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Children, Parents and the Oedipus Complex


" He would later challenge Freud's theories, saying that instead of his patients talking about their childhood and traumas, they should be working to forget their "god-awful past" (Editors). Freud and his wife, Martha, had six children, one of whom also became a psychoanalyst. Freud stayed in Vienna until 1938, when he moved to London to get away from anti-semitic views. In 1939 he and his wife died. .
             In The Oedipus Complex, a passage in the book The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud claims that psychoneurotics repress their Oedipal feelings as adults and those feelings surface in dreams, which results in neurosis (Jacobus 483). Freud suggests that all children go through a period where they feel sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex, and hatred for the other. While this is common, in Freud's view, he states that most often the children grow out of their Oedipal stage in their adolescence (Jacobus 478). Of course there are those who do not and those people need psychological help. Freud refers to the people who don't outgrow their Oedipal stage as psychoneurotics and states that they are only "distinguished by exhibiting magnified feelings of love and hatred to their parents" (Jacobus 478). Freud says guilt is the cause of his patients' neuroses (Jacobus 482).
             Freud argues that too strong of a bond between a child and parent can lead to the repression of incestual feelings which will be the cause of neurosis later in life. This theory has its merits, however, the basis of his argument has been discredited, as has Freud himself. Much of the psychoanalysis community find no merit in repressed memories/emotions. Dave Pierre, founder of The Media Report - an educational website covering topics from religion to sexual abuse, wrote an article on the debunking of repressed memories. In this article Pierre quoted the likes of Dr. Richard J. McNally and Dr.


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