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The Oedipus Complex has been one of the most influential, controversial, and deeply misunderstood ideas ever conceived. We see references to it everywhere, yet no one seems to be able to properly explain it. In Modern American Psychology, Psychoanalytic theory is dismissed and students are never really encouraged to seriously study the ideas of Freud and post-Freudian thinkers. Every Psych "expert" I know dismisses psychoanalytic theory and Freud outright, like it was astrology, but has never bothered to do the actual work of reading and wrestling with it and trying to understand it for what it really is. It's become an almost religious, dogmatic attitude in American Psychology. There's plenty of other places to discuss why psychoanalytic theory is treated as forbidden quackery, but this thread is for actually educating what psychoanalytic theory is actually all about. Put aside your prejudices for a moment, this is not to argue about the validity or effectiveness of psychoanalytic theory, it's simply to explain what psychoanalytic theory is. The title of the thread is about Oedipus, because it is the crucial core element of psychoanalytic theory. It could be called the fundamental concept of psychoanalysis. It's also the most controversial and most misunderstood. Thus, I think it needs the most explaining. I enjoy studying Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis and it would be my pleasure to answer your questions about psychoanalysis and Oedipus Complex.
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Oct 8, 2016 11:18
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Commie NedFlanders posted:In Modern American Psychology, Psychoanalytic theory is dismissed and students are never really encouraged to seriously study the ideas of Freud and post-Freudian thinkers. You do know that Division 39 of the American Psychological Association is devoted exclusively to psychoanalysis? The situation is hardly that stark, in spite of what the Lacanians say.
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Oct 8, 2016 12:18
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Numerical Anxiety posted:You do know that Division 39 of the American Psychological Association is devoted exclusively to psychoanalysis? The situation is hardly that stark, in spite of what the Lacanians say. yes I'm aware, but in Psych programs in universities across the country psychoanalysis is still dismissed, ask the ten thousand goons with psych degrees on SA
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Oct 8, 2016 14:20
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I agree with Noam Chomsky that Lacan was a fraud.quote:What you’re referring to is what’s called “theory.” And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing–using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying. Jacques Lacan I actually knew. I kind of liked him. We had meetings every once in awhile. But quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential.
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Oct 8, 2016 14:37
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Freud was a pioneer in the study of human mental health but inevitably a lot of what he said turned out to be Dumb and Wrong. See Isaac Newton for a similar example of a pioneer in a field who also believed a lot of things we now know to be utter crap.
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Oct 8, 2016 14:41
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Commie NedFlanders posted:yes I'm aware, but in Psych programs in universities across the country psychoanalysis is still dismissed, ask the ten thousand goons with psych degrees on SA Yes, but the majority of Psych programs in the US are research-oriented, and don't really give more than lip service to clinical practice. Who gives a drat what they think? The importance of psychoanalysis is as a therapeutic approach. The monopoly of yesterday is gone, and that's probably a good thing - it's an extremely expensive and extremely long form of therapy, for many patients it would amount to using a sledgehammer to pound in a nail - but it still has its place, whether as psychoanalysis proper, or in the analytically derived psychodynamic therapies.
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Oct 8, 2016 16:26
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I psychoanalyse that you had an axe to grind when you made this thread, so you may as well post your thoughts on the Oedipus complex. Better get in quick before you attract PhD level mother jokes disguised as questions.
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Oct 9, 2016 11:56
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What degrees and education do you have specifically on this subject?
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Oct 9, 2016 12:13
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How is Lacanian psychoanalysis actually used in a therapeutic environment anyway? I studied him from a lit theory perspective, and his ideas can make for compelling readings of literature. But compared to Freud or Jung, where it's easy to imagine how their ideas apply to an actual therapy session with a patient, I have no clue how it would actually go for Lacan. I might be misremembering the line, but I believe he even said something along the lines of not actually being that interested in curing people, compared to studying them.
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Oct 9, 2016 14:04
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what is the oedipus complex, op?
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Oct 9, 2016 19:54
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How's your relationship with your dad, OP?
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Oct 9, 2016 20:44
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How much cocaine am I going to need to "get" this thread?
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Oct 11, 2016 08:00
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How does one resolve the Oedipus complex OP?
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Oct 14, 2016 00:21
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I killed my mother and hosed my father  Can you give me some tips to prevent this from happening again with my children?
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Oct 14, 2016 02:21
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Knobb Manwich posted:I killed my mother and hosed my father Those things that came out of your dad, they're not children. So no problem there. Nevertheless, I recommend refusing the advances of those little temptations all the same.
