Reflection# 6 - Psychoanalysis

Freud was somewhat of a character in my opinion.  I often wonder where he came up with his psychosexual stages.  In covering these stages: oral, anal, phallic, latent, and puberty/genital, Freud insisted these were formative in a child’s development.  While some of these stages make sense, I find it hard to believe that every little boy wants to sleep with his mother and do away with his father as Freud suggests in the Oedipus Complex.  And, if this complex is not resolved, then a neurosis becomes prevalent.   In addition, his belief of castration anxiety where the father poses as a castrating force because the child has feelings for the mother seems absurd.  For human desires to be repressed into the unconscious as a defense mechanism because the conscious cannot tolerate them is more believable to me than the Oedipus Complex. 

Freud’s belief that dreams are “windows to the soul” and that these dreams speak to therapists in an abstract light seem plausible.  Here, it is important for the therapist to connect the symbols in a dream to the reality of what the person is experiencing in order to sift out the cloudiness and focus on the real issue that patient is suffering with.

For Jacques Lacan, language is important in the theory of psychoanalysis because he believed the child knows he can get what he wants through communication.   His idea is that the self is always incomplete.  There is need, demand and desire and that demand never is fulfilled.   There is something to say about this demand.  I recognize it with my own children when they want something and it never seems to be enough.  You can look at it in another way and think maybe it’s just love they desire and therefore you reach to hug them, only to have them scream they want a different toy!