#im developing a male case of hysteria

[imperaptorfuriosa]

at the point of touch-starved and horny that a chaste kiss in a (very very good) disney movie has my brain going into overdrive

[determinate-negation]

as one of the foremost psychoanalysis posters on my dash i was wondering if you've heard this account of freud's early career: while treating women for hysteria he found that most of them were assaulted by male family members as children & developed psychological problems as a result (seduction theory?). but his writings on it were unpopular (especially among the wealthy men whose daughters he was treating), so he came up with the oedipus & electra complex as an alternate explanation that let his clients off the hook, instead saying that something just went wrong internally (lundy bancroft called it the beginning of victim-blaming in psychology).

as someone who knows more than i about this field, do you know if there's any accuracy to this story? it seems to imply psychosexual development theory exists to cover up traumatic events, which puts a shaky foundation under any later theories drawing from it, and people often dismiss all of freud & psychoanalysis because of it...

yes its true about the history seduction theory but im not entirely sure if it is as directly correlated to the oedipus complex as it often is thought by critics of freud, and i dont think it invalidates the principles of psychoanalysis as a whole. his correspondence with some other doctors in the 1890s are directly related to seduction theory and you can see that the issue of seduction theory concerned him a lot and he was reluctant to dismiss it but was very influenced by society at the time.

another complicating factor is that much of freuds work was preserved by his daughter anna freud, who was for the most part a conservative force in psychoanalysis both in her own practice and in how she presented his work. a lot of his letters and writings are omitted and edited because of her, including things that show his own ambivalence about certain ideas and how his relationships with other doctors and psychiatrists influenced him to take certain positions.

this article goes into it a bit and you can see the ways that anna freud has influenced our knowledge of freud and a little bit about this period of his studies. i think another thing people really miss when they talk about freud is that so much modern medicine we currently use today came from this time period as well and just as much of the "hard sciences" also came from some things that seem pretty ridiculous and unscientific to us today, and many just outright wrong, but only psychoanalysis is given so much skepticism and criticism.

this is not to defend it, freud was absolutely incorrect in many cases and, contrary to popular views of him, very aware of the limits of his knowledge and the inaccuracies inherent in pioneering any new type of medicine. this especially he emphasizes- that any new science is bound to make errors and be imprecise. freud constantly was reformulating his ideas and made many revisions to psychosexual theory throughout his life, not to mention by all the psychoanalysts who came after him. historically, its not surprising that freud and the other pioneering psychoanalysts, most of them austrian and german jews already occupying an uneasy position, were led to revise some of their more radical discoveries that appeared to threaten turn of the century european society. psychoanalysis was considered extremely shocking and obscene at the time for even venturing to say that sexuality had such a presence in peoples lives, and that people were not moved entirely by reason and rationality (as this was the era of the enlightenment and a lot of optimism about science) so sure its disappointing but not surprising that freud retracted some of his more controversial views. and likely he would not have been as successful if he did not retract them, unfortunately. similarly with some of his writings on bisexuality that seem to point to the idea that there is no natural drive towards heterosexuality and there is no natural form sexuality takes.

the oedipus complex came more from other studies and freuds own self analysis than from seduction theory (to my knowledge at least) freud actually applied the oedipus complex only to young boys initially and has some stuff (that in my opinion holds up fairly well today and is compatible with ideas of construction of sexual and gendered difference we have now) about how young girls only come to the position of seeing the father as a love object after they realize through societal and family norms they are not meant to want the mother and 'unwillingly' (this is how freud and other early psychoanalysts describe it) are forced to identify with the mother and desire the father. freud rejected the idea of a parallel electra complex for women broke with jung over this, among other things.

