Sexuality and Health: Contributions from Sociological Insights

Abstract

Sigmund Freud turned 150 on May 6th this year. Yet despite the advancing of years, his life's work continues to have profound significance – not least for the social sciences. While much of the world remembers Freud as the 'Father of Psychoanalysis', the significance of his work for the social sciences is deep and broad. Freud developed his research methodology – qualitative interviewing – to a high level of sophistication and opened the way for some highly original interpretations of people and our relationships with society. His writings reveal an inescapable and growing consciousness of the role that society plays (largely in his view through repression) in the construction of human sexuality, sexual identity and sexual praxis, both in health and in illness (Freud 1977).