phlogma

Notes on Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
According Otto Weininger’s biographer, David Abrahamsen, Freud read an early draft of what later became Sex and Character. The encounter is also dramatized in Joshua Sobol’s play, Weininger’s Night.
—Editor’s note
 
xiii (Foreword by Nancy Chodorow)
Chodorow writes,
As someone who has written both appreciatively and critically about […]

Notes on Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
“The Sexual Aberrations”
7
In every normal male or female individual, traces are found of the apparatus of the opposite sex. These either persist without function as rudimentary organs or become modified and take on other functions.
These long-familiar facts of anatomy lead us to suppose that an […]

Notes on Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
“Infantile Sexuality”
42
Of the third or fourth year of life:
It is during this period of total or only partial latency that are built up the mental forces which are later to impede the course of the sexual instinct and, like dams, restrict its flow—disgust, feelings […]

Notes on Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
“The Transformations of Puberty”
73
A normal sexual life is only assured by an exact convergence of the two currents directed towards the sexual object and the sexual aim, the affectionate current and the sensual one.
82
Freud’s anticipation of the discovery of sex hormones and how little adjustment […]

Notes on:
Sylviane Agacinski, Parity of the Sexes.
82
What if sexual difference, instead of going back to the difference between two things of the same order, led us to discover that man and woman are not speaking of the same thing when they speak of the sexes? If the masculine and the feminine were not only the […]

Notes on:
Arthur Evans, “The Logic of Homophobia”
Evans presents a common and severe view of Weininger, and blithely extends it to Wittgenstein—certainly, a kindred spirit. He seems inclined to take Weininger’s misogyny at face value and links it to a certain excessive philologian tendency, finding both equally irredeemable. Though Evans charges Weininger, somewhat unimaginatively, with all […]

Notes on:
Judy Greenway, “It’s What You Do With It That Counts: Interpretations of Otto Weininger”
Greenway provides a brief but remarkably clear and accurate introduction to Weininger and follows with an account of his influence on the feminist and gay movements active in the last part of the 19th and the first part of the 20th […]

Notes on:
Suzanne Raitt, “Sex, Love and the Homosexual Body in Early Sexology”
Love and its redemptive capacity were celebrated by early sexologists, Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter. Later thinkers in the field (also loosely classed as “sexologists” by Raitt), Weininger and Freud tended to denigrate it. Even though the latter two may have offered an “attenuated” […]