Sigmund Frued

1590 Words4 Pages

1. Freud defines three stages of sexuality, the oral, the anal and the oedipal stage. An infant in its oral stage learns that there is an external world through pleasure and pain. Human nature is governed by the pleasure principle. When the infant is being breast fed he/she feels pleasure and when pulled away from the breast the baby feels pain. The pleasure principle is a way of seeking pleasure in order to avoid pain. We can’t be happy all the time because three things threaten us.
First of all our own bodies can’t handle too much pleasure at once, eventually our bodies get older and death is inevitable. Second, natural phenomenon’s get in our way, and third our relationships with others. We are emotionally dependent on others and when we take their words into consideration we become unhappy. Since we can’t be happy all the time we need to learn how to avoid pain. There are five ways we can avoid pain. We can become hedonistic and gain pleasure at all costs all the time. This way of avoiding pain isn’t really possible due to the fact that we wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything else in our lives. Second way of avoiding pain is by voluntary isolation. A person can take him/herself out of society and become a hermit. They do not deal with people on an emotional or personal level. The third way of avoiding pain is turning away from the world, the libidinal energy is turned inward and used up by them when they create art and literature. Forth is by working in groups and forming memberships. Groups are formed for protection against brute force and have allowed us to conquer nature. The fifth way is by influencing the organism. The individual wants to kill off all instincts and does this either by using drugs and alcohol, or using eastern techniques such as yoga. Freud said that another basic way to avoid pain is love. Sexual love is the most intense form of feeling pleasure. All forms of pleasure are related to sexual love. The sublimation of love can be between brother and sister and also can exist between friends. Along with love comes the appreciation of beauty and it is related to the sexual feeling that is part of our libido. Civilization can not do without beauty even though everyone has his or her own interpretation of what is considered beautiful. Freud describes the origin of civilization through four different time periods. First in Time A, which ...

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Eating the apple is negation but we need to eat to live. Our entire behavior is a manifestation of the struggle between life and death. This is also defined as one word ‘lifedeath’. Civilization is the reason for our misery but our aggression is a threat to civilization. Civilization forces us to internalize all of the aggressive instinct and send it back to the ego where it originated. This new area is referred to as the super-ego. The super-ego functions as guilt. This is societies way of controlling man’s aggressive tendency. The super-ego is formed during the phallic stage when a boy realizes that he can not have the mother because of his father. The boy becomes incapable of doing anything because of the ‘no’ of the father. The super-ego beats up on the ego; this punishment is a way of threatening to destroy the ego. Sigmund Freud concluded that human nature is governed by the pleasure principle to avoid pain. Sexual love is the most intense form of pleasure. Eros (love) is responsible for increasing the size of the community. As we try to avoid pain our libidinal energy is displaced. Due to this we all need to find our own way of distributing this energy.

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