Freud's take on sexuality

Over the last several weeks, The Daily Texan has published a number of arguments by students, staff and professors that malign the University and the state of Texas for the "injustice" of the University's failure to provide same-sex couples with the same employment benefits married couples have.

Morality has been central to the issue in most arguments, and more than one made an audacious comparison to the civil rights movement. Justification for treating the issue as a moral question has been lost in the fervor.

The University's so-called "discrimination" targets lifestyles, not individuals. The law applies equally to everyone. People who identify themselves as homosexual may enter a heterosexual marriage, as has presumably been done in the past and present. One may argue that the law threatens equal opportunities for pursuing happiness. However, the matter is not simply one of happiness, as there exist many lifestyles that no reasonable and decent society could allow but that make certain individuals happier. The question is where to draw the line.

This question is addressed in Sigmund Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents." The issue for Freud is not homosexuality in particular, but rather the appropriate role for sexual activity in a society.

Freud's strongest insight is the hostile relationship between society and sexual activity, and that it is justified, if not necessary, for a society to restrict sexual activity when not serving the valuable function of procreating and binding parents to one another and to a child as a result of the activity. Put simply, sexual activity alienates a person from society. It is the worst kind of narcissism. It often binds two people together against the rest of society, its institutions and even their own families, like in "Romeo and Juliet." Society demands much of one's time and energy, and sexual activity can drive one to indifference about meeting worldly obligations. Freud thinks that repression of sexual instincts enables the work of civilization, and that the demise of repression is a return to the infantilism of barbarians.

On resolving the tension between society and sexual desires of the individual, Freud remained expressly silent. In the 1950s, German émigré Herbert Marcuse took up Freud's question and laid part of the intellectual foundation for the "sexual revolution" by arguing that the civilization itself is the problem. Proffering tired Marxist themes, Marcuse found 20th-century civilization to be a source of aggression, domination and destruction.

If society were only to lift its repressive laws and taboos, people would lose tensions that cause such unhappiness in their ordinary relations and experience the joys of polymorphous affection. Sexuality would lose its genital association, and people would experience sexuality through body of the whole human organism so that everyday activities, even certain kinds of work, are made erotic. Repression would be unnecessary, yet sublimation would remain. Anxiety and earnestness cast aside, Marcuse unapologetically states that his happiness is an ever-present feeling of the infantile.

Marcuse seems to have won the day. Sexuality surges through society. Feelings of polymorphous affection and childlike indignation are now accepted as an adult mentality. For proof of the matter, consider the naive moralizing so often at play in matters such as same-sex couple employment benefits.

Staha is a law student and former chairman of the Senate of College Councils.





Freud's take on sexuality - Opinion