THE CHAPTER FOUR

This chapter on the Psychoanalytic in Tong brought to light a whole to take on Freudian theories for me. Looking at how a they way women act and how it is all driven from somewhere deep inside their psyche. Tong explores how gender identity, and gender inequality is all due to some apparently troubling early childhood experiences and attachment stages with our parents. Giving the background on Freud his stage and ideals of childhood sexuality, Tong sets the stage to provide information of feminists supporting this role. Freud says that it is harder for a girl to reach "normal" sexual maturity because she must stop loving another woman (her mother) and begin loving a man (her father). Freud says that it is also hard because a female could essentially have too much sex or just give up on sex all together.

Is there a time when males are ever accused of engaging in too much mastubation thus resulting them to "give up on sexuality altogether?"

Freud also says, "their super-ego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men"

thus implying that it is the super-ego - the sense of right and wrong- is what holds women back from being equal to men and it is the id that is driving the women.

The chapter goes on to talk about duel parenting and how that would alter the structures of society and place more emphasis on the father to be seen as a more significant role in a child's life.

Also discussing how boys are forced to reject their mothers because they cannot have sex with them and they do not want to regress back into the state of total vulnerability like when they were in the womb. This is the reason that both boys and girls push away from their mother as they grow, argues Tong.

while the stages of development and Oedipal theories offer information to be learned from they are hard to be taken as hardcore facts in today's society. But, they still offer many underlying themes in the media. So, if Freud is so rejected why are his ideas and thoughts and theories still driving the one thing we like to indulge most in?