Pansexualism is a hypothesis in

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

"that regards all desire and interest as derived from hesex instinct" or, in other words, "that the sex instinct plays the primary part in all human activity, mental and physical". Pansexualism, as a hypothesis, is the norm in the early psychological school of

Freudian Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts i ...

or classical

psychoanalysis PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might b ...

. According to Sigmund Freud, a defining characteristic of humans is an overdeveloped sexual instinct, an excess that is said to explain the existence of human culture. The notion of pansexualism identifies the concept of eroticism as the leading human motivation. The thinker Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller used the term to explain the aesthetic and sensual civilization that reconciled sensuality with reason.

References

Psychoanalytic theory Pansexuality {{sex-stub