Desire For The Mother example essay topic

The connection of mothering with the sexuality can be found it to take a closer look on the sexual drives of both sexes, male and female. The point is that women and men are raised to need each other for the survival (for the means of reproduction of human species) and so seek intimacy with one another, which is the primary instinct to have children and therefore to transmit their genetic code. Still we are unable to fulfill each others needs because of the social organization of parenting (women is mother). Both sexes are looking for a return to the emotional and physical union with the mother.

Men simultaneously seek and fear exclusivity. Women have different and more complex relational needs that an exclusive relationship with a man cannot fulfill, even if it would be primary. Therefore, the two structural principles of the family are in contradiction with each other. The family reproduces itself in form but at the same time undercuts itself in content. People form heterosexual couples, even though both males and females are parented mostly by women, these heterosexual relationships are strained and difficult.

In earlier times, the father was less absent, the family was centered on production, and the sexes were economically interdependent, as both men and women were gaining together all that they might need for survival. The heterosexual asymmetry did not overwhelm the family. With industrial capitalism, however, the family has become primarily emotionally important, isolated, and mobile. Men were the workers, who were earning the means of survival for the whole family and women turned out to be their supporters and helpers, generally being at home. Other primary relationships are less available.

That is the reason to concentrate on the discussion of heterosexual object, which may give some explanations on this issue. Chodorow book makes a trace between a girls gender development and her relationship with the mother. For instance, boys have more advantages of being loved by mother and more possibilities to be detached from the mother. The solution on this issue can be found if to transform girls jealousy of male choices into heterosexual drive. The jealousy primarily describes female heterosexuality and this point of view is quite similar to the Freud's studies.

The ground for such a decision can be viewed through the prism of general socially accepted principle of male dominance. The only thing that the girl can offer to men (in her unconscious understanding) is sex on the first place and after it for the means of reproduction. Freudian psychoanalysis is different from the focusing the view on emotional and physical investments of cognitive structures, while it does not depend on the cognitive interpretations. Chodorow has brought the new approach, but the similarity is quite distinguishable.

Unlike many followers of neo-Freudian approach, Chodorow can speak of Oedipal conflict without having relation with sexism. She prefers not to use Freudian circularity, which relies on the admiration of observed phallus es and therefore makes clearer and more precise study on the topic. Chodorow is more consistent and less random, while still leaving the whole process uncertain enough to permit an individual to imagine homosexuals. Basically, the girls desire for a man results from the desire for the mother. There should be many widely shared values of the relationship between man and woman, which will result into the reproduction existence. For the desire of a girl to reproduce and to become mother there should be a link that will be created in the act of reproduction mainly, which again support the idea of the greater desire for men.

Motherhood should be desired by the girl as a part of normal development of a girl as not an individual but as physical object, but it is separate from womanhood, which is the development of personality mainly. Actually, Chodorow is not construct all these conditions and values into a question until the epilogue, which was quite late for the correct understanding of the book..