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Strengths and weaknesses of sigmund freud theory
Contribution of Sigmund Freud
Contribution of Sigmund Freud
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Sigmund Freud has made significant contributions to society. His ideals about how society both functions and interacts have shaped the world in implicit and explicit ways. His theories were passed on to his nephew, Bernie Bernays, which then made them a reality. His ideas also resonate with the observations of other theorists, such as Marcuse. The film “The Century of the Self” put the ways we are unwillingly controlled into perspective. Consumerism has masked itself in all aspects of our lives to manipulate the individual, control masses, and suppress individuality. The ideals that shape the world today are largely based on the theory that individuals have dangerous repressed sexual desires. Along with that, the individual represses these emotions in order to function in society and fit in. Freud was one to distance …show more content…
Consumerism has grown quickly and effectively. It has become so integrated into our modern world that it is no longer singled out. Individuals revolve their life around material objects and repeatedly fall for commercials urging them to purchase unnecessary objects. This system was spearheaded by Bernays. All of our consumer needs are tailored to ensure they are overly fulfilled. A simple task such as going grocery shopping, has been micromanaged by companies; they can pay for product placement. Holiday shopping, sales, blowout events, etc. are all ways to trick the individual into the consumer spiral. Commercials and advertisements find ways to appeal to our so called repressions and bring out our craving to obtain that object. The film explained that most things are attributed to sexual desire, so an example is a perfume commercial with an oversexualized ideal of a woman or man. (The Century of the Self) The economy is only one of the ways we are limited. Freud’s ideas have worked both on an individual level and on a larger
In the article Kilbourne is stressing the Idea that advertising is stripping us of our spirituality, culture is becoming commercialism. Kilbourne believes that because of the way advertisements are deployed they’re changing our values in what I (and I’m pretty sure she) would consider an extremely negative way. Kilbourne talks of their efforts to addict us to consumerism as children and leave us emotionally starved, expecting products to fill the void that they create in us. The culture that comes with these advertisements is turning us into self-indulgent, close minded people Kilbourne sums this idea up quite well bemoaning that “This apparently bottomless consumerism not only depletes the world’s resources,
Freud believed that a human must go through certain stages in their lives or they will not socially develop to their full extent. He also made claims that a human is always struggling between their human, and instinctual nature. This was a very controversial topic because Freud concluded there was a lack of individuality of the human race. If Freud’s theory was the case then humans would have less of a choice in their life, and are truly slaves to their instinctual nature. While an intelligent figure of his time, I believe that Freud went in the wrong direction when approaching his theory. While humans do have a large amount of urges that he described, the person themselves can choose what to do based not solely on society, but their wants and needs as well. Had Freud been alive today I’m sure that his theory would have theorized much different things about the human nature. I think it is important to analyze the distinct cultural setting behi...
Freud believes the purpose of life is the pleasure principle, that the satisfaction of instinct spells happiness for us (p.28). His idea is for mankind to come together in unity, his idea is for a Utopian world such as Huxley describes in Brave New World. Love one’s neighbor as oneself, a famous quote from our Bible, Freud disregards as counter to human nature. Instead Freud concedes that guilt is the ruling power over humans, not guilt of misguided actions but rather fear of authority or the super ego. He believes people should follow their instincts, he does not believe humans are conscious of their decisions and the affects. He warrants the use of drugs because they follow along with his pleasure principle. To my dismay much of Freud’s teaching can be seen in today’s world. Gone are the ways of the Bible, which defines love as a sacred act shared between one man and one woman. Instead today, love is about pleasure, casual sex outside marriage is just one example. Freud does not believe in religion, he relates humans to apes as Darwin’s theory of Evolution defines. He opposes Sartre’s view, by saying we are not in control of our actions and cannot take responsibility of our
Ewen, S. (2001). Consumption and Seduction. In Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and The Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. (pp. 177-184). New York, NY: Basic Books.
In his documentary, A Century of the Self: Happiness Machines, Adam Curtis illustrates that Sigmund Freud had developed a new theory that human beings cannot be trusted with what they wanted. In other words, he believed that people must always be controlled. With the idea that they know what the nation is thinking, those in power used Freuds theory to help keep individuals within their limits. Additionally, if they do not command, individuals and communities will be discontented, which would lead to chaos and destruction. Moreover, Curtis maintained that Edward Bernays, who was Freuds nephew was the first to put his theory to practice. Bernays argued that manipulation was necessary in a democratic society and throughout the documentary, it
Freud has multiple known theories all describing the unconsciousness, the human defense mechanism, the clinical conversation between patients and psychoanalyst, and most prominently he discussed about sexual desire. He explained sexual desire as the key motivating energy for humans, and he discussed about its magnitude. On the same topic of sexual desire, Freud also discussed about homosexuality and how it’s acquired (Freud’s View of Homosexuality, 2013). Sigmund Freud discussed the concept of homosexuality as deterministic. According to Feud, human beings are born with unfocused sexual libidinal d...
