Sigmund Freud on the Castration Complex

             Gender identity is somehow acquired and is not "just normal." There have been different theories on gender identity, many positions but all of them, as Laqueur says, have to do with the question of power in the society. During the first wave of feminism the main debate was between Rouseau and Mary Wollstonecraft. Rouseau, argued about the subordination of women. In his book Emile, he predicates the natural course of things. For Rouseau gender is a natural product not socially constructed, in his theory, boys need girls and girls need boys, but they have different natures, and their education should be different so the education is conditioned by the nature of gender. Wollstonecraft on the other hand, was the answer to Rouseau's theory. She argued that boys and girl will develop equally under equal conditions. She challenged the concept that "masculine" is active, strong, social, nation, and "feminine" is passive, emotional, weak, domestic. Later, the ideas of Wollstonecraft were reinforced by Mill, through his book The Subjection of Women.
             However, during the 1930s, Freud came out with his theory of the "castration complex." In this theory he reinstates the lower level of women as natural. The main problem was that Freud had an enormous influence and was not easy to be contradicted. He considered "the male sexual product, the spermatozoon and his vehicle as masculine, and the ovum and the organism that harbors it as feminine." (Freud, 300) He studied the phenomenon from the mental point of view, from the psyche. He considered the masculine as "active" and femininity as "passive." When we are born, we are bisexual. The little girl has nothing less than the boy form the point of view of aggressively. In the phallic phase, the differences are eclipsed from their agreements.
             "In boys, this phase is marked by the fact that they have learnt how to derive pleasure sensations from their small penis. Little girls do the same thing with ...

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Sigmund Freud on the Castration Complex. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 18:47, April 24, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/20780.html