In working on this blog post, I had to first attempt to set aside my preconceived opinions about Freud. However, Freud’s ideas of sexuality being the driving factor behind family relations is both strange and problematic to me. Also, Freud carried many gendered ideas of family relations, such as boy children feeling more hostility towards fathers than mothers. We are too far into the age of understanding gender to accept this as fact. I think, though, that one can read this in an informative way if one moves past certain issues and thinks of these “sexual” impulses that Freud speaks of simply as those visceral, uncontrollable impulses that everyone feels in one way or another about things they care strongly about. So, choosing to completely disregard the area of the text in which one has secret sexual fantasies about a parent, I was able to recognize similarities to my life in the ideas of the changing views of parents and the “overvaluation of parents” which extends through life. I related a lot to the part where Freud writes, “the child’s imagination becomes engaged in a task of getting free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others, who as a rule, are of higher social standing.” In that pubescent stages of my life, I began to think poorly of my parents and attempted to find other parental figures at school, church, and in any other extra curricular activity. It felt like a normal process, and reading this, it seems like it was. However, now, at an older age, I have returned to valuing my parents very highly, which I read when Freud wrote, “the child’s overvaluation of his parents survives as well in the dreams of normal adults.” So, perhaps, what I was able to get out of Freud’s writing is that there are normal stages of relations to parents to go through, and that I had, too, gone through them.

-Kelsey Luks