THE IMPACT OF CULTURAL PAROCHIALISM ON FREUD'S CONCEPT OF LOVE

It is somewhat surprising that Singer does not mention the significance for Freud's work on love, of the social environment which formed his world view. It is impossible to appreciate the one-sidedness of Freud's concept of love without recognizing him as quintessentially a creature of the nineteenth century Germanic culture. Like most of his peers, he was paternalistic and authoritarian in the extreme. Typically Victorian in his prudishness, he was nonetheless so obsessed with sex that, in his early practice, he diagnosed every neurosis presented to him as a case of "coitus interruptus" -- invariably attributable to some failure on the part of the woman.

Women's' rightful place in the scheme of things is made clear in numerous passages such as the following in Contributions to the Psychology of Love: "We regard it as a normal reaction to coitus for a woman to hold a man closely in her arms...at the climax of gratification, and this seems to us an expression of her gratitude and an assurance of her lasting thraldom to him."#7 In fact, Freud's strange physics of the libido seems less ahuman theory than a strictly male one. For example: "Since man has not an unlimited amount of mental energy, he must accomplish his tasks by distributing his libido to the best advantage. What he employs for cultural purposes he withdraws to a great extent from women and his sexual life."#8

Freud meant well, and some of the therapies derived from his model may have been helpful. However, no appraisal of his concept of love can legitimately ignore the crimes perpetrated against females in the name of the theory. Beginning with the botched operation of poor Emma, from whose nose Freud's friend, Fleiss, tried to wrest her sexual demons; through all the desperate women whose complaints about rape were disbelieved; to the legion of dedicated mothers who have been blamed for their sons' homosexuality, neuroses, drug addictions and suicides; to the toddlers accused of seducing their adult abusers: wherever the dark and distorting shadow of the mirror fell, the suffering of women has been incalculable.

It just so happened that Freud's Looking Glass entities had a disturbing way of escaping into the world of human experience. His sexual theory of love plowed a deep and lasting furrow through the currents of Western twentieth century thought, leaving in its wake a society obsessed by sex, ambiguous about love, and newly-armed with a psuedo-scientific justification for bias against women. A major legacy of Freudianism is the belated recognition that ideas do indeed have consequences -- especially those taught as "essential" truths defining an eternal human Psyche.

KEY TERMS: Irving Singer -- Freudianism -- child development as sexual -- libido -- Eros -- narcissism -- ego instinct -- Vitalism -- dualism -- essentialism -- Romantic Idealism -- "developmentally stable strategy" -- coitus interruptus -- Oedipus Complex -- Copernicus -- Charles Darwin -- free will -- natural selection -- organic (feedback) causality -- teleology -- the dialectic -- "pan-psychism"

Important thing for a Life

we have to face lots of troubles in our life time,troubles are always make a various agonies,getting rid of that difficult thing,that's why a marvelous friend must have in a life.

best friend will cure your agonies,depression, streets, he or she'll help you through out your bad times and the good times,he or she'll give a strength to your life,he or she'll take you a better,harmless,safety life.have a good friend to your life,then your life will be a extraordinary one,i'll assure you that you all feel that in short time, because i'm already experienced it and i'm still having that bond.

I got a Question for you, Is it a important thing for your life?
if it's Yes or No, why is that

What is Mind ???

Try to understand these pictures much as you can..... it gives a little bit of knowledge to think what is mind and how it's behave like,

If you know your mind well, you'll be a Genius in no time,Remember that...

SINGER'S FIVE CRITICISMS

SINGER'S FIVE CRITICISMS

In the end, Singer seems to have raised five major objections to Freud's theory of love. These are what he perceives to be (1) its empirically and logically unwarranted doctrine of child development as inherently sexual in form and content; (2) its emphasis on a kind of normative essentialism rather than the pluralism that Singer himself prefers in sexual affairs; (3) its dualism; (4) its conceptual confusion; and (5) its inadequacy due to an exclusive focus on "evaluation" to the neglect of the aspect of "bestowal" developed by Singer in his own works on love. I will discuss each of these assessments in turn, indicating the extent of my agreement or disagreement.

Beginning with the last, I believe that Freud did indeed include within his theory something similar to Singer's concept of bestowal. In Civilization and its Discontents, he explained how a small minority of people do, in fact, achieve the ability "to make themselves independent of their object's acquiescence by transferring the main value from the fact of being loved to their own act of loving; they protect themselves against loss of it by attaching their love not to individual objects but to all men equally"#9 This may not quite accord with Singer's concept, but it does seem to describe a human capacity for bestowing love as distinct from either the present sensation of value associated with receiving it, or the valuing associated with selecting a love object.

The conceptual confusion apparent to Singer is considerably obviated once the philosophical premises informing Freud's work are taken into account. There is a logic relating and making sense out of his entire structure, but it is a logic now largely invalidated and (one would hope) increasingly foreign to modern thought. It is the Hegelian logic of the dialectic. I intend to discuss it in some detail a little later.

I think Freud's dualism is likewise more apparent than real. If one means by dualism a belief in the existence of two realms of reality corresponding to the old mind/body and sacred/secular division -- or a belief that human beings are different in kind rather than degree from other animal species -- Freud has to be judged innocent. There are just too many indications throughout his writings of what Singer himself has called his relentless commitment to a "mechanistic" biology.

Singer's accusation of essentialism raises many intriguing questions. In the first place -- as in the case of dualism -- I have a problem with his definition. He writes, "By essentialism I mean the belief that there is a single structure that defines the instinctual being of men and women."#10 He views Freud's idea of a fixed progression of developmental stages programmed within the human instincts as objectionably essentialist. But surely this is an empirical proposition requiring either confirmation or falsification -- not to be written off because one objects to the idea as being too biologically deterministic! It is not simply a matter of aesthetic or political preference; nor does it depend on whether philosophical essentialism or pluralism is the order of the day.

Clearly, Singer prefers an explanation of sexual development and orientation that relies more on environmental than biological programming. He is probably right, but Freud was perfectly justified in presenting his instinct theory as a possible scenario. The problem with Freud's proposition is not its contention. The problem is that he expressed it as a doctrinaire postulate to be proven by circular logic, rather than as a tentative hypothesis requiring confirmation by evidence.

Singer's negative assessment of Freud's exclusive focus on sex as the defining element in human development from infancy onward is scarcely debatable. It is possible, however, to appreciate some of Freud's observations and to recognize behavioral patterns identified by him without accepting his bizarre explanations for those regularities. B.F. Skinner has done a masterful job of giving Freud credit for these while explaining them in a much simpler and common-sense way. For example, he suggested that what Freud called the Oedipus Complex would no doubt disappear with the advent of equality for women. The asymmetrical relation of the female parent was probably at the root of it all, combined with a culture in which punishment was paramount. "Is it possible," asked Skinner, "that the so-called Oedipal relations to mother and father are simply mythical representations of positive and negative reinforcement? The boy longs, not to sleep with his mother, but to be close to the one who positively reinforces his behavior. He longs, not to kill his father, but to escape from or destroy one who punishes."#11

People like to have aims,they trying to achieve them in their life time.They put their maximum efforts to achieve those.It isn't simple, every thing is difficult.people have many kind of aims in their life,it's depends on how they are think.

But many people are facing many problems by achieving them,lots of people unable to achieve there aims...

Can't you think reasons for that???