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The Theories of Freud and Jung

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1. Freud's essay on "The Sexual Aberrations" posits the existence of a sexual urge, called "libido", which Freud finds analogous to hunger. Freud suggests that, like hunger, the libido manifests itself more or less from birth. The chief question for Freud in this paper is why libido should manifest itself in unexpected ways as with "inversion", which is the slightly old-fashioned term that Freud uses for homosexuality. Freud rather unexpectedly relies on the suggestion that mucus membranes in general are susceptible to sexual stimulation in his opinion, this accounts for such varied phenomena as kissing, thumbsucking, and anal sex. Freud then goes on to explain foot fetishism and other sexual fascination with inanimate objects in terms of primitive religion: "This substitution is not unjustly compared with the fetich in which the savage sees the embodiment of his god." (Freud 1910). Freud goes on to explain other aberrations, such as Sado-Masochism, in terms of their attempt to cope with an overvaluation of the sexual object. The idealistic impulses of love are seen, by Freud, as perhaps even more evident in people who love whips or feet. Ultimately Freud brings it back to the nature of the hypothesized infantile sexuality in Freud's belief, this has no natural object and is expressed in all directions at once. By contemporary scientific standards, Freud's essay is a mess. To take the most obvious example, Freud died in 1939: this is the same year that the Nobel Prize in

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