Are Freud's Theories Of The Oral And Anal Personalities Like
This question immediately raises the problem, "how are we to determine which parts of Freudian theory are 'good'?" Freud may well have argued that the evidence he documented from his psychotherapy sessions was sufficient, whilst behaviourists would demand that the various aspects of a theory could only be recognised as 'good' after being exposed to the full rigours of the scientific method. I personally don't feel that one can hope to design a repeatable experiment that will decisively illustrate the existence of, for example, the Oedipus complex. On the other hand I feel that we cannot simply accept a theory that has been moulded to fit a certain experimenters observations, coloured as they must be by their own personality, prejudices, and society. Therefore in this essay I will examine the empirical evidence from studies conducted on these most controversial of Freud's theories, and where that evidence appears on balance to give support to that particular theory, I will accept it as 'good'. As I said earlier some will regard this measure of worth as too lax to be of any use, whilst others will object to the application of science to the process of personality development, a process that is infinitely complex and unique, and so b
Therefore, whilst I wouldn't accept all of Freud's theory of the anal personality as good, it is at least more sound than the oral personality. Firstly the anal personality is well-defined, and can be shown to exist in the general, non-neurotic, population. Secondly, whilst there is no direct evidence linking the personality type to toilet-training and the anal-stamp, Kline's experiment does appear to be showing something significant, which despite Eysenck and Wilson's derision, cannot easily be explained. In view of the failure of Kline and others to show consistent and satisfactory evidence of a link between personality and anal fixation, I feel that the term 'anal' is a potentially misleading misnomer for a recognised personality type. A more descriptive term, such as 'authoritarian' would be of more value. This apparent failure is not unusual among such experiments, even Kline (1972), an experimenter sympathetic to Freud, admits that, "From the considerable number of studies attempting to relate child-rearing procedures to personality development only two give even slight support to the Freudian theory." One of the studies Kline was referring to was carried out by Goldman-Eisler (1951), and partially discussed earlier. After identifying the two sets of traits that constituted the opimisitic and pessimistic oral personalities, Goldman-Eisler attempted to demonstrate a link between these personality types and the age of weaning from the breast. The only significant result (P<0.05) that Goldman found was a link between those weaned relatively early, and a pessimistic oral personality. Eysenck and Wilson (1973) shed doubt on these findings, claiming that early weaning could be associated with a rejecting or unaffectionate mother, which may well have led to a personality consistent with the oral pessimistic, and that therefore the link may be environmental.
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Approximate Word count = 2393
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)
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