If a person wants to learn about what is important to this culture, all they have to do is turn on the television and watch the advertisements. The advertisements that air, provide strong evidence of what is popular in this culture. It seems that people hastily buy their wants in search for the one object that could make them happy and feel fulfilled, in turn, they only find out that the item did not generate happiness for a prolonged period of time. The evidence suggests that because society has reached their needs a door is open to people wanting to continually satisfy their wants and their happiness, which is leading to the hunger for more.
According to Sigmund Freud, what we do and why we do it, who we are
of sexual urges. Freud did note however, that social agents such as parents should be
In Sigmund Freud’s “Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness”, contained in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, the writer presents separate roles for men and women as it relates to sexuality, even referring to a “double code of morality” (22) for the genders. In his paper the former often takes the role of the subject while the former becomes the object. In fact, women are described as the “true sexual guardians of the race” glorified, it seems, instead of truly studied. However, in one particular section of the essay, Freud turns his focus onto the female sexuality. In specific he references the various factors that, in his eyes, can influence the female sexual formation. The primary influences being that of the society, primarily the institution of marriage, and that of the family, which would include both a woman’s parents and children. After discussing these elements, Freud then
Sigmund Freud was the initiator of psychoanalysis. He altered the insight into the human mind and how it works. It spurred him into defining the unconscious and what was for him the powerhouse of personality – irrational motivation. The series examines profound queries surrounding the origins and techniques of contemporary consumerism, commodification, typical democracy and its consequences. It furthermore looks at the current manner we perceive ourselves, the outlooks to fashion and superficiality. Freud's findings in connection with the mind were methodically applied by corporate America and the U.S. government to raise their capital and authority. This technique also provided the impre...
“Psychological - or more strictly speaking, psychoanalytic -investigation shows that the deepest essence of human nature, which are similar in all men and which aim at the satisfaction of certain needs... [are] self-preservation, aggression, need for love, and the impulse to attain pleasure and avoid pain...” At its simplest form, this quote perfectly explains Sigmund Freud’s theory on human nature. Human beings, according to Freud, are in a constant state of conflict within themselves; trying to satisfy their animalistic instincts, while also maintaining a socially appropriate life. Freud termed these animalistic tendencies that we have, the Id. The Id is essentially our unconscious mind, it is the part of us that has been there since the day we were born and is what drives our life’s needs and desires. The Id simply aims to satisfy our sexual or aggressive urges immediately, without taking into account any further implications. On the other hand, Freud used the term, the Superego, to describe man’s conscience and sense of morality. It is the Superego’s job to keep the Id in check by combatting the desire to satisfy urges with the feeling of guilt or anxiety. Finally, the Ego, is the conscious representation of the constant battle between the Superego and the Id. It must work to satisfy human’s instinctual tendencies while taking into account their conscience and doing what is rational and acceptable. Freud argues that these internal process that are constantly at work in our mind are what shape humans to do the things that they do. Thus, he believes, the goal of human nature is to satisfy our basic aggressive and sexual desires while adhering to cultural and social standards.
In Sigmund Freud's observation, humans are mainly ambitious by sexual and aggressive instincts, and search for boundless enjoyment of all needs. However, the continuous pursuit of gratification driven by the identification, or unconscious, directly conflicts with our society as the uncontrolled happiness. Sigmund Freud believed that inherent sexual and aggressive power prevented from being expressed would cause our "society to be miserable and the forfeiture of contentment." Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic view of personality theory is based on the perception that greatly of human behavior is determi...
“The average family is bombarded with 1,100 advertisements per day … people only remembered three or four of them”. Fiske’s uses an example of kids singing Razzmatazz a jingle for brand of tights at a woman in a mini skirt. This displayed to the reader that people are not mindless consumers; they modify the commodity for their use. He rejects that the audiences are helpless subjects of unconscious consumerism. In contrast to McDonald’s, Fiske’s quoted “they were using the ads for their own cheeky resistive subculture” he added. He believed that instead of being submissive they twisted the ad into their own take on popular culture (Fiske, 1989, p. 31)
Freud believed that humans develop through stages based on particular erogenous zones. Freud theorized that to gain a healthy personality as an adult, a person would have to successfully complete a certain sequence of five stages. Within the five stages of Freud’s psychosexual development theory, Freud assumed there would be major consequences if any stage was not completed successfully. The stages, in order, were the oral stage, the anal stage, the phallic stage, the latency stage, and the genital stage. In general, Freud believed that an unsuccessful completion of any stage would make a person become fixated on that particular stage. The outcome would lead the person to either over indulge or under indulge the failed stage during adulthood. Freud truly believed that the outcomes of the psychosexual stages played a major part in the development of the human personality. Eventually, these outcomes would become different driving forces in every human being’s personality. The driving forces would determine how a person would interact with the world around them. The results from Freud’s theory about the stages of psychosexual development led Freud to create the concept of the human psyche; Freud’s biggest contribution to