Have you had sexual thoughts about one of your parents?

Screw Freud and his disturbing theories

Hell, no.

Eww…gross.

No not really, I don’t think…I definitely never had sexual thoughts about my father…I’ve probably thought about my mother sexually once or twice in my life…she’s a very attractive woman, physically and I have no qualms about incestuous feelings or whatever…

^^ how did i know that response was coming

Nope. never did. i guess i’m repressed…and by “repressed” i mean not fucked up.

I wanted to be with my mom forever because dad was an asshole.

@tinyfaery that’s exactly what I thought

I used to say I wanted to marry my dad when I was young and unaware. Probably because I heard some other little girl saying it. That’s as far as the remotely sexual thoughts went. That said, if I had a different father who was sexy and attractive then maybe. I do like older men, after all :)

Is this about the Mackenzie Phillips interview?

and oh yeah, I never have been attracted to my parents. Actually, I’ve always seen them in a very cartoonish way

@eponymoushipster sure whatever makes you feel better at night…lol…

Addressing my wife as “Honey” after calling her “Mom” for so many years required quite an adjustment.

Just read the Mackenzie Phillips article. That’s sad and seriously fucked up. No wonder she was a mess.

Even thinking about that now is quite….. disgusting?.

It is just a theory, so i’d like to believe not. As children though, maybe they just looked up to their parents. But who knows?.... :S

@figbash @jmah Awwww, Yall ruined tomorrow’s Oprah show for me

Nope. I can see how my dad is considered an attractive man, and how he was a total hottie when he was younger. But that’s as far as it goes.

This is a misrepresentation of Freud’s theories. I’ll go into it tomorrow when I’m at the computer, but for now suffice it to say that Freud did NOT think that people have conscious thoughts about sleeping with their parents.

There seems to be a lot Mother/Son stuff going on in the past couple of years. There is that case in the US that has been making headlines lately where a thirty-five year old woman tracked down the teenage son she had given up for adoption and started a sexual affair with him. Mother/Son

A lot of psychological texts in recent times claim that it is far more common than publicly realised – that it started during the the second world war with mothers with teenage sons and absent husbands. It just isn’t talked about as readily as incest with daughters.

I find the whole concept repelling.

I had a dream once about my dad.

To this day it still disturbs me to the point where I have the equivalent of wanting to gouge out one’s own eyes to stop from seeing something… only it’s my brain.

as long as both parties consent, why the repulsion? once upon a time gay relationships faced just about the same level of stigma. in many (most?) parts of the world, they still do.

adding to the list, one woman on LiveJournal has sexual relations with her mother. I admire her for her courage in talking about it.

@poofandmook: regardless of what I think about incest, you have no reason to feel bad about anything you did in a dream. drop the remorse. it doesn’t give you anything of value.

that’s just nasty

why?

No, I never have. Freud was wrong. At least in my case.

Um. Ew. No.

I’ve had sexual thoughts about mothers. Not mine, though. even ignoring the incest stigma, she’s not an attractive woman.

@Sarcasm OPMILF? (Other People’s Moms….)

@airowDee Sometimes you should stop your mind from wandering to these places. WTF?

@Ria777 I find that VERY disturbing.

@airowDee you take after him, i see.

@chicadelplaya: that doesn’t surprise me. if you have a moral aversion to anything and you don’t know you do, I say take a look at it, figure out why you have the aversion, and if you can’t find a reason, think about giving it up.

@Ria777 i think she has the aversion because that’s disgusting. wow, case closed.

@Ria777 Perhaps that suggestion could apply to something else, but in this particular topic, NEVER. I don’t even want to know how or why you came to feel this way. Whoa.

@Ria777 Couldn’t the moral aversion to incest with a parent simply be the biological factors of potentially having screwed up offspring? Some moral aversions are there for a reason.

@Likeradar: I imagine it does. and I think that a lot of other cultural features have sociobiological explanations.

@Ria777 So why should anyone explore why they might have an aversion to having sex with a parent? The idea is instantly icky to most people for a perfectly good reason.

