Freud- My Opinion

Well, this is the first time I have actually learned about what Freud said. I cannot understand why everyone thinks of Freud when they think of psychology- he seems to have some pretty radical and wrong ideas. Some things might be true, like repression. People do repress memories. But not sexual desire for parents they had when they were 6. Absolutely not.

For those people out there who say Freud might actually be right about everything having to do with sex- Freud decided that when you are six, you have sexual desires for the parent of the opposite sex, and because you are ashamed you repress the memory. Aside from the fact that I don't think it's true because little kids don't know what sex is- there are teenagers who don't know!- there is a major flaw in Freud's assumption. He didn't study/observe children. Also, everything was hindsight bias because he didn't conduct an experiment. I think we read that he just observed, and didn't follow the rules of the scientific method.

We can't take anything he says as the truth.

Also, I think, and this is not true!!!! I think that Freud was abused by one of his parents when he was a boy, and because of this he tried to search for a way to explain that sexual abuse isn't really abuse and that it is just a natural stage children go through, and everything is sexual blah blah. Maybe one of his parents sexually abused him. Anyways, I really don't like this fellow.

Freud Test

This is an interesting test according to Freuds theory

Five things are happening in your house at the same time. In which sequence would you solve them?

1. The telephone is ringing!
2. The baby is crying!
3. Someone's knocking or calling you from the front door!
4. You hung the clothes out to dry and it is beginning to rain!
5. You left the tap on in the kitchen and the water is already
overflowing!

In which sequence would you solve these problems? Write the sequence and check below how your decisions were made.

BUT BE HONEST, THE FINDINGS ARE EXCITING. First write YOUR sequence from 1 to 5. I will send then scroll below and read after!













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Have you really finished?
Because cheating is bad and wont benefit you in this case :D
Alright fine..

Answer:


Every individual point represents something in your life.

On the list you can see which meaning every point has:

1. Telephone represents Work
2. Baby represents Family
3. Door represents Friends
4. Clothes represent Money
5. Tap represents Love Life

Your chosen sequence determines the priorities in your life!

(Remember.. this is only according to Freud and it is very general so do not be alarmed if you do not think this is a right representation.)

Hello my dear fellow classmates,
I am so excited to learn more about this chapter, especially since it has a lot to do with Freud's ideas. Ever since i was a little child i have always heard people discuss Freud and his ideas. I remember people often saying how appalled they were by his extreme and inappropriate ideas. Now that we have started to learn about him, i am able to slowly form my own opinion of Freud and his ideas. Although many of my classmates found Freud's ideas "weird" and "crazy" i tried to look at his ideas from an objective point of view. For example, i remembered learning in chapter 7 when we learned about states of consciousness that Freud's theory was that our dreams actually depict our sexual desires(even if we dream about "innocent" themes such as flowers and trees). Overall, he thinks that basically all our actions have a sexual component to them(like if you sneeze that is sexual.) Some of us might just call him insane and wacko, while others will simply be creeped out and disagree and disapprove. Although im inclined to not fully agree with Freud's idea in this particular case, i appreciate his opinion, especially since it caused me to think. Even though i dont think that everything has a sexual content to it, there are definitely certain innuendos(which we all have heard) that are actually NOT meant to be sexual but might be interpreted that way. Perhaps he simply interpreted everything that way. Yes, Freud's ideas were very extreme and...different, but he allows us to view the world in a different perspective. With which of Freud's ideas do you agree or disagree?

Personality Tests

On television there are a lot of commercials for dating websites. The commercials explain that all you have to do is take a personality test on their website and they will match you with someone with the most similar results. I find this crazy. First of all, I do not believe that you can truly know someone's personality strictly from a test. I really think you must KNOW the person. When we had to describe our personality by listing our positive and negative qualities, I had a really hard time. I couldn't just think of a few words that fit perfectly to me. I think I've shared this with everyone, but I always have a hard time finding the right words because I don't think that words can fit the way we are/our emotions exactly. (I'm sorry if this makes no sense, but it's just something that has always bothered me.) This is the main reason why I think a personality test is not affective. Also, maybe you do not want to date someone who is exactly like you, or seems to be the most compatible. We learned in Chumash that the Ezer Kenegdo is supposed to fill in your missing parts in a way, to tell you when you are doing something wrong. If you have almost the same personalities you might not be able to fill in each other's gaps. Overall, I do not think a personality test can accurately explain and identify who you really are. I think you are the only one who knows that, not a test. We use the term personality pretty loosely in our daily lives. However, after just two days of discussing personality, I have learned that it is actually a very complex and difficult idea that I am excited to really understand!

Freud's Crazy Ideas

Hello everyone!

