Wtf is up with these complexes developed by Freud?? I have a bachelors in psych so I have studied them but no matter which angle I try to look at it from, I cannot comprehend the reasoning behind them.
Why can’t kids just live their parents and be done with it? I know pretty much everything with Freud was sex but come on now…
In: 2
It’s my understanding that Freud’s psychosexual developmental theories have fallen out of favor with most modern psychologists so you aren’t alone in thinking it’s a bit much.
Young children naturally tend to idolize their parents.
From an evolutionary perspective (considering we are a species of social animals and not solitary animals) this makes sense; paying close attention to our closest caregivers (and engaging in mimicry) helps us to learn how to survive in the world and how to behave properly in the social group (which is important when ostracism may result in death or at the very least make reproduction unlikely). This is subconsciously hardwired “mammal-brain” stuff.
As we age we may encounter better role models and choose to mimic/learn-from them instead, but that is more of a conscious “monkey-brain” effort. By then, most of our foundational learning still occurred under our primary caregivers and so the process of learning from new role models is not *just* learning from them, but also *unlearning* some of what we had previously been ingrained with.
But how does sexual attraction get involved?
There is more happening evolutionarily in us than just our fancy “monkey-brain” consciousness and other “mammal-brain” stuff… there is also a fair amount of “lizard-brain” survival instinct running in the background.
From an evolutionary standpoint inbreeding is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, inbreeding can lead to generational accumulation of harmful genetic defects (and thus poor evolutionary fitness of the gene pool), and so there is evolutionary pressure to minimize it overall. On the other hand, if a related male and a female lizard are literally the last two lizards on Earth then not reproducing results in extinction. This means a species that does inbreed is more likely to survive a near-extinction event than a species that would never inbreed, and so there is evolutionary pressure to keep some non-zero propensity toward inbreeding around.
So, there is some latent “in case of emergency, inbreed” code running in all our “lizard-brains” and there is likely some genetic variation (and hormonal variations) to the strength of that propensity. For the most part, the lizard code is running at such a minor level that it is completely drowned out by all of the proper social behaviors that we never notice. If the lizard code is for some reason in overdrive, and/or the proper social behaviors are weakened or inhibited enough, then some “lizard code” might start to come in conflict with the “monkey code” and those crossed wires allow misplaced attractions develop.
In Freud’s time, evolution was still a relatively new and barebones concept. Darwin had published the general idea, but it’d still be almost century before Watson and Crick, and a couple decades more before Dawkins. Freud could only see the resulting behaviors (misplaced attraction toward mother/father figures) and try to posit some sort of causation from them. As such, the framework for a large number of his theories doesn’t really stand on any solid bedrock. (That being said he *was* more proto-scientific than the *”Your blood has ghosts in it, you should probably do cocaine about it.”* snake-oil quacks of the time and so some of his broad-strokes were at least a step closer to the right direction.)
If you look at the symbolism employed in dreams, and if you (as in any psychiatrist or psychologist) talk to enough patients who are unable to come to terms with the things they’re thinking, then it makes a lot of sense that our thoughts are hiding from us, coding themselves as other things. It’s quite reasonable to say, as male children we devour the mother, and want to possess her as OURS, because we start out so inherently selfish and so oblivious to social mores. That we might see the other male figure in the house as some kind of competition. It doesn’t seem to track with reality after all, but considering how coded and hidden our thoughts are? Yes, our shameful ideas and concepts would be the most expertly-hidden.
Latest Answers