@Likeradar: a bait and argument there. I agree that societies have good reasons for a parent-child incest taboo. that does not follow that makes it objectively wrong.

plain gross!!!!!

It just occurred to me. I have a large B&W nude photograph of my Great Grandmother hanging on a wall. She is breathtakingly beautiful – and it is a studio shot that is not erotic – just stylish and classy. It was years before I found out who she was (my mother had the photograph on a wall in her study) – after going through old photographs of grandmother’s after she died and discovering many more photos of her with her clothes on. My Great-Grandmother was truly gorgeous. She was a singer and stage actress in the late nineteenth century.

I never really knew her, she was close to ninety years old when I was born.

no!

@DarkScribe By any chance do you have them saved in a digital format? I don’t know… I just find that B&W portraits from long ago have a certain high-class artsy feel about them.

@Saturated_Brain DarkScribe By any chance do you have them saved in a digital format?

I have everything saved in a digital format, I have been a keen photographer since my teens – which is why I always end up with boxes of negatives and slides after every family funeral. I have a large lightbox and an Epson V750 Pro and I scan everything of interest.
I have just been outside taking some shots of the local landscape in the middle of the huge multi-state dust cloud we are experiencing. It is like something out of the twilight zone.

@DarkScribe That’s cool…. If you don’t mind, do you have a link to them online (even of the dust cloud)?

@Saturated_Brain That’s cool…. If you don’t mind, do you have a link to them online (even of the dust cloud)?

Dust cloud yes, the news version, Great-Grandma – no, that’s private.

QLD-Dust Cloud

Everywhere I look it is reddish-orange, like a sunset that covers the whole sky. The sun is barely visible, paler than a small moon. What is really weird is that all the birds are sitting silently in the trees – normally they would be darting about and making a ruckus. (Mostly parrots.)

@DarkScribe About your greatgrandma, sure thing then.

As for the dust cloud… That’s just so creepy and scary… I’m glad I don’t live in a place where dust storms occur..

Of course, we’re off-topic already. =P

LOLLOLLOLLOLLOL! F**K NO!!!

Have any of you actually read Freud? There is a standard edition of his work, edited by Strachey. Until you know what he wrote, maybe you should leave him out of your discussions. It makes you look ignorant.

@pdworkin Have any of you actually read Freud?

Shhhhsh! Don’t spoil a good thing.

Me, I prefer Jung, he changed his mind so often that you can always find something that he said to support any position that you decide to take.

@DarkScribe I just pre-ordered The Red Book from Amazon.

@pdworkin _ I just pre-ordered The Red Book from Amazon.

At Amazon’s prices I’ll get a copy from the campus Co-op bookshop. Less than half.

Not on my campus. More than double.

@pdworkin Oh don’t worry.. I haven’t read Freud. Not yet.. Just read a tidbit or two, enough to make me convinced that reading any whole book of his might just give me nightmares. Am I wrong?

@pdworkin Not on my campus. More than double.

To buy through Amazon here will cost me US$160 plus.

The Co-Op is expecting about au$85.00

Ah, I paid US$110.

@Facade I used to tell my dad that I would marry him one day as well. I was about 6 years old at the time and never associated marriage with sex.

In answer to the question, no, I have never thought about either of my parents in a sexual way. However, I was abused as a child by someone close to me and for a long time I found that I couldn’t trust my dad (I hate myself for that now because my dad is one of the most wonderful men you could ever meet, I know now that he would NEVER do anything to harm me in anyway) and had nightmares about suffering the same abuse but at the hands of my dad. That NEVER happened and I trust my dad 100% now but from the ages of about 11 to 15 I was scared of all men.

@eponymoushipster so just because you find something disgusting, does it make the case closed?

@Simone_De_Beauvoir no, i think a lot of other people find it disgusting as well, as evidenced by this thread.

@eponymoushipster so what? does that make the case closed?

@Simone_De_Beauvoir yes. it’s repulsive in every way.

