Friday, January 4, 2008

1.) Freudian penis envy theory.
And all of this is supposed to occur shortly after the girl is 5 years old...!?


* Soon after the libidinal shift to the penis, the child develops her first sexual impulses towards her mother.
* The girl realizes that she is physically not equipped to have a sexual relationship with her mother, as she has a clitoris, labia and vagina, rather than a penis.
* She desires a penis, and the power that it represents. This is described as penis envy. She sees the solution as obtaining her father’s penis.
* She develops a sexual desire for her father.
* The girl blames her mother for her apparent castration (what she sees as punishment by the mother for being attracted to the father) assisting a shift in the focus of her sexual impulses from her mother to her father.
* Sexual desire for her father leads to the desire to replace and eliminate her mother.
* The girl identifies with her mother so that she might learn to mimic her, and thus replace her.
* The child anticipates that both aforementioned desires will incur punishment (by the principle of lex talionis)
* The girl employs the defence mechanism of displacement to shift the object of her sexual desires from her father to men in general.

The offshoot of these events, often cited in the media and colloquially, is that a girl really wants to become her mother, so that she can control her father.


But doesn't she want to control her father so that she can have sex with her mother, who is now herself?

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_envy#Freudian_theory

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2.) It's good to laugh.

Juliet Mitchell—another Feminist theorist—attempted to reconcile Freud's thoughts on psychosexual development with Feminism and Marxism by declaring his theories to be simply observations of gender identity under capitalism.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_envy#Feminist_criticisms




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