the question for Freud is not:

'how does one become a pervert?'

The question is:

'how does one become sexually normal?'

because he was of the conviction

that human sexuality

is instrinsically,

is fundamentally

disturbed.

The first thing we need to understand is that

when Freud talked about sexuality

he employed

an enlarged concept of sexuality.

It no longer meant

genital, penetrative sexual acts

but any practice

that was invested with libido

that had an erotic charge for that person.

In a lot of contemporary theories about sexuality

people still speak using evolutionary theory

and say: 'you know, men like this

and women like that because we're sort of

designed to breed.'

But everybody knows

that it's not really like that.

Human beings are so much more complex than that

and more perverse, and more difficult

and look for totally other things.

They might not be interested in reproductive sex at all.

Which means that

we need to move away from thinking that

Freud's concept of sexuality

is all about people having sex.

It's about that too

but it's about much more than that.

Our sexuality is not bound up with

simply the task of reproduction,

but rather we can find pleasure and joy

as well as disturbance

all over the body.

What he had discovered very early on

was that young children experience

intense sexual desires.

Not in the adult form,

but in the form of that they get pleasure from

the 'oral drive', we would say,

from oral activities,

from anal activities,

from touching, from their skin,

from being tickled.

After a baby is born

the caregivers will focus on particular parts of the body.

There'll be an exchange of looks,

sustained eye contact with the baby.

There'll be feeding, which obviously

involves the mouth.

There will be speaking,

which involves the ears.

There will be all sorts of other

cleaning activity

bathing, changing nappies and so on.

All the things one imagines

in the care of children.

They are early forms

of what later becomes

organised into adult sexuality.

Adult sexuality

is quite a complex thing.

It includes

all the various forms of infantile sexuality

like the oral pleasures,

say, kissing,

anal pleasures, which may be

more or less repressed and acted on

touching, looking, being looked at.

But in adult sexuality

these are subordinated, usually,

to the main form of sexual activity,

which is genital sex,

and getting excitement and pleasure through that.

But then, if these infantile forms of sexuality

become the main sexual activity of the adult,

say, a voyeurist who gets off

just by watching somebody getting undressed

we could call this perversion.

But this watching is a normal part of

infantile sexuality.

So in a way he's making the point

that aspects of sexuality which

in an adult might be regarded as perverse

are there in infantile life.

Sexuality,

the way we think of it as an adult,

is a much more restricted version

of this sense of sensation

and enjoyment in the body

that is part of ordinary childhood.

So for Freud, perversion

is not really something that one acquires.

Perversion is something with which one is born

and, if all goes well

during the process of social development,

the perversion becomes contained

under the aegis of

processes of socialisation

but also under the aegises of shame and guilt

and the net result is

a form of sexuality that is

more normative, one could say.

But Freud is interested in

challenging the idea of a split between

the so-called 'normal' and 'abnormal'.

Freud made his first discoveries

by working with patients who were

suffering from some distressing,

debilitating symptoms,

so something 'abnormal', you could say.

But what he discovered

was that the underlying processes

were processes that are normal to every person.

So part of what's challenging in Freud

is that he doesn't allow us

comfortably to assume

that we are simply part of a

category called 'normal'

and that there's some other class of being

called the 'abnormal'

but that many of these processes and traits

are familiar, really, in everyone.

Freud showed that our sexuality

will be built up through our interactions

with our early caregivers.

Basically, the family.

And he's interested in how this develops

through phases that he describes:

he talks about the oral, the anal,

the genital, phallic, and so on.

Different zones of the body

that are particularly excitable

in the young child,

starting with the mouth,

that gets stimulated

when the child is being fed

and the child gets pleasure from it.

So we speak of an oral stage.

Then there would be the anal phase

which would be to do with

potty training or learning about how to

just sort of organise this thing.

You know, 'it's bad to do it this way',

'it's good to do it that way'.

Something important about it.

You're just beginning to learn to speak.

You have to understand the messages

you're receiving about it.

When you pee, or when you poo,

or all that sort of thing

suddenly becomes something important

that needs to be thought about and dealt with.

And then comes a phase when

both boys and girls

become interested in the penis.

And that is what is called the phallic stage.

And it would be phallic for boys as well as girls.

It would be to do with sexuality

and dealing with what it is to get

satisfaction from that part of the body.

What means that

there's something interesting about it.

The interesting thing about those activities,

those 'phases', as they're called, is that

they're so obvious to parents

of young children.

You spend all your time with

poo poo and pee pee and willies

and then a few years later

everyone's forgotten it.

The parents have forgotten it

and the children have forgotten it.

Children in particular, at the age of nine,

would be deeply ashamed

to remember the things they got up to

when they were three or four.

Some ideas get pushed out of consciousness

and then become unavailable

but they don't just go away.

They still try to, you know,

they look for expression.

So they try to come out,

but they always come out

as something else.

Perhaps Freud's most radical idea here

was that the human symptom

is itself a form of sexual activity,

that it takes up an erotic charge

linked to themes of sexuality,

linked to one's early history.

Behind many neurotic symptoms

is some conflict that involves

a sexual desire.

One of the promises of psychoanalysis

is that those ideas can come out

as themselves sometimes,

and then they become much

less worrying, less frightening,

less disturbing.

So psychoanalytic work will often involve

unravelling those threads

to bring out the components,

these threads that make up the symptom.

And in doing that, in many cases,

though not all,

the symptom will evaporate.