I get it, you’re gonna be “open-minded” and “free” by accepting actions like this. I see you pull this schtick on various similar threads. Fantastic. You want to bop Papa, fondle a goat and give Granny a Cleveland Steamer. Go ahead. Do you think incest should be legal? Do you think it’s right? What next? Should people be allowed to have sex with children? Is that “repressive” and “draconian”, hmm? Would you let someone with such an “open mind” have sex with your child?

If you feel disgust about this kind of issue, perhaps it would be worthwhile to investigate why. Sexuality is profoundly human, and profoundly complex, and incest taboos are very deeply wired. Remember the words of Terentius: Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir: Do you know what happens when people start screwing really close relatives? Bad recessive genes build up and people get sick and stupid and go all crazy. Why do you think there’s a lot of hemophilia in the royal European families? Because they were all screwing each other! It’s disgusting because it makes biological sense!

@eponymoushipster there is no need to put open minded and free in quotes – because I am those things and you’re being VERY condescending by saying this is my ‘shtick’ as if only your paradigm is real, which isn’t true…I would discuss the questions you pose in your comment, but not when your tone is patronizing – I deserve better.. and please refrain from huffing and puffing and putting words in my mouth – I don’t believe I ever condoned sex with children or with my father or wanted other adults to have sex with my children…if you can show me where I’ve ever expressed such an opinion, we’ll talk…

@KatawaGrey of course I know what happens – I have a degree in Biology, thanks…but I can also look at society from the outside, objectively and realize that certain things we find disgusting haven’t always been so and I can understand why the incest taboo exists but the biology of it is only one reason…it’s a social, not biological, disgust that we, as a society, feel…

Usually, people don’t get involved sexually with people they have lived closely with all their lives. It doesn’t matter whether they are related to the cohabiter or not. Perhaps it is just something built into us that makes us see those we live with in a non-sexual way, for the most part.

Of course, there is incest, and some of it, I suppose, might be consensual, but most of it I suspect is not. In any case, it often seems to be associated with some pathology, and thus it makes me suspicious when I hear someone else say it could be consensual. Really? Really? It’s possible, I suppose. Highly unlikely, though.

As an intellectual thing, I’ve thought about my parents being intimate with me. I do this with just about everyone I meet. It’s not something I take seriously. I’ve never thought about it seriously—as in, with actual desire. It has never appealed to me. It’s just something I conceive of (no pun intended) and then drop from my mind, because it is a disturbing thought. Sometimes I can’t believe the thought has even appeared. Weird, eh?

So I’d have to say I’ve had sexual thoughts about my parents, just as everyone who has answered this question has. You can’t answer the question without thinking about it. It’s not something I have ever felt desirable, though, and I can’t imagine it ever would be. It makes me shudder with revulsion, actually. I wish I didn’t have the image in my head.

As to other people thinking about it in a positive vein—as I said, I suppose it’s possible, but I seriously doubt it. If it does happen, it’s very difficult for me to imagine it as a healthy thing. It seems like it is likely to be a sign of a pathology. I can’t imagine it as a truly consensual thing, except possibly in a case where the two never knew each other when the child was growing up. Even then, I’d think it was some kind of compensation for issues related to abandonment.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir: You know, there are a number of societies where sex with children is condoned, even encouraged. I’m talking about young kids here, 9 year olds marrying 60 year olds and popping out kids. What’s so wrong about that?

Just because the rest of society has declared it to be gross with seemingly no explanation doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Maybe instead of just ignoring all these things you don’t like, you should look into them and figure out why they are the way that they are.

Also, if you have a degree in biology, you should know that, as a woman (‘scuze me, someone with two X chromosomes) you have fundamental biological and psychological things that make you different from men (‘scuze me, people with a Y chromosome.)

@Simone_De_Beauvoir it is a schtick. I could say “Peeing in the pool is bad.” and you’d start moaning “But, if you have to pee, it’s ok. Peeing in the pool is ok. How can you say that? You’re being close-minded.”

Mother, father – same thing in the terms of incest. You don’t get less sick freak points for banging mommy rather than daddy.

