Freud's View of Women and Culture

Freud'a view of women. His view appears to be that women are not entitled to anger in the face of civilization that willy nilly must needs be ruled by men. In this regard, Gilligan comments that Freud makes mention of women's ability to experience love, however "narcissistic or . . . hostile to civilization," as an experience that "does not appear to have separation and aggression [ah, the bane of civilization's existence] at its base" (Gilligan 47). In other words, by Freud's lights, women behave as if they were separate from civilization but have the effrontery to experience life as if this were a fundamental reality for them. Women are excoriated for feeling alienated, and excoriated for experiencing that alienation through a filter of affection. How dare they find a way to make life tolerable! How dare they challenge the culture, and how dare they not! Perhaps feminists can be forgiven for wondering, after Freud: What do men want? Similarly, they be forgiven for seeking literary expressions of wonderment and possible answers to the question.

What is at work here is the response to the traditional rhetorical, aesthetic, and ethical analysis of the culture from the position of those who for myriad reasons find themselves able to analyze from an objectively acknowledged position of significant power. What Freud does not appear to acknowledge in his own analysis of alienation from the culture is that, objectively speaking, women are set apart from and profoundly and objecti

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consistent with the feminist critique of the culture for the reason that the weight of evidence is all on the side of the idea that women experience life in a contingent way even when they seek the stability that the supposed custom and practice of the culture offer. In this culture, women who have been married for five years or even 25 years find themselves traded in on a new or younger model--contingency. Divorce occurs, and husbands become single men, while wives become single and frequently impoverished parents--contingency. Women who live without or "like" men are alien beings in a society in which heterosexual romance is the celebrated norm and a woman alone has less social standing or validity than a bachelor man about town--contingency. Girls are educated differently than boys and must in some measure expect limits to be set on their expectations--contingency. Germaine Greer sums up this hard reality in a way that demonstrates that women in the modern culture are creatures with the most contingent way of life, and more, that contingency as a mode of experience is artificially enforced on them by reason of the unavoidable contingency of the culture itself. Christianity developed its own paradigm of the nuclear family and c

Category: Psychology - F