Radical Freud: Reconstructing the Bisexuality Thesis

Radical Freud reveals a radical dimension to Sigmund Freud’s sexual theory that has previously been neglected.

Thomas Olver argues that Freud’s radical heritage has been transformed into an orthodox school with an internal stasis that is unassailable from within but increasingly challenged from without as irrelevant. Olver offers a return to the radical elements of Freud’s work, first by reviewing the ways in which Freud’s pioneering sexual theory has been vulgarised since his death, and by recentring his texts. The bisexuality thesis is then reconstructed, based on a close reading of key texts, and contrasted with the better-known Oedipus theory. Olver then explores the philosophical and clinical consequences of this parallel line of sexual theory.

Radical Freud will be of great interest to psychoanalysts as well as to academics and scholars of psychoanalytic studies, gender and queer studies, sociology, anthropology, history and philosophy.

Thomas Olver is an independent researcher and translator living in Pretoria, South Africa. He studied modern languages, comparative literature and psychology at Pretoria, Witwatersrand and Zurich. He favours a collaborative approach to epistemology. His research and teaching interests include psychoanalysis, semiotics, aesthetics, narratology, modern literature, translation and the history of ideas.