The life and works of Sigmund Freud.

Authors Avatar
Freud                        Sigmund Freud was the first of six children to be born into his middle class, Jewish family. His father was a wool merchant, and was the provider for the family. From the time Freud was a child, he pondered theories in math, science, and philosophy, but in his teens, he took a deep interest in what he later called psychoanalysis. He wanted to discover how a person’s mind works, so he began to explore the conscious and unconscious parts of one’s psyche. Freud’s parents and siblings were directly involved in allowing him to pursue this unexplored area of psychology. He was given his own room so that he could study his books in silence, and was only disturbed when it was time to eat. Freud eventually married Martha Bernays. She was cooperative and completely subservient to her husband. She was simply filling a role that the society during that time insisted was proper for all women. Freud himself derived his attitudes toward women and his beliefs about the roles of individual sexes from personal experiences in the strict culture of the time. In the middle to late eighteen hundreds, Central European society distinguished clearly between the roles of men and women. Cultural norms dictated that men be responsible for work outside of the home, and the financial well being of the family, while the women’s responsibilities were in the home and with the children. With these specific gender roles came the assumption of male dominance and female submission. Females were pictured as serene, calm, creatures that were lucky to have the love and protection of their superior husbands. It is in this form of the family where most children first learn the meaning and practice of hierarchical, authoritarian rule. Here is where they learn to accept group oppression against themselves as non-adults, and where they learn to accept male supremacy and the group oppression of women. Here is where they learn that it is the male’s role to work in the community and control the economic life of the family and to mete out the physical and financial punishments and rewards, and the female’s role to provide the emotional warmth associated with motherhood while under the economic rule of the male. Here is where the relationship of superordination-subordination, or superior-inferior, or master-slave is first learned and accepted as "natural." -John Hodge: Feminist Theory P.36 Philosophical definitions of women, written about by male philosophers, share warped views that were the result of the cultural times and places from which they originated. The view that women are somewhat "less" than men in many respects, began with the philosophies of Aristotle in the fourth century BC. Since Aristotle was one of the most influential philosophers of ancient Greece, he had a widespread impact on the thinking of many people. Christian theologians in ancient Europe rediscovered his theories. Aristotle believed that a woman’s part in conception was to supply the container in which the seed, planted by the male, grows. Aristotle said, "We should look on the female as being as it were a deformity, though one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature." Although we know now that Aristotle was mistaken in his biological interpretation of the female gender, his philosophies had a long-term impact on the perception of women from a non-biological perspective. A few philosophers, such as Plato (427-347 BC), Condorcet (1743-1794), and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) had opinions that opposed Aristotle and inherently supported women’s rights, but females are still struggling to prove to the opposite sex that we are not "defective men." In fact, women were seen as inferior since the time of Aristotle and throughout Freud’s lifetime because they did not have penises. It seems that it could also be argued that men lack the clitoris and instead have an elongated and inefficient organ of a similar kind. These two points depend, of course, on point of view, but the ancient philosophers did obviously not take the female point of view into consideration. A vast amount of Aristotelian views are present in Freud’s beliefs. The biological "reasons" given by the ancient philosophers for specific social roles are somewhat incomplete. It seemed fairly logical for women to have the natural role of caring for children because she gives birth to them, but there was no biological explanation for the assumptions that women were less important as human beings, of lesser worth, naturally passive, or should be ruled by men. Simply because women give birth to babies, it has somehow been assumed that we are confined to roles as mothers and as caretakers. These conclusions were not drawn from biological observations, but from numerous western thinkers throughout history who made enormous mistakes in their reasoning about women. Freud was puzzled by members of the opposite sex and therefore did not attempt to logically study them and come up with objective theories regarding a woman’s psyche in general. He instead concentrated on the development of a woman’s mind up to adulthood at which point he could no longer understand it. "And now you are already prepared to hear that psychology too is unable to solve the riddle of femininity…In conformity with its peculiar nature, psycho-analysis does not try to describe what a woman is –that would be a task it could scarcely perform- but sets about
Join now!
inquiring how she comes into being, how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition." Sigmund Freud stated this in his book titled "Femininity" which was published in 1933. From an early age, Freud was critical of the feminist argument for equality between the sexes. He thought that it was "absurd" to think that a married woman could earn as much money as her husband, because her domestic responsibilities should take up all of her time and energy. Those who challenge Freudian theory of gender roles belong largely to the ever growing and highly vocal members of ...

This is a preview of the whole essay