And, if you notice, I was asking about children as a hypothetical; i never said you said it (yet).

@KatawaGrey I do know of the societies you speak of and in the case of 9 years olds and 60 years olds, that’s rape and abuse of power of the adult…and I don’t ignore these things with just an ‘ew’ or a ‘gross’ or ‘case closed’...I am the one that talks about them openly, about all the perspectives…and yes there are inherent physical differences between most of the people categorized as female and most of the people categorized as male…obviously I have never said they don’t exist…what I argue in my analysis of sex and gender (and this q isn’t the place for this, so please pm me if you really want to talk about it) is that gender norms don’t have to ‘follow naturally’ from these biological differences and that gender norms don’t stay static and that anyone can be of any gender as gender is performative and sex, to a degree, is also a legitimized constructed category in that when we find intersex people and ‘deal’ with them as a society, we find that our own notions of biological sex categories are kind of shady and there is a lot of grey area…and chromosomes aren’t so clear cut in many people either…as many people have chromosomes of the other sex but live the opposite gender…

@eponymoushipster I could say the same thing to you – I could say that all you do is validate the party line, the majority’s view and that you do it for acceptance, because you are close-minded..but you know I’ve never told you that…I don’t believe that and I don’t know why you are so bent on insulting me…and the question above asked if I ever had those thoughts and I answered it honestly, so what? big deal…my answer has nothing to do with yours…if you think I’m so sick, make sure to not hang around me and make sure your children don’t either…rolls eyes

That is just so wrong…

I had a friend whose father wanted to and got as close as possible to having a sexual relationship with her.

She is now one bag of damaged goods.

Trust and respect starts at home.

@ChazMaz I just don’t think having sexual thoughts about your parents means you’re going to have sex with your parents or want to have sex with them or that you’re damaged…I am sure if my father approached me in that way, I’d punch him as I never liked him much…(yes cue @eponymoushipster saying something about my father issues)

@Simone_De_Beauvoir don’t have to say a thing. anyone who’s read this and the other threads like this you’ve posted in, knows about them already.

@eponymoushipster oh and I’m sure you’re so normal? right…and who are these others? is there like ‘let’s snigger about how weird simone is’ club? are you the president? congratulations, now you have a purpose.

@eponymoushipster you’re right. that would be pretty sad. hence you and i should stop talking. agreed?

[Mod Says] Flame off folks.

” I just don’t think having sexual thoughts about your parents means you’re going to have sex with your parents ”

I agree.
But, and, at least the way I was brought up. It was a non issue. There was no connection. Parents were and are looked as… Parents.
Sexuality and its relationship to my parents. Is like comparing orange soda and the sun.
Today I can see it be an issue, (not to say it was not then) with sex and sexuality injected into everything and everyone.

The thinking of your parents sexually is an OLD question. No question is does happen. I was just not brought up to make the connection.

I don`t know why people have to say ew, or gross. No one is condoning sexual intercourse between parent and child. This is a simple question I want to discuss because I want to see if anyone has ever thought about marrying their mom or dad, and I can honestly say that I had. I don`t think it`s gross, stop with the thought control, because discussion is more appealing than throwing around patrionizing comments.

“Have you had sexual thoughts”

Children bond with their parents. Feelings that are innocent.
It was a sexual question. Did you want to marry your dad so you could have sex with him?

Because the thought of anything sexual having to do with my parents is gross. You haven’t seen my parents.

(A perfect example of how messed up it is (incestuous relations)) I’m watching Mackenzie Philips on Oprah right now. She was 18 when she and her father, John Philips had an incestuous affair. Even though it was consensual, boy, did it fuck her up (and she admits to that).

