0.2 Sigmund freud  (Page 23/37)

Following the oral, anal, and phallic stages there is a period of latency, during which progress is at a standstill. There are, however, some interesting things that happen during this period. The child knows that they are still incapable of procreation (even though this knowledge may be unconscious), so they begin to turn away from their sexual desires. They begin to view sexual impulses with disgust and shame, and to consider them immoral (Freud, 1905/1995). Although their education has much to do with this, Freud believed that it is also a natural occurrence. To compensate, the child (or the child’s mind, as this again may be entirely unconscious) engages the defense mechanism of sublimation: the conversion of the unacceptable sexual impulses into activities that are socially acceptable (such as school work or sports). Another important consequence of this mental activity is that we forget our infantile sexual impulses, something Freud called infantile amnesia . Infantile amnesia is critical to the whole theory of the development of neuroses and the technique of psychoanalysis (Freud, 1938/1949), and it is one of the main reasons that many adults insist upon denying the possibility of infantile sexuality in the first place.

With the onset of puberty, the individual enters the final stage of psychosexual development: the genital stage. If the challenges of the earlier stages have been resolved in a satisfactory way, the individual is finally capable of appropriate and mature intimacy and sexual behavior. All of the psychodynamic processing that has taken place is not gone, however. According to Freud (1938/1949), even normal people have some of the following factors included in their final psychosexual organization: some libidinal cathexes are retained, others are taken into sexual activity as preliminary acts (such as foreplay), and still others are excluded from the organization either by repression or sublimation.

Freud’s Perspective on the Female Psyche

I would like to begin this section by being fair to Freud. First and foremost, there were no other theories on the development of personality for Freud to consider as he developed his own theory. Second, most of the patients Freud saw were women, and apparently he needed to explain how it was that so many of his patients were women and not men. There were certainly other possible explanations than those offered by Freud, but it has been easy for others to look back and criticize him with the benefit of new and different ideas. One must also keep in mind that Freud was a basic scientist for many years, and he put a lot of emphasis on details. It is an undeniable, biological fact that men are male and women are female! Freud believed that psychology could never truly understand sex and gender differences unless we could understand why so many species exists as two different sexes in the first place (Freud, 1933/1965). Nonetheless, having acknowledged this, Freud’s theory does, unfortunately, describe women as the products of an incomplete and frustrated male development.