Responce to “Freud's Theory of Human Nature"

siddhu

(for the final exam)

This blog will try to explain a problem with these extremely influential theories. They took the world by surprise and people loved it and felt it was a great system of beliefs and could truly explain human behaviour until very recently.

Sigmund Freud came with the theory of the Id, Ego, Superego and Karl Marx with communism. Sigmund Freud came with his theory of psychosexual development. The primary trouble with Freud’s theory is that while his ideas appear sound and even appealing to common sense, there is very little empirical evidence to back it up. Modern psychology has produced very little to substantiate many of his claims since a large part of them are based on a hypothesis.

For instance, there’s no large-scale scientific evidence in support of the idea that boys lust their mothers and/or hate their fathers. He was totally, utterly wrong about gender. And his notion of ’penis envy’ is now both laughable and tragic. However, concepts like these can actually be better explained by Social Psychology. If in a society, women are considered to be inferior then men, they will envy the role of men and the hence concept of ‘penis envy’. It is also seen that problems associated with the ‘vagina’ is usually a topic to be talked behind closed doors unlike the way he talks about penis will be openly talked about in such a society. Any person living in a society like this will envy the role of a man if she is constantly made to feel inferior. Hence there is not any understanding that Freud’s theory can throw light on in such situations via his own theories.

Further, there is no proof of the Id, Ego or Superego. There’s also no evidence to support the claim that human development proceeds through oral, anal, phallic and genital stages. Nor that the interference or arresting of these stages leads to specific developmental manifestations. For example, he theorized that homosexuality was a failure to complete the anal phase or the Oedipal phase. He also argued that only ‘mature’ women could orgasm from vaginal sex and that women who could only climax via clitoral stimulation were somehow stunted - stuck at a latent phase. Most of these theories can now be disputed even in the basic sex education classes.

There’s also no evidence that Freudian psychotherapy is any better than others, including Skinnerian behavioural therapy (which is diametrically opposed to Freudianism in terms of methodology), systematic desensitization or assertiveness training. Therapy depends on a person, and what suits him/her better. Further, he asserted people are innately bad people and enjoy hurting and seeing people in pain. In today’s world, positive psychology completely refutes it. The guiding principle of this new line of work is that innately people are good people and must work on their strengths. It is also the fastest growing field and one of the most accepted ones.  A concept like altruism also refutes what he says as; altruism is doing selfless behaviour for someone else without expecting anything in return.  For example, a mothers love for a child.

Let’s look at Karl Marx’s communism. Though communism at the time of poverty in Prussia was a great idea, like Freud’s theory, it was not based on any empirical evidence. Marx believed that people are good-natured and would love equality and hence the state can distribute wealth to all. However, he forgot to add one thing to the equation - ambition. Ambition plays a very powerful and important role in any person’s life – it is what drives us to achieve things, to be better than someone else and many times the reason to do what and why we do things. Without factoring ambition, Karl Marx had set up for failure of this theory in the long run. People are not easily satisfied with status quo and always want more.

What interesting is that despite both of these theories having huge problems it was still accepted by people. It was so for the simple reason as it gave a solution. Freud talked about people and gave his view about why people do things and gave a solution to the eternal questions, ‘Why is that person like that? What does he gain from doing that?, etc.’ Marx, on the other hand, gave a solution to poverty that his community was going through. His idea seemed like a utopia compared to the current situation.

I would like to end this by posing a question out. Can there ever be one common theory that accounts for people behaviour?

I don’t think so! People constantly change as there are multiple driving forces, be it personal motivation, purpose, situations, etc for a person and thus no single theory can encompass the reasons for why we do what we do.