Man, the way that I feel about John Philips has changed.

do you ever notice how anti-gay activists conflate gay sex with pederasty? a lot of the anti-incest rhetoric assumes a situation where an adult parent exploits a child. not an adult, a child. and of course it does sometimes happen. gay pederasty also does actually happen.

as for Daloon’s point about family members (blood or otherwise) not having sex with each other… a friend (who had a sibling) has mentioned to me how often he has heard from people with their brothers and/or sisters. adults just tend not to talk about it. (though I grew up with siblings, they didn’t experiment with me, BTW.)

also…

shame and guilt over having transgressed just about the biggest taboo around (probably more negatively regarded than cannibalism) will trigger self-loathing in almost everyone. shame, guilt, just from having done something almost anyone would condemn.

so if hates herself, now, I can see why would do it. in practical terms, I also want to say that she may possibly have destroyed her whole career. and that if she had not shown repentance she would have destroyed her career. (I don’t mean to imply she has faked the remorse, here, just reminding you all of just badly it could hurt someone’s psyche to talk about this openly.)

But at the same time, if more people can talk openly about “yucky, eww, gross” issues , there might be less chance of self loathing and shame and guilt on those who suffer these kind of abuses.

Does anyone want to actually see the passage in question? No? You would prefer to loll around comfortably castigating Freud as a psychopath to make yourself look smart to other ignorant people? Too bad, I’m going to show you anyway. But first, a word about terminology, so you guys can understand this: The “sexual object” = the person you want to do it with (though Freud, like Proust, does divide the person from the feeling).
The “sexual aim” = what you want to do with that person. Also important to remember when reading this stuff is that Freud thinks that the sexual drive is made of component drives.

Ok, now I’m not going to show you guys the passage itself, unless someone really wants me to, because I think my notes from class are easier to understand if you’re not familiar with psychoanalytic thought, and because I’m worried about copyright issues. So here goes, from my notes:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thumb-sucking: Every time the baby is fed, it is also erotically stimulated, because being fed is an erotic stimulation. There is no question, for the baby, of nourishment in the act of thumb-sucking. It is a remembrance of nourishment. When a baby puts its thumb in its mouth, it is going for the erotic stimulation. So this represents the first purposive moment of purely sexual activity. At first, as a somatic function, it has no object-relation: it is auto-erotic. Nourishment → sexual satisfaction. Our sexuality is inherently auto-erotic. This is why F insists on the separation of sexual aim and sexual object. This also fits in well with F’s theory of wish fulfillment in the baby’s hallucination of the breast before it learns to cry to get the breast.

A symptom is formed by the repression of the perverse sexual aim. The disposition to perversion is universal.

Thumb sucking shows us the derivation of the sexual aim itself. It is the experiential aspect of the satisfaction of the hungry baby. This is the point where the sexual aim, divorced from any aspect of self-preservation, appears. It is auto-erotic, which means that sexual satisfaction is not originally/initially object-oriented.

All sexual acts performed as adults will contain elements of infantile sexuality. Sexuality and fantasy are interrelated (wish and auto-erotic activity go together). One cannot tell the difference between truth and cathected affect. interjection: “cathedted” = “mentally processed”, more or less

In the second phase, when sexual aim begins to be concentrated on the genitals, there is object-choice (the parents). The parents have become implicated in the child’s masturbatory activity. This is due to the inevitable seductions of the parents themselves.

Freud is beginning here to adumbrate his account of human experience. Human mammals have a diphasic onset of sexuality, unlike other mammals. In the Oedipus complex we get something that is very close to the adult version of adult sexual relationships. F must account for the inevitability of incestuous object-choice in the phase of genital masturbation. Then all this gets repressed in the latency period, and is preserved in the unconscious. These are revived at the time of puberty, and can escape repression.

We would have no respect for our parents whatsoever except that we were passionately in love with them.

Should that (what that) not happen – and in neurotics it never happens – the focusing of all desires upon a single object will be unattainable.

Now, this is the really pertinent part: Because of the relatedness of the child to the breast, the child can extend that relation to the mother. This doesn’t happen – it is only that now it is possible. It is only in adolescence that there is really an idea of another person sexually. Only when this connection arises can the further connection be made between self-realization and sexual object extension.

