The Essential Characteristics of Loving Assignment

The Essential Characteristics of Loving - Assignment Example According to Freud, present society is on the third level of restriction of sexuality: it controls even those sexual activities that are intended for procreation only (â€Å"Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness† 6). This is dangerous, because in this situation: (1) individual libidinal characteristics (that often differ from the societal demands) are ignored and (2) every man and woman is being torn apart by 2 contradictory yet inescapable desires. One of them is the need of appreciation from fellow human beings, which is impossible when the sexual behavior of an individual is considered inappropriate. Another one is an instinct that Freud associates with love. In â€Å"Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness†, the founder of psychoanalysis describes sexual instinct as almost a living creature that is innate in every human. It is a subject to development, and the problems in the way of this development lead to different types of neur oses (in the article, Freud distinguishes between neurasthenia and psychoneurosis (4). This â€Å"animal inside us† is incomparably greedy and cruel: it is â€Å"probably more strongly developed in man than in most of the higher animals; it is certainly more constant, since it has almost entirely overcome the periodicity belonging to it in animals† (â€Å"Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness† 5). Freud does not recommend tolerating abstinence, as it suppresses the dangerous sexual instinct. In such cases, the latter is either ‘sublimated’ or resulting in neuroses. However, marriage does not offer any attractive alternatives, as it limits the sexual satisfaction of the couple to the pre-conception intercourses (â€Å"Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness† 8). Following this logic, marriage is a severe stress, especially for women, so that neurotic girls cannot make the good party (according to Freud) and are succumbed to the abstinence-related neuroses (â€Å"Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness† 8). In the paper â€Å"On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love†, Freud develops this theory of sexual instinct. As a physician, he approaches love technically, mainly as a working instrument of the explanation of neuroses: â€Å"The highest phase of development of which object-libido is capable is seen in the state of being in love, when the subject seems to give up his own personality in favor of an object-cathexis† (Freud, â€Å"On Narcissism† 76). From this quotation, it follows that sexual instinct is always object-directed, and it finds its objects either in the people surrounding an individual or an individual him/herself.