as an identity, rather it was something that the powerful men engaged in for their pleasure, while also being married and fathering children. For most of history there were not categories of people such as homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual, rather homosexual and heterosexual would be ways of describing the specific act one engaged in.
This all changed with Freud. When Freud made sexuality key to being human, and part of the core urges of the id, this also meant that divergence from normal sexual behavior should be seen as a neurosis. This shifted behaviors from the categories of morally right and wrong to those of healthy and unhealthy. He therefore called abnormal sexual behaviors "the negative of perversions" where the desires of the Libido are misdirected.
As a result, he now saw the identity of the individual as formed around their desires. Thus, one who desired sexual relations with another of their own sex was not one who engaged in homosexual behavior, but one who was, at their core, a homosexual. This changed sexual behavior from temptations and actions to personal identity.[10]
It is easy to see that as this trajectory progressed, more forms of desires and therefore more sexual identities would be created. This is why today someone who has desires, such as homosexual desires, now centers their core identity around that desire. It is important to note that for Freud, these different sexually based identities were forms of mental illness and not something to be celebrated. However, it is also clear that after Freud, others have come along and questioned if these alternate forms of desire, and therefore identities, are truly disorders or just a different way one is made, like how some today argue that ADHD should not be understood as a disorder, but as having a different neurological makeup.[11]
It is somewhat ironic that Freud’s psychological theories have been thoroughly debunked, yet his way of viewing humanity has won the day. Much like Darwin (there are no traditional Darwinists anymore), Freud’s lasting influence is in his philosophy, not his science. Following Freud, people can now define themselves based on their Libido and sexual preferences, which helped give rise to the veritable alphabet soup of sexual identities today.[12]
[1] Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2020), 202.
[2] Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York: Viking Press, 1959), 66 quoted in Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 202 n. 2.
[3] Jerome Neu, “Freud, Sigmund,” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Robert Audi, Second. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 331–32.
[4] Dave Breese, Seven Men Who Rule the World from the Grave (Chicago: Moody Press, 1990), 134–35.
[5] Philip Rieff, My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, Sacred Order/Social Order 1 (Charlottesville ; University of Virginia Press, 2006).
[6] Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 217–21.
[7] Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 205–7.
[8] Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 210; Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 42–53, 73–74.
[9] “The Sexual Enlightenment of Children,” in Freud, vol. 54 of Great Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 119-22.
[10] Neu, “Freud, Sigmund,” 332.
[11] I should note that this comparison does break down in that there is neurological evidence that ADHD comes from a differently structured brain while there is no evidence that homosexuality has such an origin.
[12] Some list as many as 107 different genders, see: Sexual Diversity, “How Many Genders Are There? Gender Identity List,” Sexual Diversity, 7 December 2022, https://www.sexualdiversity.org/edu/1111.php.