The first of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is titled “The Sexual Aberrations.” Why should Freud begin a book the main point of which is to argue for the existence of infantile sexuality with a discussion of adult perversions? (After all, the existence of the adult aberrations was not news.) I believe Freud's beginning can be usefully understood as part of an effective argumentative strategy to extend the notion of sexuality by showing how extensive it already was. Freud himself (in the preface to the fourth edition) describes the book as an attempt “at enlarging the concept of sexuality” (1903d, VII, 134). The extension involved in the notion of perversion prepares the way for the extension involved in infantile sexuality.

The book begins, on its very first page, with a statement of the popular view of the sexual instinct:

The Interpretation of Dreams is often regarded as Freud's most valuable book, and it was pivotal in his work.

Freud began his psychological investigations by following up an insight of his senior colleague Joseph Breuer. One of Breuer's patients was a very intelligent and articulate young woman diagnosed as hysterical. Breuer inquired into her symptoms in great detail, and discovered that they were connected with her emotional life in a number of ways.

In particular, she and Breuer could often trace the beginning of a symptom to an event that had been significant to her but that she had forgotten. Where this was so, moreover, the symptom itself could be seen to be connected with feelings related to this event, which she had not previously expressed. Such symptoms thus had a meaningful connection with events and motives in the patient's life. And they were relieved when she brought these events to consciousness and felt and expressed the motives connected with them.

She was, for example, afflicted for some time with an aversion to drinking, which persisted despite "tormenting thirst." She would take up the glass of water she longed for, but then push it away "like someone suffering from hydrophobia." Under hypnosis she traced this to an episode in which a companion had let a dog - a "horrid creature" - drink water from a glass. She relived the event with great anger and disgust; and when she had done so, the aversion ceased, and she was able to drink without difficulty.

Historically, psychoanalytic writing and everyday language have referred to “woman” as a unitary entity; psychoanalysis has compared “the man” to “the woman” “the boy” to “the girl.” Recent feminist and postmodernist writing has taught us to be wary of such singular referents and of theories that employ them. In particular, psychoanalysis has often been criticized for the limited class and cultural location of its clinical sample of the empirical “women” upon which its purportedly universal theory of femininity has been developed. When we interrogate Freud's writings, however, we find that his and other psychoanalytic references to “woman” are in dialogue with an emphatically plural account of a multitude of “women.” Freud's descriptions of women and of his interactions with them comprise a large cast of characters, a pantheon of higher and lesser ideal-typical goddesses and mortals to complement and accompany Oedipus, Narcissus, Moses, and others in psychological glory or ignominy. We also find actual, historically specific, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century named and nameless women in clinical cases and vignettes.

This essay enumerates these women. I describe a number of implicit axes that differentiate them. Freud describes woman as subject of her own psyche, that is, as living experiencer of self and conscious and unconscious mental processes, as subject to herself. Woman as subject expands into woman as subject-object, that is, object to her own subjectivity as she internally relates to and identifies with or against another internally experienced woman.

For many years, Freud's “seduction theory”of neurosis was seen as an erroneous if initially plausible step on his way to the mature theory of psychoanalysis, and his account of his rejection of the seduction theory was taken essentially at face value. More recently, with the increasing appreciation of child sexual abuse, classical psychoanalysis has been criticized for dismissing childhood reality as infantile fantasy, interest in the seduction theory has been revived, and Freud's motives for abandoning it have been sharply questioned. The story of the rise and fall of the seduction theory thus takes on new interest and significance. Perhaps its most crucial lesson is the importance of theory in psychoanalysis. Theoretical presuppositions played a major role in creating the theory, in causing Freud to abandon it, and in helping him produce a replacement. Theoretical considerations also explain why, though Freud never ceased believing in the reality of sexual abuse in childhood, he could not find a causal role for it once he had adopted his new theory.

