The Shadow of the Other

Abstract

This article analyzes, in the work of Sigmund Freud, the approach between sexuality and morality. Several passages from his early writings link the formation of neuroses to the impossibility of satisfying instinctive impulses, due to the norms that govern common life and delimit the antagonistic fields of permitted and prohibited. The study of fantasies and childhood sexuality, however, will introduce another dimension, specifically psychoanalytic, into what until then had been a certainly liberal position, but within the limits of what was tolerable within the framework of bourgeois society.