Posted by Dinah on December 3, 2005, at 21:31:54
In reply to Re: Anyone up to more serious psychological debates?, posted by Gee on December 2, 2005, at 23:00:05
I guess I'm a bit wary of dogma. But that doesn't mean I don't admire Freud. He observed behavior and tried to formulate explanations for it. And succeeded so well that we've absorbed a lot of his concepts into our cultural accepted wisdom.
And maybe he didn't do such a bad job of observing and categorizing types of people. I know more than a few oral types, or anal types.
For his time, and given the state of psychological knowledge in his time, I think he did very well. After all, very few theories are initially formulated as they eventually end up. Successors test and refine the ideas.
I guess I don't necessarily buy his notions of how traits developed. I give a lot more credit to nature, as opposed to nurture.
I don't know many women today who would endorse the idea of penis envy. (Well, I might. But only for recreational purposes.) But given the society of his day, maybe he wasn't too far off with it. I'm sure the role women were expected to play may well have influenced how and why women displayed some of their symptoms. And maybe they did indeed envy some of the qualities that at the time were limited to men by cultural constraint.
What do you think of symptoms being associated with different developmental phases?
poster:Dinah
thread:584442
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20051130/msgs/585183.html