Caring for the child is sexually gratifying for both the child and the parents. This is desirable within limits, because it teaches the child to love and allows her to grow up into a normal, psychically strong person. An early sign of a neurotic is seen in a child’s insatiable need for parental affection.

There is the postponement of sexual maturation in humans to set up the barrier against incest. This is a universal (this universal point is hotly contested) cultural demand, because if children get swallowed up by their families, they cannot reproduce (Later, the superego, the formation of guilt and its role in the Oedipus complex will add a more detailed layer of reasons for this.). However, the theory of a period of sexual latency has not stood up (presently) to observation.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So, guys, please do try to realize that Freud was not crazy, and he did not at all think in the way that the OP portrays his thought. Infantile sexuality does, in fact, exist – this has been proven. And in fact, everything except for the theory of a period of sexual latency has stood up to observation! The object of infantile sexuality is invariably the parent(s). This does not mean that Freud thought that people consciously desire their parents sexually. What it does mean is that here we have a brilliant thinker who finally came up with a coherent explanation for how humans develop sexually. F’ing appreciate it already.

Oh @wildpotato, you had a perfect chance to use the phrase “polymorphically perverse”. How did you restrain yourself?

@wildpotato Read it. But there’s one thing I want to understand. Freud seems to be trying seems to be proving his conclusion by his premise. I didn’t get any part which explained why a child sucking its mother’s breast is auto-erotic, save for the section which says that all adult sexual acts contain elements of infantile sexuality (sucking comes to mind).

“Nourishment → sexual satisfaction”

Okay.. But why? I’ve effectively been given an assumption.

(unless I misread/misunderstood something in that passage of yours)

Freud said essentially that a primary infantile drive is sexual, so this drive can express itself in breast feeding, urinating, being tickled, etc. Satisfaction, to an infant, is sexual satisfaction. Tension and release.

Without starting a range war, I will say that one of the reasons that psychodynamic psychotherapy is going out of style in many venues is this very difficulty you have elucidated as a form of petitio principii. Freud is a closed system, and it has proven difficult to design experiments to prove or disprove many of his theories by empirical means.

@pdworkin

I never thought that a child or a baby could know that they are consciously attracted to their mother or father. But looking back as an adult now, I can guess that I probably have felt some sort of attraction to my parents and it might not have been sexual than, but it could be intepreted as sexual now, for me, as an adult.That is the question I am asking.

This story is what I am trying to get across:
It’s from here http://www.fathermag.com/9604/oedipus/
”

© Corbis. All rights reserved.
Encounters with Oedipus Rex
by Matthew Westra

One evening as I was leaving to teach a night class, I kissed my three-year-old son, Ben, goodbye as he played on the living room floor. I went to the couch and kissed my wife, Cheryl. As I reached the front door, Ben sprang from the floor, climbed onto the couch next to Cheryl, wiped the kiss from her lips with broad strokes of his open palm, turned to face me with a challenging, chest-out posture, pointed his finger accusingly, and declared, “You don’t kiss her. She’s MY wife!”

The kid had me over a barrel. He was going to win this battle because, after spending all day taking care of his needs, I was off to earn money to feed and house this insurgent. Despite my tenuous situation, I was caught by the sight of this former cherub, now puffed up like a bullfrog in mating season and full of himself. ”

Well there is our problem raising its head again. We cannot remember what it was like to be an infant, and we have no way of knowing what an infant really feels, so all of these object relations issues from Freud through Melanie Klein, even to D.W. Winnicott are of necessity unprovable assertions.

Personally I think Freud was a seminal genius for the 20th Century, but there is an enormous school of cognitive and behavioral experts who think I am full of shit.

I just thought of something. There are those who believe that homosexual men exist because they have a dominant mothers in their life, and they never got to identify with their fathers due to divorce or unhappy marriages.

This is disturbing because that fits with Freud’s theory. I know not all gay men have dominant mothers, but does it increase the likelihood? Are some transsexual women or effeminate gay men the way they are because of the lack of a strong father figure and a mother who got attaches to her little boy?

It can’t be.

