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Workshop 3 - Freud's Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis

Don Finkel and Thad Curtz ( curtzt@elwha.evergreen.edu)

This workshop will let you explore Freud's ideas about sexuality and its role in human development. Please divide up into groups of four. The whole workshop should take an hour; Thad will talk some more after we finish.

1. (5 minutes)
What is the difference, from Freud's point of view, between the terms "genital" and "sexual"? Explain what each term means.

2. (10 minutes)
What does Freud mean by claiming that infants and children have sexual motivations? Try to give as many examples as you can of things you believe babies and children actually do which manifest sexual motivation.

3. (5 minutes)
Kissing is included as a part of sexual activity by most adults in our culture. Yet kissing has nothing to do with reproduction. In fact, if you think about it, kissing can seem a pretty odd form of behavior. How does the phenomenon of kissing develop during a person's life?

4. (7 minutes)
If a person had sex by kissing continuously and never doing anything else, Freud would call this a perversion. Why? What is the Freudian definition of a perversion? (Please try to distinguish between "perverse" as a term in Freud's theory and "immoral" or "wrong". Freud was not concerned as a theorist with the morality of the various kinds of sexual activity that society called perversions, but with their origins and significance.)

5. (5 minutes)
If a person got nauseous every time he sucked anything, Freud would call this a neurotic symptom. How is this fundamentally different from the perversion in 4? What is Freud's definition of a neurotic symptom?

6. (5 minutes)
Here are some activities. If an adult's sexual life consisted of just one of them, it would count as a perversion in Freud's theory. Try to find, for each one, some corresponding activities in children and in babies.

1. Watching mud-wrestling.
2. A man wearing high heels and women's underwear.
3. Looking in other people's bedroom windows.
4. Sexual activity with an animal.

Can you find other correspondences like these?


7. (10 minutes)
In Freud's view, one particular form of infantile sexual motivation, and one stage in its development, is what he calls the Oedipus complex. In a brief summary of this complex in another work (The Question of Lay Analysis, p. 44) his hypothesis breaks down into the following steps:

1. Children under six are particularly attracted to a parent of the opposite sex.

2. This attraction is a sexual attraction.

3. The child seeks sexual satisfaction - "so far, that is, as the child's powers of imagination allow."

4. The child, as a consequence of this attraction, regards the same sex parent as a disturbing rival.

Do you think the O'Connor story is about sexual attraction and a search for sexual satisfaction? Do you think it is psychologically realistic, or just clever?

8. (10 minutes)
Consider an emotionally charged experience from early childhood, like Oedipal desire or hate, the memory of which gets repressed by a person. (Do you remember any feelings of the sort we have been theorizing about this morning?) List as many things as you can about the nature, quality and effects of this repressed memory throughout the rest of the person's life.

9. (10 minutes)
From Piaget's point of view, one might consider repression to be an adaptive response to the environment or a maladaptive one. There is a good case to be made for each viewpoint. What can you see to say on each side?