STEVEN MARCUS
519
wholes, and Freud's procedure in the opening essay is to take these
aggregated phenomena and arrange them in such a way that they can
be disaggregated and decomposed. A further pertinence of this device
ofworking backwards begins to be revealed when we see Freud regard–
ing these adult manifestations of sexual behavior as being, on one
level, integrated forms of sexual activity and, at the same time, on
another level, failures of integration, developmental outcomes in
which the various component drives of the sexual instinct have not
been put together in a fully integrated way. In addition to the relative
familiarity of this material, however, a further strategic consideration
vis-a.-vis his audience may have been guiding him. The explosive
material of this book is to be found in the second essay; it would have
been imprudent, in the most elementary sense, to begin straightaway
with that material. A groundwork in the familiar and paradoxically less
inflammatory subject of the sexual aberrations had first to be put down
before Freud could proceed to the unsettling question of infantile
sexuality.
In this connection, it may be useful to note that in the
Three
Essays
Freud is writing with a model somewhere in his mind. That
model is Darwin, and the
Three Essays
is Freud's most truly Darwinian
work.
It
occupies the boundary that both separates and connects the
biological and the psychological realms of existence, and it touches
unavoidably upon the complex relations that obtain between phylo–
genesis and ontogenesis. It is about "origins" in more ways than one,
and is written from a consistently evolurionary point of view. Like
Datwin, Freud is concerned with the "variations" in form and struc–
ture that the sexual instinct takes, and he is interested in arranging or
classifying these "variations" in such a way that both their resem–
blances and differences be rendered in full account. Thus in enumer–
ating the various kinds of homosexual activities, Freud remarks that
though there are certainly distinctions and differences among them, it
is nonetheless "impossible to overlook the existence of numerous
intermediate examples of every type, so that we are driven to conclude
that we are dealing with a connected series. " At the same time, he is
concerned to discover' 'the general conditions under which mere vari–
ations of the sexual instinct pass over into pathological aberrations."
This double interest is clearly analogous to the interest in Darwin of
tracing both the relations of variations within a species to one another
