Freud's Oedipal Complex example essay topic

has his, rather than believing it is possible that they had them and lost them, the boy convinces himself that they have them, but they are located somewhere else on the body. He spends an immense amount of time looking for the physical penis, and at some point gives up on finding it, but transfers it to something a woman does have -- long hair, or pointed high heels, or any other object representing her power and her missing phallus for him. Without the presence of this object, the adult male cannot experience sexual release, it is an integral part of his psychological concept of the woman he is with, and without it, she is castrated in his eyes. Although a fetish is a more common perversion in males, it can occur in females as well, who as girls avoiding recognizing their own lack of a penis by substituting some other object for it in their mind (long braids, perhaps, or a necklace). Like sadomasochism, fetishism is a form of sexuality that does not recognize difference between genders, or difference, fundamentally, at all. Many people are skeptical of Freud because he so often refers to childhood sexuality, and the concept meshes poorly with our beliefs about what children are like.

In order to appreciate what Freud was trying to say about people and sexuality, as opposed to what it sounds like, here is a definition of Freudian sexuality beginning with the LIBIDO. Freud believed that the root of all desire and demand was to to attain pleasure, which he called sexual. Though this is added commentary, in reading Freud it often seems that what he refers to as "sexual fulfillment" could as easily be read as "intense" or "central" fulfillment, for both children and adults. Freud may have chosen to use the word sexual because the sexual drive is one of the strongest ones in human experience and relating what he spoke of to that drive may have emphasized how strong he believed our desires to be fulfilled are. Freud believed all energy was sexual in this sense, and came out from the LIBIDO, or core of sexual drives, into the world seeking fulfillment. It can be channeled and controlled in many ways, but the LIBIDO cannot run rampant (which ties in with castration), because if everyone always did exactly what it took to get exactly what they wanted, there would be no civilization.

Freud did not want people to free up libidinal energies, quite the opposite, he believed that a healthy individual had their libido sublimated into many controlled subroutines that gave them some pleasure, while avoiding going after the things they really wanted which would have involved acts abhorrent to civilizations, such as incest, rape, murder, stealing, etc. A libido that has been civilized gives its owner all the drive and power to succeed and accomplish great things, but a wild libido that devotes most of its energy to getting exactly what it wants, unaltered by rules and reality, only ruins the owner's life. The LIBIDO leads into the last Freudian term covered here: the OEDIPAL COMPLEX. Even if you haven't heard of the Oedipal Complex, you " ve heard that little boys like their mothers better than their fathers and little girls like their fathers better than their mothers, and sometime just before puberty, it switches and boys like their fathers and girls like their mothers. Anyone looking for this sort of behavior can find a million and one examples of it, whether or not it is actually true, and whether or not Freud's Oedipal Complex really explains it. Freud constructed a model of psychosexual development beginning with the birth of a boy and his attachment to his mother, or mother-substitute.

While he is a newborn, the mother's attention to it is nearly unbroken by any interruption: her identity and role in life consists of taking care of the infant and nothing else. She, after a fashion, lives for the child. As time progresses and he is less fragile, and the mother more used to his presence, so she begins to spend more time with others, including and typically mostly, the father, or a father substitute. Once she is gone, her son understands what it means not to have her complete attention and immediately wants it back. He wants to be everything to her, and seeing what his father is to her -- her lover -- he wants to assume that role in addition to his previous role. Hence the condensation of the Oedipal complex that you will hear all the time: He wants to kill his father and marry his mother.

Freud outlined a similar process for little girls, involving the father as the figure they desired to marry, but even he admitted the shortcoming of that theory, and later Freudian analysts considering the possibility that all children, male and female, want their mother's sole attention, and want to be their father, at least initially.