0.2 Sigmund freud  (Page 27/37)

Making this removed comforting contact with men and feeling the relief it gave me as my life as a man went on was not a sign of having joined the overclass, for whom superiority is assumed and bucking up unnecessary. It was more like joining a union. It was the counterpart to and the refuge from my excruciating dates, which were often alienating and grating enough to make me wonder whether getting men and women together amicably on a permanent basis wasn’t at times like brokering Middle East peace.

I believe we are that different in agenda, in expression, in outlook, in nature, so much so that I can’t help almost believing, after having been Ned, that we live in parallel worlds, that there is at bottom really no such thing as that mystical unifying creature we call a human being, but only male human beings and female human beings, as separate as sects. (pgs. 281-282; Vincent, 2006)

As an indication of how popular this topic continues to be, shortly after Ms. Vincent published her book she was interviewed on the popular news/comedy show The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. I guess it’s important to keep smiling as we struggle through the many challenges of male/female relationships.

Freud’s perspectives on women have created a great deal of negativity toward him and his theory, particularly among women. But should we judge Freud so harshly? It was common in the society in which he lived to consider women as the “weaker sex.” In his practice, most of the patients he saw were female, so he needed his theory to explain why most of the people with psychological disorders were women (at least, that’s what he thought). Granted he had made fundamental errors by not realizing that men might be avoiding help for psychological problems because of the culture and by not recognizing that women might be suffering from oppression caused by men, but since there were no other theories to compare his own ideas to, it is easy to condemn him. However, those theorists who began to address the cultural issues, like Adler and Horney, had Freud’s theory for comparison. Horney in particular also had a growing body of research on anthropology and sociology to draw on. So as much as Adler and Horney may have disagreed with Freud, he still laid the foundation for their work and the work of many others.

Psychoanalysis

Most psychologists today make a distinction that Freud seldom, if ever, made. We refer to all theoretical perspectives related to the views of Sigmund Freud as psychodynamic theories, reserving the term psychoanalysis for the therapeutic method developed by Freud. Freud simply referred to both his theories and his therapy as psychoanalysis. This may well have resulted from the fact that Freud began as a therapist, and only developed his theories in order to explain why certain approaches worked and others did not. It may also have something to do with the fact that Freud’s personality theories came first, and so there was no need in his mind to distinguish his views from the work of others. Whatever the reason, for our purposes we will use the term psychoanalysis to refer to the therapeutic method developed by Freud, which was uniquely different from the techniques already in use by people such as Breuer and Charcot. I would also like to note that many of the references in this section cite the book co-authored by Freud and Breuer (1895/2004). However, the citations come from a portion of the book written by Freud alone, and in which he takes personal credit for the work. Therefore, we need to acknowledge that although the book is published as the work of both men, it contains mostly each man’s individual work, and only the “Preliminary Statement” is co-authored by Freud and Breuer. This point is by no means a small one, because it was at this point in their careers that the two men went their separate ways.