GlyphGryph posted:

I'm not saying 1-5 year olds aren't stupid and selfish, but that rests on assumptions way more extreme than anything born out by reality.

Simply from a behavioural perspective, children past 1 actually actively seek out and enjoy sharing within certain contexts, so the idea of it being "incomprehensible" is ludicrous on the face of it. There's plenty of situations where they aren't willing to do it, but plenty of others where they are, and anything that rests on the assumption that the concept in general is incomprehensible isn't operating on all cylinders unless you're using some super special jargonistic version of sharing that has no relation to the way regular people use the term.

Additionally, there are obviously things children have mixed feelings on, even in the moment. Desire tempered by fear, and fear tempered by curiosity are both super common states. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what is meant by a lack of nuance, here, and the argument is just that both feelings are felt to extreme amounts simultaneously?

Serrath posted:

The works of Freud make it pretty clear that he is talking quite specifically and directly about sexual feelings; he saw the human libido as innate and present at birth. Where adults experience human libido specifically through sex, Freud conceptualized pre-mature sexual libido under a model he termed polymorphous perversity in which infants and children can derive sexual gratification through means other than adult-genital contact. It's through subsequent social conditioning, though, that children learn to derive pleasure through socially acceptable norms which culminates in typical sexual impulse by adulthood. Absent a social context, though, Freud believed that sexuality would remain disambiguated and deriving sexual pleasure through incest, various forms of touching, fetishism etc would be the norm. Where children represent the "natural" state of sexual gratification, adults represent a socially constrained and artificial state of sexuality and it is through this social limiting that psychoses develop. Freud taught that the natural state of sexual limitation created a basal level of sexual repression and thus psychoses in everyone, in children who are robbed of the ability to sublimate their polymorphic sexuality during a time when it's socially acceptable for them, you get even more adult psychoses because even more sexual repression has taken place.

The Oedipus complex merely sits within his larger model of undifferentiated sexuality; it's the consequence of having an undifferentiated sexuality directed at a socially unacceptable target (the opposite sex parent) and having that sexuality rejected. Freud believed this process of rejection would be attributed, by children, to the competing influence of the same-sex parent (as opposed to the socially unacceptable nature of a child-parent pairing) and the logical response is the child's desire to get rid of the same sex parent. Eventually social influence takes over and the child has no outward desire to attain sexual gratification with their opposite sex parent but they retain an unconscious desire to because, in Freud's model, sexual desire is never eliminated, it's only repressed. Our natural way of dealing with this unconscious desire, then, is to seek mates with qualities similar to our opposite sex parents.

In psychoanalysis, this has been revised heavily; where Freud talked very specifically and directly about sexual impulses, subsequent theorists conceptualized this as a competition for attention from the opposite sex parent. Basically, as we grow older, we retain the desire to have their care and attention focused on us but we actually get less attention as we develop autonomy. Some people don't cope with this well and develop various psychoses due to their perceptions of rejection as their parents did the normally age appropriate steps of giving them less and less attention as they aged.

As for the following


Freud actually addressed this by suggesting that the social taboos against our "natural" sexuality evolved as a defense mechanism to the threats that our natural sexuality posed to us, the human animal. He generally spoke of "perversion" (his term) in morally ambiguous terms and suggested that late 1800's society was instrumental in the development of a lot of sexually-based psychiatric disturbance, he also acknowledged the harms that could be caused by fully embracing this perversion.

*edit* This thread doesn't get many replies so I'm happy letting it die but psychoanalysis did form a small part of my study in psychology and I can speak to some questions people have on the topic. It's rubbish insofar as it doesn't generate testable hypotheses and everything it explains can be better accounted for by contemporary theories but often the purpose of any psychological model is more to generate a shared understanding and language of a problem so that a therapist can communicate the goals and direction of therapy to a patient. Admittedly the Oedipus complex is one of those "out-there" theories but there are some psychoanalytic models which do inform workable treatment models. When you consider that a lot of the "success" of therapy is attributable to the rapport between the patient and doctor and the sharing of goals and information independent of psychological model used, there are some psychoanalysts who practice using outdated models and yet still enjoy therapeutic success with their patients. If you consider a goal of therapy to simply engender psychological literacy in a patient allowing them to think more analytically and systematically about their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, than psychoanalysis can be a framework to help a patient think about their own mental state.

Numerical Anxiety posted:

It's rather the kind where I get the good thing, then you do, and then me again. This makes young kids furious, because they don't yet really understand the logic behind how this works, and have a poor temporal sense.

Serrath posted:

Knobb Manwich posted:

I killed my mother and hosed my father Can you give me some tips to prevent this from happening again with my children?

Cephas posted:

How is Lacanian psychoanalysis actually used in a therapeutic environment anyway? I studied him from a lit theory perspective, and his ideas can make for compelling readings of literature. But compared to Freud or Jung, where it's easy to imagine how their ideas apply to an actual therapy session with a patient, I have no clue how it would actually go for Lacan. I might be misremembering the line, but I believe he even said something along the lines of not actually being that interested in curing people, compared to studying them.