Question

Do you think that Freud was too influenced by gender stereotypes and the influence of the culture of his day?

Answer 1

Note: This response is in UK English, please paste the response to MS Word and you should be able to spot discrepancies easily. You may elaborate the answer based on personal views or your classwork if necessary.

(Answer) Sigmund Freud was an Austrian psychologist, neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis. He was born in 1856 and died in 1930. He lived most of his life in the continent of Europe at the time of the First World War and he died on the eve of the Second World War

At this time, nations were trying to out-do each other not only through war but also through scientific research and technology. These developments were in the field of weaponry, anatomy and futuristic technology.

Freud, on the other hand, indulged in studies of the conscious and unconscious mind, Oedipus theory, gender development and identity studies among others. These topics about child psychology and superego would hardly be topics that a government would support at the time of a major War.

It was mostly that Freud stuck to his field, despite his studies being the need of the hour or not. However, his studies may not have been profitable at a time of war, but it was surely essential in understanding the psyche of individuals that were involved in the war.

Considering Hitler’s relationship with his parents, world leaders taking drastic measures to prove their might and other circumstances, theories like Freud’s are certainly helpful in the determination of psychological issues that several men of power faced at the time.

If it is the separate matter of Freud’s gender development studies, then it is something that focuses on the stages that a child might go through in finding their sexual identity. Both male and female subjects in these analyses have been treated with objectivity. Furthermore, through psychoanalysis, Freud proved his hypotheses through legitimate methodologies. If bias was a factor, his theories might have probably been disproved entirely by now.