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Oct 14, 2016 04:26
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Can we make Julia Ann the patron saint of this thread?
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Oct 16, 2016 02:27
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Numerical Anxiety posted:Those things that came out of your dad, they're not children. So no problem there. Nevertheless, I recommend refusing the advances of those little temptations all the same. I was being quiet hoping the OP would reappear, but as they're missing, FYI I greatly enjoyed this post.
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Oct 23, 2016 13:20
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Please return OP and say some interesting poo poo. Also echoing who actually are you, in the context of this subject? We can all read Wikipedia.ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Freud was a pioneer in the study of human mental health but inevitably a lot of what he said turned out to be Dumb and Wrong. See Isaac Newton for a similar example of a pioneer in a field who also believed a lot of things we now know to be utter crap. Can you expand here? I find it loving annoying on here when people talk like an authority but do so in a cute way and say actually nothing. It's got an air of assumed knowledge and you're so confident that you don't even need to state your ideas. I don't care what the popular opinion is, I want to know the logic behind it so I can decide if I agree. Tell us why Freud is Dumb and Wrong. Tony Montana fucked around with this message at 13:38 on Nov 3, 2016 |
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Nov 3, 2016 13:32
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Tony Montana posted:Please return OP and say some interesting poo poo. Also echoing who actually are you, in the context of this subject? We can all read Wikipedia. I can (sort of) weigh in on this as I've had an interest in psychology, done a lot of reading, and have been dating a therapist for the past 8 years of my life (she has a master's and has studied Freud at length on her own). Freud had great ideas, he was huge on talk therapy, unconscious mind (we are not masters of our own mind), compartmentalization of the brain (aka the brain can be divided up into parts that do/cause different things), and maybe other stuff that I don't remember. He was also wrong/misguided, likely in part due to the times he lived in, about a lot of things, or, perhaps, he was right and we've just had a societal shift that makes him look wrong in retrospect! (probably not the case) He said that deep down all boys lust after their mother and hate their father, which honestly is difficult to prove either way, but has become accepted as incorrect. His id, ego, superego theories have also been tossed out because there is no supporting evidence. The stages of human development (oral, anal, phallic and genital) that he came up with have also been tossed out as ridiculous notions. Basically he had thoughts about gender and sexuality that seem, in this day and age, extremely misguided. He believed homosexuality was caused by stunting the progress of the developmental stages and that women that could not climax from vaginal intercourse alone were stunted in their developmental growth as well. Freud was (or at least seems to have been) a very misogynistic dude, talks about women having penis envy that can only be "resolved" by being a mother with a male son. Honestly there's other stuff I could probably write another 10 paragraphs on stuff he did right, partially right and wrong, but this is an overall gist of it.
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Nov 3, 2016 20:05
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Thanks. Geez, he's caught up a lot in sex, isn't he.. I knew some of this stuff but I do like hearing it from people that know more than me. The thing about not being able to climax from vaginal alone makes you a fuckup is pretty crazy, Dan Savage will happily tell anyone that'll listen that it's the minority of women that can do that. That penis envy thing is interesting though, I get the horribly politically incorrect connotations and the squirming it would create.. but as someone that knows a number of mothers personally, there might be something there. But the whole 'homosexuality is a fuckup' can't be validated in anyway, we just don't think that way anymore. Read something like The Forever War or even Brave New World and modern thinking might actually go the opposite way. As for the OP, looking at his regdate I don't know how much experience he has here. Yes, there are literally tens of thousands of drooling retards on these forums but there are also a ton of well educated, intelligent people. The OP might have realized they aren't going to really be explaining much and more defending his ideas against people that already understand the concepts.
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Nov 4, 2016 03:22
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Tony Montana posted:Thanks. Geez, he's caught up a lot in sex, isn't he.. As someone with actual clinical psychoanalytic training, the very pervasive assumption that Freud's ideas are psychoanalysis now and forever is kind of depressing. He was the founder, he's important, but he also talked a fair amount of poo poo. There have been a hundred or so years or refinement both of the theory and of the practice, which has both elaborated on Freud where it could and discarded where it couldn't. Most contemporary analysts pay very little attention to the Oedipus complex. It's like saying that because Newton had all those crazy alchemical ideas, physics is bullshit.
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Nov 4, 2016 05:00
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Hrm, so that seems all very sensible. Do you have any more than this, OP?
