Gifts giving at the 69 Eyes M&G in Bologna, Italy with our TEAM...

this is my last creation: a video made by me with the beautiful Poisonblack song "The Darkest Lie" dedicated to Bazie from The 69 Eyes

I decided to talk about one of the most Freud's criticized works: "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality". This is a 1905 work which advanced and exposed his theory of human sexuality, in particular its relation to childhood. I think that together with Freud's work Interpretations of Dreams, these essays are between Freud's most incredible and original contributions, not only to psychology studies, but especially to human knowledge in general.

I think that Freud found a lot of great difficulties by exposing his new and unconventional theories in the last years of 19^th century… There wasn't a right perception of what human insight really was and there was a very strict scepticism about his revolutionary theories, especially that ones about sexuality. The concept of human mental health was strongly related to the absence of observable symptoms and the cure was based on the elimination of visible symptoms. No one before him accepted, or simply considered, the idea of a real complex and varied internal world (typical of every person) and he also underlined the importance of the presence of specific sexuality functions during childhood period. In short, Freud argued that "perversion" was present even among the healthy, and that the path towards a mature and normal sexual attitude began not at puberty but at early childhood. During the 19^th century there was a forced and optimistic vision of human childhood (and obviously before) according to Positivism Theory, so it was really simple and even obvious for the other science men to attack his ideas by saying that they were perverted or even fool at all! Revolutionary and unconventional ideas are always banned as unacceptable at the beginning from society because they break old and strict ideas, changes are always difficult to accept because they bring a latent fear of the unknown. "The fact is that we're always ready to despise what we cannot understand; it's a comfortable way to simplify our problems" (Freud).

But we have to define what is the really sexuality mean according to Freud's opinion: it is not only the act of mating, but the whole world of sexual characteristics that influences our own existence and, of course, our own psychological construction, we can call it psychosexual development.

Looking at children, Freud claimed to find a number of practices which looked innocuous but were really forms of sexual activity (thumb sucking was a primary example, the implications being fairly obvious). Freud also sought to link his theory of the unconscious put forward in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and his work on hysteria by means of positing sexuality as the driving force of both neuroses (through repression) and perversion. It also included the concepts of penis envy, castration anxiety, and the Oedipus complex.

As I said before, talking about sexuality in an open way was a real revolution made by Freud, but it was also difficult to deal with problems related to this decision. Freud wanted to explore human mind and deep unconscious nature without preconceived ideas and to do that he had to abandon all conformist and strict morals (typical of his époque) that chained free thinking and new knowledge experiences. He wanted to understand human nature and not to correct it. He thought that "also if Man removed his evil impulses in his unconscious world and also if he would say to himself that he's not responsible of them, there's something that forces him to feel this responsibility as a guilty sensation that remains unknown for him". By saying this, Freud meant that every man got unconscious and irrational instincts and that it's improbable to find someone without them. This is not a way to deny human positive characteristics, on the contrary, this is a way to give importance to human deep and unknown nature without any form of prejudice. Guilty sensation, as Freud said, is often given by society. But we have also to say clearly that unconscious material is not made only by "evil" impulses… especially these ones that come from dreams. They're useful to understand our internal world, our limits and our development possibilities.

I decided to talk about Freud because I really appreciated the way he was able to break conventional psychological perception of human insight, it was a real exploration that putted a start to the unconscious discovery and that learned us that there are no limits to this exploration and to human mind speculation possibilities.

Naples, 26 February 2008 Chiara Carmelo

Napoli, 13/06/2007 Chiara Carmelo