So, I found this little video that it short and I am not exactly sure what language it is in, but it was cute and short. It's about the Id, the Ego and the Superego. What came to mind for me when we learned about this was the angel and devil telling a person what to do. It was a very interesting class that Mrs. Perl taught! She took on the role of the Id as the "cool" frat dude who loves to party all day long, and the superego is the perfect little school girl, who does everything right. The ego seems to be somewhere in between, but I guess we have to learn more about it in class! I though that Freud's ideas were very extreme, and, as we learned, he did not really do research to come up with these ideas. They are just his theories. They seem to make sense because a lot of times in life, we compare the good and bad choices that we can make in life to the angel and devil on our shoulders. However, Freud's approach seems slightly, almost scary, because he thinks that we have a psychosexual development that we undergo in addition to all of the craziness that goes on with out personalities. This development shapes our personalities in the sense that, if we develop properly, we will have a "normal" personality, but if we get stuck at a stage in development, we will be a little bit "off" in some way...This is all very interesting in a weird way!

here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KovpyKWuueg&feature=related

Difficulty Communicating

Hello everyone,

I would like to bring up a topic that comes about in daily life, and I'm sure everyone, or almost everyone can relate to this. We learned that we communicate with people through facial expressions, gestures, and our tone of voice, which helps us have regular conversations and solve daily issues. However, since we are living in the 21st century now, everybody tends to do much of their communicating through the Internet. Whether it is e-mailing for school or a job, or chatting with friends on facebook, we use the computer to talk for us. This means that we are not able to truly communicate our feeling. Simple emoticons like :) ;) or :P might be friendly smileys that we like to use when trying to convey our emotions in a message, but do they really speak for us?

Communicating in this way seems to be a huge issue, in my opinion, because people cannot truly express themselves. I find that many people are afraid of confrontation when they get in fights with friends, so it is easiest to text or chat about it instead. But, this is not necessarily the truth because words in texts/ online can have one meaning to one person and another meaning to the next person. This is all very difficult!

So, I have come to the conclusion that it is probably best to try to resolve problems, or have meaningful/ important conversations in person, so that each person in the conversation can get a true understanding of what is going on.

Culture

This past weekend on the basketball tournament I thought a lot about psychology! Firstly, before each game, I felt my sympathetic nervous system kicking in. I felt my heart racing and breathing increasing. I would also get stomach aches.
The thing that stuck out at me the most was the differences in culture. There were 10 teams total at the tournament. You would think that we would all be pretty similar. We are Jewish teenagers living in America, we go to Jewish day schools and play basketball. However, despite all of these similarities, differences in culture stood out the most. The whole weekend, everyone on our team would comment on the awful driving in Miami. It was much more intense and busy than in Memphis. People were rude and had no problem honking at every little thing. When I was with a group of girls from New York on Shabbos, I was shocked when they started talking about how calm and peaceful the driving was in Miami. Although we only live a two hour plane ride away from each other, we had totally different opinions on the driving in Miami. They are probably used to the intense traffic of New York and saw Miami as a step down. There was also a team who had a lot of Persian girls. Not only did they look and speak differently but they had different customs that I noticed. (davening for example.) You can also notice that each team all dressed similarly. You can also notice a difference between how team A dressed and how team B dressed.
Although I was away from class a lot this month, psychology still followed me everywhere I went!

Just let it out and cry! One approach on why we cry

As I was reading Zahava's post and thought about the idea that we learned in class and from the book, that if we do a certain emotion (smile) we can then feel the emotion that comes with it afterwards (happy). What came to my mind was crying.
I do not think that this is the case for crying, since when I fake cry I dont feel like it makes me sad. Also the idea that we should not let the anger out for example by punching our pillow since it will not help us get rid of the anger but may make us even angrier does not apply to crying.

Maybe it is because of the different reasons why we cry. One approach that I have heared somewhere was that we cry because we want people to feel empathy and that makes us feel better, to be able to share with others our weak moments.

I think this approach is very clever since it gives us an understanding for why we cry and why it is good to let it out sometimes.

Hello my dear fellow classmates,

you will be blessed with two posts this week since we have learned about so many things this week!

We learned about our sexual motivation sometime this week. Men have more testosterone than women which therefore causes them to be more "sexual." For example, men tend to fantasize more about physical sexual experiences, whereas women tend to be more emotional. As many of you know i immediately went and researched how sexual motivation is intertwined with many different sexual behaviors and even sexual disorders. Interestingly enough, i read that many people are often wrong about why certain men rape women. People often assume that because men have more testosterone than women, they have a higher sex drive and often rape to satisfy their desires. Rape, however, is almost never about sexual motivation at all, rather about control and power. Did you think at first that rape has anything to do with sexual motivation like so many others did?

Hello my dear fellow classmates,

So we have learned about motivation, such as hunger. Unfortunately, in our day and age, disorders such as bulimia nervosa and anorexia nervosa have evolved. Bulimia and anorexia first became a concept in the 1970's as more and more women started having it. The thing that upsets me so much about anorexia and bulimia is that it is believed that these disorders only evolved because of environmental pressures. Women are under so much pressure to be "the perfect size" which is often portrayed in movies and where women are unhealthily skinny. They constantly feel that in order to be considered "pretty" they must be "skinny." Statistics show that at least one in every three women struggles with her weight and body image. In the past, these struggles only existed among upper class western white females, but the disorder has now spread towards other ethnicities and races. The disorder has become more severe due to the fact that our society has changed and evolved as well. In the past, curvier women were considered "beautiful". Marylin Monroe, one of the most beautiful role models to so many women, was a size 14! However, due to the fact that she lived in the 50's, she was considered a beauty, including her size. Nowadays, a size 4 in the modeling world is considered plus-size and many women are forced to use unhealthy methods to reach this "perfect" size. Do you guys think that it is our "fault" that we have "created" this disorder? Could we perhaps have prevented it by making sure that our role models weren't these skinny binny women on the covers of our magazines but instead have curvy yet beautiful women such as Adele, Jordan Sparks(before she betrayed us and lost all that weight!) and Oprah? Do you think it will only get worse like it has until now?