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Nov 4, 2016 05:25
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Yorkshire Pudding posted:What degrees and education do you have specifically on this subject? I have a bachelors degree in psychology from UT Austin but most of what i know of psychoanalytic theory comes from independent study
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Nov 6, 2016 11:14
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Farg posted:what is the oedipus complex, op? Oedipus is about desire, pleasure, fantasy. It is an experience which forms the human subject. It is the core of neuroses, obsessions, phobias, and other maladaptive problems in adulthood. There are conscious and unconscious elements to it. It comes in stages, first when the child is very young and forming a basic ego. Gender identification takes place here. It reappears later in puberty. it occurs differently for boys and for girls, there is a unique sort of logic to each.
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Nov 6, 2016 11:30
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fantastic in plastic posted:How's your relationship with your dad, OP? i plead the fifth commandment
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Nov 6, 2016 11:32
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Commie NedFlanders posted:I have a bachelors degree in psychology from UT Austin but most of what i know of psychoanalytic theory comes from independent study Independent study like continuing professional education in the context of patient care, or independent study like you've done a bunch of reading without discussing it with colleagues in your field and have decided that you alone understand the complexity of this system of thought for some reason? What do you do for work? Other than your thoughts on this particular issue, how often and in what ways do you engage with the professional communities that practice psychotherapy?
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Nov 7, 2016 03:37
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Dogfish posted:Independent study like continuing professional education in the context of patient care, or independent study like you've done a bunch of reading without discussing it with colleagues in your field and have decided that you alone understand the complexity of this system of thought for some reason? the latter but i don't think i understand it all. a big part of the reason i made this thread was to simultaneously clarify the most common misconceptions about psychoanalytic theory and explain the foundations and basics, while getting critical feedback to help me in directing my own continued education. quote:What do you do for work? Other than your thoughts on this particular issue, how often and in what ways do you engage with the professional communities that practice psychotherapy? i don't work in the psych field
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Nov 7, 2016 05:30
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MF_James posted:I can (sort of) weigh in on this as I've had an interest in psychology, done a lot of reading, and have been dating a therapist for the past 8 years of my life (she has a master's and has studied Freud at length on her own). Freud had great ideas, he was huge on talk therapy, unconscious mind (we are not masters of our own mind), compartmentalization of the brain (aka the brain can be divided up into parts that do/cause different things), and maybe other stuff that I don't remember. He was also wrong/misguided, likely in part due to the times he lived in, about a lot of things, or, perhaps, he was right and we've just had a societal shift that makes him look wrong in retrospect! (probably not the case) this is why i made this thread, very well educated people will just gloss over this and go "ew" and move on without giving it the serious academic rigor that is justified by the impact of his work. The incestuous desire of the boy isn't the same as adult sexuality. your typical neurotic will believe that there is a clear a strong distinct difference between pleasure/enjoyment and "getting off". the child has no such concepts, the child simply wants the mother, wants her body, wants physical contact and love and attention. the child's first desire is a bodily desire, a carnal desire, but not a desire that can be equated to proper adult sexuality. think about it, before birth the child is essentially in Nirvana (this is the myth the child yearns for), one complete totality, connected to his universe which loves him. so the first experiences that a human being has is an experience of irreparable loss, and the object of infantile incestuous desire is nothing more than the fantasy of this united totality with the mother. The child simply wants to be made whole again with the mother. the presumed lacking something, which is needed, is the Phallus, it's what the child imagines it has when it feels powerful, in motion, in control, able to have things. Phallus is never simply a penis it's more of an imaginary thing which one possesses which gives them power. the basic binary notion the child understands is having/not-having : satisfaction/privation : phallus/lack the child thus wants to "have" his mother, to literally possess her what sets the oedipal complex into motion in the young child is when the child discovers that not only is itself not whole, but the mother is lacking something as well, as evidenced by the mother having desire. the child then enters a phase of wanting to be the object of the mothers' desire, to be the Phallus itself, which the Father prohibits. the whole idea of the child wanting to be rid of the father and the child experiencing castration anxiety has more to do with the child having to accept that it cannot be Complete, it cannot have access to the mother in such a way as to grant full enjoyment. the child imagines that the father possesses something which is the object of the mothers' desire, because her desire is directed towards him. what the child strives for, which the Father prohibits, is raw enjoyment, excess enjoyment, enjoyment that threatens to annihilate the child - jouissance the child never actually experiences it as enjoyment, but imagines it as such. for the child to enter into the symbolic order and to acquire language and function in society properly, it is necessary that the father function prohibits the child from accessing jouissance, since the child can not be one with the mother, it accepts an alternate path to enjoyment which is proper enjoyment and desire the child rejects the mother as an object of desire and is now able to find enjoyment in other things and love in other people. quote:His id, ego, superego theories have also been tossed out because there is no supporting evidence. they are simply a framework for discussing psychic phenomenon not something meant to subjected to rigid empiricism. the problem with trying to analyzed our minds this way is that we are trying to scientifically examine something which is outside of the realm of proper science. it has led to a bunch of broken, piecemeal, contradictory