FREUD'S THEORIES

Freud's Theories

Freud's Theories Of Female Sexuality

Introduction

Sigmund Freud was born in nineteenth-century Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, to a secular, middle-class, Jewish family. When Freud was four, the family moved to Vienna, where he remained for most of his life. He trained as a doctor and he always saw his theories as part of a scientific, empirical tradition. Freud viewed himself as extending the understanding of the human being, both normal and pathological. Freud has been immensely influential, both on the treatment of the mentally unwell and, more generally, on the modernist concept of the human self and mentality.

Late in his career (1923 - 1933), Freud expressed his thoughts on female sexuality. They may not be comprehended without connection with his notion of the primacy of the phallus, in relation to which, for both sexes, “only one genital” (the male) played a constructing role. Structurally remarking, the phallic phase described the girl so far as the boy, but the girl's hold of the phallic— at imaginary (imagined in an oscillation between impotence and power), symbolic (thought-cathexis) and once real (felt in reality), was cantered on the clitoris. Although, the Freudian theorization of the female's psychosexual development toward femininity took as its solitary foundation the psychosexuality of the boy, Freud frequently highlighted the dissimilarities between the sexes incidentally, and thus too the specificity of the Oedipus complex of females. Castration complex and penis envy the perform the main, classifying functions which created admission to femininity achievable. This paper discusses Freud's theories of female sexuality and how helpful are these theories for understanding gender or sexual difference in contemporary culture.

Discussion

Freud's prominent essay, “Female Sexuality”, impractical as it currently looks, is still motivating when seen as a phase in the growth of Gender Theory. In Freud's essay, the essential issue is how females get to the condition of the Oedipus complex? Just Like the male, her mother is her primary love-object, but at a phase she changes her sexual agreement to her father. Certainly, what is challenging with this representation is that it proposes that bisexual or lesbian females are just “underdeveloped”, as they would have never experienced this new change. The mature female has also moved her attention in her clitoris to her vagina. [1]

Freud was initially struck by the number of his women patients who described themselves as seduced by their fathers or other male family figures. In 1897 Freud came to the view that these were, in fact, early childhood fantasies. He described these fantasies as the 'Oedipus complex' and argued that this was a phase which everyone has to go through. In simple terms, the child falls in love with the parent of the opposite sex and becomes a rival of the same-sex parent. In males, the boy is drawn to the mother but fears being castrated by an angry father. In a satisfactory development, Freud thought, the boy works through these feelings, renouncing his mother and identifying with his ...