Foucault and Freud

Paper Summary:

This paper provides a summary of Michel's Foucault's "A History of Sexuality" in which he examines how dispersed forms of power, which are embedded in religious, scientific and social norms, create hegemonic ideas regarding proper discourses relating to pleasure and sexuality. The paper then looks at several lectures from Sigmund Freud's "Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis" in which he discusses how childhood traumas can keep a patient's libido from its natural development, resulting in the perversion of sexual desires.

From the Paper:

"In Lecture 18, Freud moved to discuss how neurosis can result from traumas that affect the unconscious. In traumatic neurosis, the problem stems from a traumatic situation in the patient's life. This leads to a patient's unconscious fixation, resulting in the obsessional behavior seen in neurotics. The task of the psychoanalyst is thus to help the patient delve into his or her unconscious, to remove the "amnesias" that block the patient from consciously dealing with the trauma that manifests in neurosis."

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