im very much against this idea of freud as the founder of modern misogyny or the "beginning of victim blaming in psychology." this is a myopic historiography that ignores how radical freuds approach was in comparison with psychology and medical science at the time. most physicians at the time believed that patients hysteric or neurotic symptoms were either signs of a physical organic disease or that they were consciously faking them and in control of them. (why is freud the father of victim blaming and not these doctors?) common treatment would mainly be locking them up to be studied or dubious 19th century surgeries and medical treatments. freud was one of the first to ever propose that hysteric and neurotic patients were not purposefully consciously deciding to do this but unconsciously reacting to something that happened to them, that symptoms represented a patient history that may be unknown or unarticulated to them but could be brought out by associations etc. thus that no symptoms are random or meaningless, all have some psychic significance, and it can be uncovered through analysis. this is the most crucial discovery of psychoanalysis, and although i think it was wrongly applied to seduction theory, he shows it time and again in many of his other clinical studies and interpretation of dreams, and it does not invalidate the whole of psychoanalysis

[cadaverousdecay]

hiiii leaf hi helloooo !!!!!! (⁠灬⁠º⁠‿⁠º⁠灬⁠)⁠♡ this is a free space to tell me about your favorite fictional characters from any type of media and/or where you would like to live if you could live anywhere. im bored and you always have interesting things to say <3 (no pressure 2 answer this. its just in case you feel like talking to someone)

hiiiiii nico!!!!! jumping up and down like a kitty cat <33333

well i really like the character spike from buffy the vampire slayer. looooove characters who were meant to show up for a few episodes then die, but instead became a fan favorite and got put on the show as a regular and end up as the most beloved character to a good portion of the audience (see also castiel supernatural and barnabas collins dark shadows)

[spoilers for buffy ahead]

but yeah spike is great, he came onto the show as this badass punk vampire who loves his vampire wife with the most gothic devotion imaginable. cuz at heart what motivates spike and always will is his passionate love. he is self described as “love’s bitch”

anyway, when the fan response gets back as being crazy abt this evil vampire character the creator of the show gets pretty upset cuz he has this thing about good and evil and vampires are supposed to represent evil and be metaphors for problems you face and not supposed to be sexy they already had one sexy vampire and that was more than enough etc etc etc. but he didnt kill spike off. he decided to bring him back to the show

but if he was gonna bring him back and the audience was going to like him, he was gonna have to ‘humanize’ him more. and so he comes back and hes cringefail<3 hes shed his hard shell a little and just becomes this pathetic little guy <3 he even has his traumatic past revealed <3 hes still an antagonist, but then he gets a chip in his head that makes him unable to hurt a living person. and so we have the wonderful arc of “not actually reformed or anything but he’s kinda on our side sometimes i guess?”

and in that time where he cant be his bad old self and is working with (sorta) the main gang, he develops feelings (his biggest weakness) for his mortal enemy, the slayer, buffy. he tries to push them down, then just. deals with them in the most fucked up ways. hes just a fucked up little guy who doesnt know how to deal with his fucked up feelings, hes just like me for real,,,, if tumblr existed when the show took place he would be reblogging “the enormity of my desire disgusts me” and cannibalism-as-a-metaphor-for-desire shit probably. anyway

vampires in the buffyverse dont have souls (there are some exceptions) but spike, even without one, decides to better himself for buffy. and eventually not even to be with her, but just for her. he protects her when she doesnt know it and he doesnt get anything out of it. he protects people she loves because he knows it would hurt her if they got hurt.

he may not be human but his humanity is astounding. anyway, there are definitely slip ups, and writing choices i dont really like, but eventually he decides to make himself something buffy could really love, he decides to go through the excruciating process of getting a soul

and he comes back with his soul suffering bouts of guilt-ridden male hysteria. love to see it. (hes also being haunted kinda) he delivers this one monologue in a church about his soul and guilt and forgiveness which ends with him embracing a cross that seers his flesh. most iconic scene, i memorized it also. for funsies.

then theres this whole sleeper agent murder thing and he thinks hes beyond saving but buffy wont give up on him and her faith in him helps him make it through. in the end, they have moments of reconciliation and spike never believes that she actually loves him but her caring for him at all is good enough

anyway. hes just a really fun guy. theres a lot to him. his characterization can be comedic, passionate, heart wrenching. he contains multitudes. he contains soooo many issues too, i want to study him under a microscope <3 but yeah. i love this weird little vampire from my shows