@pdworkin Thank you! I edited “polymorphically perverse” out, actually; thought it might invite more criticism from people who wouldn’t try to understand what it means.

@airowDee Good job, you’re in the ballpark as far as the overall structure goes, though off base when it comes to the content you’re filling it with. Freud says that one’s sexual orientation is, indeed, a result of the identification one retains to one parent or the other – but this doesn’t have much to do with “dominant” mothers; that aspect doesn’t enter into his thought so much, actually. He does say a brief word about lack of a strong father (below), but it’s more of an afterthought than anything. I’ll quote this directly for you cause I found the whole text of the Strachey edition in a few places online , and I think you ought to hear him in his own words: (vocab: “inversion” = “homosexuality”)

“Footnote added 1910:] It is true that psycho-analysis has not yet produced a complete explanation of the origin of inversion; nevertheless, it has discovered the psychical mechanism of its development, and has made essential contributions to the statement of the problems involved. In all the cases we have examined we have established the fact that the future inverts, in the earliest years of their childhood, pass through a phase of very intense but shortlived fixation to a woman (usually their mother), and that, after leaving this behind, they identify themselves with a woman and take themselves as their sexual object. That is to say, they proceed from a narcissistic basis, and look for a young man who resembles themselves and whom they may love as their mother loved them…”

To elaborate on this – male and female babies begin by identifying themselves with their mothers. For the male baby to turn out heterosexual, he must transfer his identification to his father (Incidentally, this is where the Oedipal complex comes into play, because if you identify with your father then you take your mother as your sexual object). Male babies that turn out homosexual never make this transfer, and continue to retain the identification with the mother (Freud speculates that this is one way to defend against the father’s murderous rage – never getting to the point of the male version of the Oedipal complex in the first place, because your mother can’t be your sexual object if you identify with her and thus take your father as sexual object). I’m not going to go into the details of how this happens for female babies, because it gets a lot more complex. Ask me tomorrow if you really want to know.

Now, this is the part I really like:

”[Added 1915:] Psycho-analytic research is most decidedly opposed to any attempt at separating off homosexuals from the rest of mankind as a group of a special character. By studying sexual excitations other than those that are manifestly displayed, it has found that all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious. Indeed, libidinal attachments to persons of the same sex play no less a part as factors in normal mental life, and a greater part as a motive force for illness, than do similar attachments to the opposite sex. On the contrary, psycho-analysis considers that a choice of an object independently of its sex—freedom to range equally over male and female objects—as it is found in childhood, in primitive states of society and early periods of history, is the original basis from which, as a result of restriction in one direction or the other, both the normal and the inverted types develop. Thus from the point of view of psycho-analysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature. A person’s final sexual attitude is not decided until after puberty and is the result of a number of factors, not all of which are yet known; some are of a constitutional nature but others are accidental. No doubt a few of these factors may happen to carry so much weight that they influence the result in their sense. But in general the multiplicity of determining factors is reflected in the variety of manifest sexual attitudes in which they find their issue in mankind. In inverted types, a predominance of archaic constitutions and primitive psychical mechanisms is regularly to be found. Their most essential characteristics seem to be a coining into operation of narcissistic object-choice and a retention of the erotic significance of the anal zone. There is nothing to be gained, however, by separating the most extreme types of inversion from the rest on the basis of constitutional peculiarities of that kind. What we find as an apparently sufficient explanation of these types can be equally shown to be present, though less strongly, in the constitution of transitional types and of those whose manifest attitude is normal. The differences in the end-products may be of a qualitative nature, but analysis shows that the differences between their determinants are only quantitative. Among the accidental factors that influence object-choice we have found that frustration (in the form of an early deterrence, by fear, from sexual activity) deserves attention, and we have observed that the presence of both parents plays an important part. The absence of a strong father in childhood not infrequently favours the occurrence of inversion. Finally, it may be insisted that the concept of inversion in respect of the sexual object should be sharply distinguished from that of the occurrence in the subject of a mixture of sexual characters. In the relation between these two factors, too, a certain degree of reciprocal independence is unmistakably present.”

