History and Philosophy of Psychology by Hyland Michael E. Chung Man Cheung & Michael E. Hyland

Author:Hyland, Michael E., Chung, Man Cheung & Michael E. Hyland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2011-11-28T16:00:00+00:00

The way the boy sublimates his desire for his mother (i.e. finds an acceptable form for this desire) is very clever. He identifies with the father. By identifying with the father the boy obtains his mother sexually in a surrogate or sublimated form. By identifying with the father, the child takes on the moral code of the father. So Freud says that the ‘superego is the heir of the Oedipal conflict’, meaning that the satisfactory resolution of the Oedipal conflict leads to the formation of the superego. The phallic personality is one where the male has to prove, symbolically, that he has not been castrated. People who are high achievers, who are show offs, and who are always trying to ‘look big’ are all phallic personalities.

Box 9.11 The Case of Little Hans

Little Hans (in fact Herbert Graf) was a 4 year old boy who developed a fear of horses. Freud did not see Little Hans, but treated him using the father as an intermediary. Freud was convinced that this fear of horses stemmed from hostility towards the father and an unresolved Oedipal conflict. Little Hans had pointed out to his mother that horses have ‘widdlers’ and that his mother did not have one – i.e., he was aware of sexual differences. His mother had previously told Hans not to play with his widdler – ‘If you play with your widdler, Dr A will cut if off and then what will you have to widdle with? This admonition by his mother led to an association of castration anxiety and horses. So, whenever Little Hans saw a horse he was reminded of his hostility towards his father, his love for his mother, and the fear of castration that this produced.

An entirely different explanation might be that Little Hans saw a horse and cart fall down in the street and became afraid simply due to associative learning (compare with Watson’s account of Little Albert – children are afraid of loud noises). Students can make their own mind as to whether the Freudian or Behaviourist explanations of Little Hans are more likely.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.