Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionII. Psychodynamic
Theories- Freud: Psychoanalysis © The McGraw−Hill^51
Companies, 2009
Throughout his career, Freud often proposed theories without much clinical or
experimental evidence to support them. He would later come to see most of these
theories as established facts, even though he possessed no intervening substantiating
evidence. For as long as he lived, however, he remained doubtful of the absolute va-
lidity of his theories on women. Freud once admitted to his friend Marie Bonaparte
that he did not understand women: “The great question that has never been answered
and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into
the feminine soul is ‘What does a woman want?’ ” (E. Jones, 1955, p. 421). Such a
question posed after many years of theorizing suggests that Freud regarded women
not only as quite different from men, but as enigmas, not comprehensible to the male
gender.
Beyond Biography Did Freud misunderstand women? For
information on Freud’s lifelong struggle to understand women, see
our website at http://www.mhhe.com/feist7Latency Period
Freud believed that, from the 4th or 5th year until puberty, both boys and girls usu-
ally, but not always, go through a period of dormant psychosexual development. This
latency stageis brought about partly by parents’ attempts to punish or discourage
sexual activity in their young children. If parental suppression is successful, children
will repress their sexual drive and direct their psychic energy toward school, friend-
ships, hobbies, and other nonsexual activities.
However, the latency stage may also have roots in our phylogenetic endow-
ment. Freud (1913/1953, 1926/1951b) suggested that the Oedipus complex and the
subsequent period of sexual latency might be explained by the following hypothesis.
Early in human development, people lived in families headed by a powerful father
who reserved all sexual relationships to himself and who killed or drove away his
sons, whom he saw as a threat to his authority. Then one day the sons joined together,
overwhelmed, killed, and devoured (ate) their father. However, the brothers were in-
dividually too weak to take over their father’s heritage, so they banded together in a
clan or totem and established prohibitions against what they had just done; that is,
they outlawed both killing one’s father and having sexual relations with female mem-
bers of one’s family. Later, when they became fathers, they suppressed sexual activ-
ity in their own children whenever it became noticeable, probably around 3 or 4 years
of age. When suppression became complete, it led to a period of sexual latency. After
this experience was repeated over a period of many generations, it became an active
though unconscious force in an individual’s psychosexual development. Thus, the
prohibition of sexual activity is part of our phylogenetic endowment and needs no
personal experiences of punishment for sexual activities to repress the sexual drive.
Freud (1926/1951b) merely suggested this hypothesis as one possible explanation
for the latency period, and he was careful to point out that it was unsupported by an-
thropological data.
Continued latency is reinforced through constant suppression by parents and
teachers and by internal feelings of shame, guilt, and morality. The sexual drive, of
course, still exists during latency, but its aim has been inhibited. The sublimated
libido now shows itself in social and cultural accomplishments. During this time
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