So today we've been guided through to wonderful world of psychobabble and all the wonderful bollocks that goes with it. Freud, to me, comes across as a bit of a knob in all honesty. Even if we ignore his blatant hating on women folk (of which there was an awful lot), the idea that everything can be traced back to sexual repression and wanting to tap my Mum is laughable. The human brain is far more complex than that, as science has shown. Yes we have primal urges, but these run right at the background of our mind in our lower brain functions.
Religion also plays a major part in Freud's psychobabble, especially in regards to his analysis of women. Most mainstream religions repress women, especially the Abrahamic religions, which Freud thought to be a good thing. According to Freud, women are miserable creatures as their sexual functions are so appalling (aka periods) and so are themselves self-repressed due to this horrible act (everything is about sex, remember?). They also wish they were men and have this thing called "penis envy". That doesn't mean they see a guys dick in the shower rooms and think "Oooh, look at him. Wish I was as big as that". No, this is that they wish they just had a penis as vaginas are horrible things that bleed every month.
This is all quite frankly bollocks. I'm yet to come across a woman who craves to have a cock attached to her and while periods are kind of shitty, I doubt they cause women to become disgusted at themselves. No doubt there are women who wish they were men, but there are also men who wish they were women. Freud would probably just say they wanted to shag their Mum's but couldn't so they just wanted to be like her or something equally bizzarre.
While Freud is a nutter, not all psychology is as mental as he is. It helps people overcome mental illnesses such as depression and is a valuable medical practice. It also helps that modern psychology has pretty much discredited a lot of Freuds ideas, so putting stock in Freud's quite frankly sexist and insane theories is a short trip to the loony bin yourself.
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Haha love it!! You totally ripped Freud apart :)
ReplyDeleteI doubt if there will ever be a person who is 100percent right about everything. There's value in Freud - but the obvious problem is that he ignored the political and social oppression of women and dealt with it all as biology. You are taking a view similar to 1960s/70s feminism (we will read some of the later in the course). remember Freud is 100 years ago. His ideas are rebutted and superceded, like all before him (eg Newton by Einstein). But the critique of freud can only begin once - for example - there are enough women in higher education to grasp what he is on about and then criticise his theories in their own terms. The roughly happens in the 1960s when the first generation of postwar women rach their twenties. Hence 'second wave feminism'. But to dismiss freud out of hand I think is a mistake, would be similar to saying that Gallileo was 'wrong' because his astronomical findings were superceded by radio telescopes.
ReplyDeleteI get that his theories are a problem of the time they're in (especially the sexism towards women), but I also think some of his stuff has merit, such as the Ego, Super-Ego and the Id. I just find his attitude towards women too offensive and his theories on motivation too simplistic to ignore.
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