The climax of the story is well known. In his letter of September 21, 1897, Freud announced to Wilhelm Fliess, "I no longer believe in my neuiotica" (1985 [1887-1904], 264), the seduction theory he had tenaciously defended for the two preceding years. His reaction to this event seemed paradoxical even to him. It was, he wrote, "the collapse of everything valuable" in his recent theoretical efforts, yet he had "more the feeling of a victory than a defeat (which is surely not right)." But it was. The famous letter was as much birth announcement as obituary. Less than two months later, Freud sent Fliess with mock fanfare the first outline of his theory of infantile sexuality and its role in the formation of neurotic symptoms in adulthood.

In the preface to Volume 14, we said that a rounded perspective on the Communist enterprise in China might be possible only after a century. An epilogue appended to the final volume of a history of China covering two thousand years is a hazardous venture. Yet to take our narrative so close to the present and not offer some contemporary reflections seems craven, even if the result will only provide harmless amusement for future historians.

In our introduction to these final two volumes, entitled "The Reunification of China," we pointed out that "a billion or so Europeans in Europe and the Americas live divided into some fifty separate and sovereign states, while more than a billion Chinese live in only one state." We rejected geography and ethnic diversity as sufficient explanations for the failure of Europeans to revive the Roman empire, as compared with the success of the Chinese in restoring theirs. We argued, rather, that the disorder of the Warring States period (403-221 B.C.) led Chinese political philosophers such as Confucius to enshrine peace and order as central ideals, thus transforming unity into an overriding political goal. Once achieved, unity was preserved by the invention of bureaucratic government. The bureaucracy's function was facilitated by the unifying symbol of the emperor and legitimized by a universal ideology of which it was the guardian.

POINTS OF CONTACT BETWEEN MARXISM AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Marxism has made two major contributions to recent moral philosophy. The first has been to stimulate a deep and wide-ranging discussion of the moral status of capitalism, provoked by the attempt to determine whether the Marxian critique of capitalism is a moral critique and, if so, on what moral ideal the critique is based. The second has been to force moral philosophers to confront the problem of ideology. Before sketching out the shape of these contributions and the lessons they bring, let us briefly consider what it is about Marxism and about moral philosophy that makes each subject to the concerns of the other.

First let us look at Marxism, which aims to be a scientific theory of social systems. Although Marx devoted the major portion of his writings to the analysis of one type of social system - capitalism - he tried to develop a science of history, an explanation of how societies arise, persist, and decline. And Marx predicted that capitalism's day would end with a revolution that would supplant it with communism. But Marxism is more than observation, analysis, and prediction. Marx was no neutral observer, no scholarly wallflower. His allegiance was to the working masses whose efforts wring from nature the conditions necessary for the survival and flourishing of every society, and he matched his written work with political activism. Moreover, Marx's partisanship is inextricable from his theoretical writings.

Social theorists tend to be remembered for their conclusions rather than the way in which they conducted their inquiries, but if we neglect to study the latter it is quite likely that we will misunderstand or misconstrue the former. Marx complained that the method he employed in Capital was “little understood” and although he attempted to clarify the nature of what he called his “dialectic” the logic of his scientific endeavor has continued to be a contentious subject (Marx, 1977: 99-103). To improve our understanding of his method and its significance in social science, a number of questions need to be addressed. What did Marx mean by dialectic? What did it look like in his work? What was the precise relationship between Marx's dialectical method and formal logic? And finally, what is the relationship between Marx's dialectic and Marxist theory?

The most direct way to get to the heart of the first three questions is to examine Marx's use of the concept of contradiction, which played a role of vital analytical significance in his work, resulting in well-known formulations such as the “contradictions of capitalism” and “class contradictions.”Dialectical philosophers claim that contradictions exist in reality and that the most appropriate way to understand the movement of that reality is to study the development of those contradictions. Formal logic denies that contradictions exist in reality, and where they are seen to exist in thought, they have to be expunged in order to arrive at the truth. This is embodied in the principle of noncontradiction, in which the presence of a contradiction in a statement or proposition invalidates its claim to truth. On the face of it, therefore, the claims of dialectical and formal logic appear to be incommensurable, and dialogue between the two systems appears to be impossible.