

Psychoanalyst Karen Horney, a contemporary of Freud’s, and whose theories led to the feminist psychology movement, believed penis envy was purely symbolic. “Freud claimed that the only way they could overcome this penis envy was to have a child of their own – even going as far as to suggest they wanted a male child, in their efforts to gain a penis,” writes the British Psychological Society. Freud believed that a woman’s realization that she does not have a penis leads to an intense envy, which is at the root of female behavior. “Penis envy” grew from Freud’s Oedipal complex theory, and Freud published it in 1908. This is when a girl becomes unconsciously sexually attached to her father and hostile toward her mother.įreud believed that the Oedipus complex was “the central phenomenon of the sexual period of early childhood,” but there’s no scientific evidence to support his theory.

But, Freud postulated that boys experienced the Oedipus complex and girls experienced the Electra complex. Popular culture uses the Oedipus complex as an umbrella term to represent a phase for both boys and girls. A child feels a sexual pull for their opposite-sex parent and jealously for their same-sex parent. According to Freud, it’s the unconscious desire that begins during the phallic stage of development, between the ages of three to six. Oedipus Complex, Penis Envy and Womb EnvyĮxperts consider the Oedipus complex, a psychosexual theory, as Freud’s most contentious theory. Modern science has yet to explain why Freudian slips happen. Freud debuted his theory of the Freudian slip in his 1901 book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and suggested that these verbal (and sometimes written) mistakes were rooted in “unconscious urges” and “unexpressed desires.” Further, Freud believed that failing to remember something - like someone’s address or name - was linked to our need or desire to repress it. He believed that the “slip of the tongue” - saying something we don’t mean to say - reveals what we are thinking, subconsciously. One of the most popular phrases from Freud’s theories is the Freudian slip. Patients would throw out ideas as they came to them, no matter how trivial. With each new feature of a dream during a psychoanalysis session, Freud would suggest to his patients to relax and - to use a modern term - spitball what they believed to mean. Based on the theory that dreams and their meanings are personal, Freud let his patients interpret dreams themselves, instead of telling them his own opinion.
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Free Associationįreud’s dream theories fed directly into his theory of free association. He insisted that while dreams are symbolic, they are specific to the person and cannot be generally defined to fit all of society. In fact, he shied away from such specifics. While popular culture took Freud’s theories and applied meanings - as in dreaming that you are flying means you are subconsciously thinking about ambition - Freud never wrote a dictionary of dreams. Prior to its publication in 1899, scientists believed dreams were “meaningless.” Freud believed that dreams were instead “disguised fulfillments of repressed infantile wishes.” “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind,” writes Freud.įreud’s theories on dreams and his book, Interpretation of Dreams, were revolutionary.

Dreams are for real.” But it is Freud who reveals what a dream is - an alternate reality we experience when we sleep. From best-selling author Erma Bombeck’s quips, “It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else,” to American rapper and actor, Tupac Shakur’s lyrics, “Reality is wrong. If you Google “dream quotes,” there seems to be an endless supply. We frequently talk about our dreams in modern society. Terms like dream analysis, free association, the Oedipus complex, the Freudian slip and the-ever present ego, as well as id and superego, are woven into so much of what we do, think and say.
