Sex in mythology - Essay Example

During his study he observed that majority of his patients talked about things that they could little express. The reason for this difficulty he believed was repression of feelings due to taboos and painful experience attached to such forbidden ideas. He hypothesized that that one main reason for such anxiety was the repressed energy of libido or sex that was held by human due to several defense mechanisms. He added fear or feeling of guilt or shame to such fantasies that were not possible to express in normal life.

He explains that jokes, slip of tongue, customs, myths and dreams are kind of ventilation and unconscious expression for such repressed feelings. Freud believes that Libido (sex) develop in humans by changing objects. He argued that during the sexual development, individuals are fixated on special objects to derive pleasure; such as sucking thumb; which later on changes to fixation on the mother as a sexual object (which he named as Oedipus Complex). In the case of daughter it is the fixation on father named as Electra complex.

The Oedipus complex is a conflict that Freud called neuroses in childhood; where a male child desires excessive love towards his mother and looks at his father with jealousy. The central theme of Freud psychoanalysis theory is that children go through Oedipus complex, but it is their fear of castration that leads them to identify themselves with father rather than desiring mother. The child develop ultimately resolves the Oedipus complex by following parental values; which give rise to super-ego and forms the unrealistic ideals where a child find himself torn between his desires and parents ideal through out his life resulting in anxiety, fear and repressed wishes.

Oedipus complex is named on Greek tragedy Oedipus the son of King Laius of Thebes and Queen Jocasta. Oedipus was left in the mountains to be devoured by wolves but found and raised by a shepherd. Years later Oedipus kills his father unknowingly and marries his mother. The story comes to a tragic end where Oedipus blinds himself and begs in streets after knowing the truth. Freud relied on self-analysis and on the anthropological studies to develop his theory of Oedipus complex. He mentions that Oedipus conflict is the expression of wish through a myth, and how human desire incest, but they repress such desires.

The legend of Electra; the daughter of Agamemnon who killed her mother to get his father is named as Electra complex (which was named by Carl Jung as female Oedipus attitude in young girls). What Freud points out that during the phallic stage daughters are more attached to father and imagine father; that results in hostility towards mother, the myth of Electra is one such example. Freud mentions that this phenomenon is present in different kind of fairy tales and that the myth is in fact a distorted version of wish fulfillment of an entire race or nation.

He sees the Oedipus Complex not as a story, but a real episode as children desire parents during their developing years but refrain to act due to social pressure or taboo. He even mentions a real incident where sons oppressed by father revolted and overtook the father's wives after killing wife (Similar incidents used to happen in ancient Arab culture). But the subsequent generation refrained from doing so; thus Freud concludes that myths are repression of ideas; which he further elaborates in