Damn, I love it. A “general natural bisexual predisposition” in humans, because we have all in fact made a homosexual object-choice at a certain point in the process of our mental formation. Brilliant. This is all from a footnote on p. 144 of the SE in the 3 Essays, for those of you who care.

This issue, by the way, is hotly contested to this day. The matter has by no means been left at that. Here is a bit of an overview.

I refuse to accept Freud’s theory because that is demeaning to the way I identified. Freud’s penis envy proves that he is by no mean accurate on all things, or maybe even anything. There is a grain of truth here and there, but i am sure biology also plays a part into someone’s orientatin and/or gender identity.

@airowDee Ah I see. So by that logic, because you are wrong about this I get to say that everything you ever write is full of it. Fair enough, I guess.’

Read it again, Sam. He says at the top of that first quote I put in that it’s unclear whether homosexuality is innate or not.

@wildpotato Hmm… Interesting man, this Freud… But still, I have to point out that as @pdworkin confirmed, Freud’s system is a closed system. No doubt he was a great thinker, but there’s something of a logical fallacy in his work. We are unable to falsify his theories, because the axioms they’re based upon come out of his mind without much explanation, and we accept them because they apparently work, just like maths really.

I might just pick up his Interpretation of Dreams one day. My interest is piqued (although judging from the difficulty I had in reading that excerpt [I had to reread a few sentences in order to get the gist of it] it’ll take me some time to digest it).

Actually, I dare say that in some ways, this theory of his regarding sexuality makes quite a lot of sense and it concurs on many levels with how I believe sexuality turns out (although I’d refrain from using some of the language he does, and I also still have problems accepting his belief that all satisfaction babies gain is auto-erotic).

@airowDee Just because you don’t believe in it doesn’t mean it isn’t true. If you really want to find out the way things really work, sticking your head into the sand won’t work. Go and read both sides in order to get the full story and from there make your opinion. So what if one theory is demeaning? If so many people believe in it, perhaps there’s some merit to really understanding it. Please do this for your own sake.

@Saturated_Brain I suggest you start with The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. It is both accessible and instructive. Don’t forget that Freud contributed to psychology something fundamental that no one who is serious doubts in the least – the theory of the unconscious mind. That is why @airowDee, one may so easily forgive such minor errors as the problems you identified with his thinking on the phallic stage of development. After all, he was working with upper-class women in Victorian times.

And, he was hopped up on cocaine.

Upper-class Victorian women and some blow. The man had it going on.

Freud was a product of his time and as a product of his time had many many limitations and though his work was revolutionary in some way it was also completely off in others

Before you start deifying Freud try reading some Derrida or any of Freud’s other critics.

@ChazMaz He actually had a really bad coke experience pretty early on – one of his friends O.D.‘d – and he didn’t do it too much after that. Not to say that it would have been a bad thing if he had kept doing it.

@tinyfaery I’ve read a ton of Derrida. Could you please cite the parts of his work you’re referring to?

I nearly had a sexual thought about a parent today. My father is being a PITA and I nearly suggested that he engage in a solitary sexual act. I restrained myself though – yet again.

(They split up in the sixties and I tend to favour my mother’s issues more than his. It was only after she died that we started talking again – at her behest the day before she died.)

@DarkScribe What does PITA mean?

@cyndihugs Pain In The Ass

The original question seems to be about kids having attraction to their moms or dads (which is quite different from sexual thoughts about them as an adult). Freud talked about unconscious wishes to posses our other-sex parent (son-mother, daughter-father) and this is pretty evident in the way kids are with their parents. It is a normal part of growing up in that we are mentally practicing our roles as partners. It does not mean that if we have these unconscious thoughts we will grow up to have conscious sexual thoughts of our parents. I think it’s pretty common for little kids to think about kissing their parents or getting abundant attention – like sleeping with them in the bed and the other parent wouldn’t be there. So some of the important distinctions here are unconscious vs conscious thought, as well as child vs adult.