theories that offer little insights into the human experience but rather strange little brain hacks and ways to exploit people. quote:The stages of human development (oral, anal, phallic and genital) that he came up with have also been tossed out as ridiculous notions. those are actually oedipal phases, they aren't grand stages of human development, it's all done in early childhood quote:Basically he had thoughts about gender and sexuality that seem, in this day and age, extremely misguided. He believed homosexuality was caused by stunting the progress of the developmental stages and that women that could not climax from vaginal intercourse alone were stunted in their developmental growth as well. Freud was (or at least seems to have been) a very misogynistic dude, talks about women having penis envy that can only be "resolved" by being a mother with a male son. this is a shining example of what i'm talking about. people are "taught" so many things about psychoanalysis but rarely actually investigate it themselves. have you read much actual psychoanalytic literature yourself? like have you read the work of psychoanalysts and theorists?
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Nov 7, 2016 05:57
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That could be in the top ten stupidest things I've ever heard.
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Nov 7, 2016 11:01
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How do you feel about the racist bake sale
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Nov 7, 2016 11:02
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This has to be a troll Nobody who actually reads this stuff would write whole paragrahs without any capitalisation. Its like saying its normal for a racing driver to not be able to park Tony Montana fucked around with this message at 11:50 on Nov 7, 2016 |
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Nov 7, 2016 11:48
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Here, I'll try to present it in a literate way, without jumping into stupid Lacanian jargon. Note that this is just the basic Freudian picture of the Oedipus complex, without any of the later revisions, which is no longer taken to be a general framework in analysis, 1. It's important to note that we're assuming two heterosexual parents - much easier to do in 1900 than today, but that's the way it is. 2. Human children are remarkably incompetent, and for a much longer period that really every other animal. Especially in the first years of life, the human infant is totally dependent upon its parents for survival, and for pleasure. Left to its own devices, it dies. 3. In the early years of life, infantile thought processes are really without any nuance at all. Good things are loved absolutely, and bad things are hated to such an unfiltered extent that adults really can't comprehend how extreme it is. 4. The mother is the child's first love-object, because she feeds the kid, cleans it, plays with it; all pleasure and life come from her, since the child can't get any of these things for itself. The mother is thought to the best thing in the universe, because from her, life, pleasure and all good things come. 5. The father is also important, because he too can bring the child survival and pleasure. But, there's a problem. Little kids are extraordinarily selfish. Sharing is incomprehensible, especially at the earliest stages of life, If there's a good thing, I want it, and no one else should have it. And as will become apparent, mommy and daddy love one another as well as me. This is intolerable, but at the same time, the kid can't tell its parents to gently caress off, since it's still dependent upon them. What we get is ambivalence - I love my objects (when they pay attention to me and me alone) and I hate them (when they pay attention to anything else). 6. The child's love for its objects extends in two ways, possession and identification. I want to have mother completely at my disposal, for my pleasure and I want to be her, (i.e. the one who has all the good stuff at my disposal for myself), and the same goes for father. It gets complicated because insofar as I identify with mother, I want father (because she wants him); identification with one parent reinforces the desire for the other. And note that the child wants to possess and identifies with both parents at the same time. 7. Having both sides of the identification-possession triangle going at the same time is confusing and contradictory, so generally the child abandons one side of the interaction. Usually (for little boys and for little girls, initially), this leads to identification with the father and desire to possess the mother. Relations here are still very conflicted - I admire and love dad, but also hate him because he has access to mother that I don't. So we have a conflicted and confusing state where the father is loved as a model and hated as a rival. It can, however, go the other way. 8. Again, because children's though processes are very simple, if something pisses the child off, its response is an extreme "I want it to go away forever and never come back, so I have can have mom's love all to myself." Kids are not very good at thinking about silly things like the future and consequences - they live mostly in the moment. But if the kid shows any of this aggression against the father, chances are he or she will get punished. This reinforces the idea of rivalry, but also makes very clear that the playing field is not level; the father is so much more capable than the child, who becomes fearful and anxious that his or her hatred and aggression will get him in so in trouble that father and mother will abandon him or her, and there will be no more love forever. 9. Most kids will figure out that this is unsustainable because of their own fear and anxiety, and also because of increasing cognitive development. It gives up the mother as exclusive love object, and broadens its horizon as it leaves the exclusive space of the home. It discovers new love objects, and figures that when it grows up, it can be like daddy and have someone like mommy, but not mommy herself. One goes looking for love after the model of earliest childhood, searching for something that will be like the mother of earliest childhood, who loved the child unconditionally, asked nothing in return, and showered love and affection on it. That was probably all in the infant's fantasies for starters, and even if it wasn't, no one is ever going to love you like that again. We idealize our love objects later in life, pretending than they're better than they really are, trying to recreate the lost infantile state. It's not that I want my mother specifically, I want that absolute love where I just had to sit there are scream for her to come running with love and comfort. Now, this aspect of the thing isn't conscious, but still, in looking for love, adults are looking for an absolute; hence why love is always disappointing. Most people can make it work by compromising enough, but even so, there's an element of phantasy that sustains the whole thing whose expectations can never be met.
