Freud : his dream and sex theories / by Joseph Jastrow.

  • Joseph Jastrow
Date:
1948,
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Freud : his dream and sex theories / by Joseph Jastrow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    is actually or erabryonically sadism. With this as Scylla, the Charybdis is its converse, “masochism”—combining a perverted joy in suffering with sex gratification. It is in this stage or episode of libidinal development that the divergences of the masculine and feminine version become marked. Psychoanalysis, being a masculine dis¬ covery, derives its libidinal concepts from the role of the male, although it owes so much of its clinical mate¬ rial to women. To balance the Oedipus there is the Electra complex, the analogy not complete, but going far enough to satisfy Freud in maintaining that there is an inherent tendency toward incest, affecting both sexes. The cultural incest taboo is regarded as a confirmation of a strong native trend in the forbidden direction. The contrast in external conspicuousness of the genitals of the two sexes, he maintains, gives rise in girls to an envy complex, which is the equivalent of castration. These paired opposites—impressively called “polarities”: pleasure and pain, love and hate, the mas¬ culine and feminine—and likewise “ambivalence,” or simultaneous yet contradictory emotional attitudes: fearing and hating while yet loving, creating and de¬ stroying—all enter into the conflict of rival urges, for the most part libidinized. To present even in barest outline an epitome of the Freudian “Scylla-Charybdis” sexology would require a chapter for which I have neither taste nor talent. I am content to indicate how Freudian psychoanalysis strongly and strangely sex- ualizes the human career. Emerging from the Ulyssean wanderings of libido, we reach the haven which we all, whatever our psy¬ chological allegiances, readily recognize as the prime of life in every sense, recognizing also that in attaining it we come upon a concept as familiar as acceptable—re-
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