Adolescents begin to direct their desires on members of the opposite sex (www.AllPsych.com).
Defense Mechanisms -- Freud. Arthur Clark writes that Freud listed a total of 17 defense mechanisms; some of those include "conversion, displacement, isolation, projection, repression, and retreat or withdrawal from reality" (Clark, 1998). "Unconscious processing" means that when threatened a person is not consciously thinking about the threat; "subjective distortion" means putting the onus on the counselor or someone else rather than absorb the threat. "Denial" is probably the most obvious defense mechanism and intellectualization is another one. A woman I know cheated on her boyfriend and when a friend told the boyfriend that she was seen having lunch with another man, she denied it was romantic and claimed it was a job interview. The boyfriend was so wildly in love with her that he accepted her denial as the truth. She was a very believable person who could tell a lie with absolutely a straight face, giving away nothing.
Criticisms of Freud -- one of the most noted criticisms of Freud is that he saw women as inferior to men. He said women had "penis envy" and believed that sexual repression contributed to their hysteria. He was...
"Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own," he was quoted as saying in a 1925 paper (Cherry, 2010). Still, Freud is very highly respected because he got it right in many aspects of his work, and although there have been major adjustments to some of his theories, he is considered the original author of psychotherapy and notwithstanding his obvious male chauvinism, his discussion of the id, the ego, and superego is widely accepted as accurate all these years later.
Works Cited
All Psych Online. (2008). Freud's Stages of Psychosexual Development / Psychology 101.
Retrieved April 8, 2012, from http://allpsych.com/psychology101/sexual_development.html.
Cherry, Kendra. (2010). Freud & Women: Freud's Perspective on Women. About.com.
Psychology. Retrieved April 7, 2012, from http://psychology.about.com.
Clark, Arthur J. (1998). Defense Mechanisms in the Counseling Process. Thousand Oaks, CA:
SAGE Publications.
Coon, Dennis, and Mitterer, John O. (2008). Introduction to Psychology: Gateways to Mind
And Behavior. Independence, KY: Cengage Learning.