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Nov 7, 2016 14:03
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Thanks for presenting it in a readable not-nonsense way, Numerical Anxiety! And wow, that's some craziness. I don't know much about his life, but I can't imagine Freud had much experience with children? It starts to diverge pretty sharply from reality at around point three, and then just jumps off the fantasy cliff at point five. Or, at least, it doesn't even begin to apply to any child I personally have ever dealt with, including my own. Maybe kids in Freud's day were just different. It definitely makes sense that people would drop it from serious consideration if the fundamental bits are going to rest on alien and unfamiliar behaviours.
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Nov 7, 2016 19:09
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GlyphGryph posted:Thanks for presenting it in a readable not-nonsense way, Numerical Anxiety! Honestly, much of the points regarding categorical thinking and selfishness amongst infants has been born out by people who study early attachment patterns. The thing is, adults tend to judge children's behavior as if it were more sophisticated than it is. Development entails losing the ability to think in that kind of simplistic way; and, of course, people tend to view children, especially their own, with rose-tinted glasses. Now. whether things are still that simplistic at ages 3-5, when Freud positioned the Oedipus Complex is debatable at best. The triangular object relation is more what is open to doubt, and I think no one believes today that the Oedipus situation is the kernel of all neurosis. You run across cases where someone has Oedipal issues animating their problems, but these are far from being the majority, let alone universal.
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Nov 8, 2016 14:43
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I'm not saying 1-5 year olds aren't stupid and selfish, but that rests on assumptions way more extreme than anything born out by reality. Simply from a behavioural perspective, children past 1 actually actively seek out and enjoy sharing within certain contexts, so the idea of it being "incomprehensible" is ludicrous on the face of it. There's plenty of situations where they aren't willing to do it, but plenty of others where they are, and anything that rests on the assumption that the concept in general is incomprehensible isn't operating on all cylinders unless you're using some super special jargonistic version of sharing that has no relation to the way regular people use the term. Additionally, there are obviously things children have mixed feelings on, even in the moment. Desire tempered by fear, and fear tempered by curiosity are both super common states. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what is meant by a lack of nuance, here, and the argument is just that both feelings are felt to extreme amounts simultaneously? GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 15:54 on Nov 8, 2016 |
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Nov 8, 2016 15:52
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Even shorter summary: Parental incest is detrimental to evolutionary success. If it were basic to all humans, we'd be inbred idiots. While not denying that some adults may have sexual issues related to parental figures, to interpret and assign complex sexual feelings to infants and toddlers is absurd. There is no testable theory involved, so you may as well attribute the behavior to the Flying Ravioli Monster. Freud was revolutionary the way Aristotle was, in that he is the first recorded instance of looking at some problems in a certain way. Just as we don't really have four humors controlling our body, we don't really have conflicts relating to early sexual tensions with our parents. Anyone who thinks the Oedipus/Electra Complex is real is totally on the same level as your college roommate who thought the matrix was real. Interesting thought experiment, but no basis in reality.
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Nov 13, 2016 04:30
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Oh man can we PLEASE have a no-holds-barred evopsych vs Freud cage match?
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Nov 13, 2016 05:06
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I'm not sure they are talking about sexual feelings. Having control of their attention sounds closer, as in, this person is completely at my beck and call, and then getting pissy when they don't in fact have that. I dunno I find this hard to understand, possibly because I'm dumb, likely because it's a crock.
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Nov 13, 2016 05:22
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Knobb Manwich posted:I'm not sure they are talking about sexual feelings. Having control of their attention sounds closer, as in, this person is completely at my beck and call, and then getting pissy when they don't in fact have that. I dunno I find this hard to understand, possibly because I'm dumb, likely because it's a crock. The works of Freud make it pretty clear that he is talking quite specifically and directly about sexual feelings; he saw the human libido as innate and present at birth. Where adults experience human libido specifically through sex, Freud conceptualized pre-mature sexual libido under a model he termed polymorphous perversity in which infants and children can derive sexual gratification through means other than adult-genital contact. It's through subsequent social conditioning, though, that children learn to derive pleasure through socially acceptable norms which culminates in typical sexual impulse by adulthood. Absent a social context, though, Freud believed that sexuality would remain disambiguated and deriving sexual pleasure through incest, various forms of touching, fetishism etc would be the norm. Where children represent the "natural" state of sexual gratification, adults represent a socially constrained and artificial state of sexuality and it is through this social limiting that psychoses develop. Freud taught that the natural state of sexual limitation created a basal level of sexual repression and thus psychoses in everyone, in children who are robbed of the ability to sublimate their polymorphic sexuality during a time when it's socially acceptable for them, you get even more adult psychoses because even more sexual repression has taken place. The Oedipus complex merely sits within his larger model of undifferentiated sexuality; it's the consequence of having an undifferentiated sexuality directed at a socially unacceptable target (the opposite sex parent) and having that sexuality rejected. Freud believed this process of rejection would be attributed, by children, to the competing influence of the same-sex parent (as opposed to the socially unacceptable nature of a child-parent pairing) and the logical response is the child's desire to get rid of the same sex parent. Eventually social influence takes over and the child has no outward desire to attain sexual gratification with their opposite sex parent but they retain an unconscious desire to because, in Freud's model, sexual desire is never eliminated, it's only repressed. Our natural way of dealing with this unconscious desire, then, is to seek mates with qualities similar to our opposite sex parents. In psychoanalysis, this has been revised heavily; where Freud talked very specifically and directly about sexual impulses, subsequent theorists conceptualized this as a competition for attention from the opposite sex parent. Basically, as we grow older, we retain the desire to have their care and attention focused on us but we actually get less attention as we develop autonomy. Some people don't cope with this well and develop various psychoses due to their perceptions of rejection as their parents did the normally age appropriate steps of giving them less and less attention as they aged. As for the following quote:Even shorter summary: Parental incest is detrimental to evolutionary success. If it were basic to all humans, we'd be inbred idiots Freud actually addressed this by suggesting that the social taboos against our "natural" sexuality evolved as a defense mechanism to the threats that our natural sexuality posed to us, the human animal. He generally spoke of "perversion" (his term) in morally ambiguous terms and suggested that late 1800's society was instrumental in the development of a lot of sexually-based psychiatric disturbance, he also acknowledged the harms that could be caused by fully embracing this perversion. *edit* This thread doesn't get many replies so I'm happy letting it die but psychoanalysis did form a small part of my study in psychology and I can speak to some questions people have on the topic. It's rubbish insofar as it doesn't generate testable hypotheses and everything it explains can be better accounted for by contemporary theories but often the purpose of any psychological model is more to generate a shared understanding and language of a problem so that a therapist can communicate the goals and direction of therapy to a patient. Admittedly the Oedipus complex is one of those "out-there" theories but there are some psychoanalytic models which do inform workable treatment models. When you consider that a lot of the "success" of therapy is attributable to the rapport between the patient and doctor and the sharing of goals and information independent of psychological model used, there are some psychoanalysts who practice using outdated models and yet still enjoy therapeutic success with their patients. If you consider a goal of therapy to simply engender psychological literacy in a patient allowing them to think more analytically and systematically about their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, than psychoanalysis can be a framework to help a patient think about their own mental state. Serrath fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Nov 13, 2016 |
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Nov 13, 2016 06:22
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This is completely anecdotal, but the only Freudian I've ever met took the view of "who can truly say what is mentally healthy or not who are we to judge? We can never know." While I agree to an extent, I think we can agree that things like suicidal ideation and hallucinations of your dog telling you to kill your family because they're agents of Satan and won't really die are, in fact, not healthy. He "didn't necessarily" agree. Also he had a PhD in Psychology.
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Nov 13, 2016 07:16
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