Peter Fritz Walter

Normative Psychoanalysis: How the Oedipal Dogma Shapes Consumer Culture Peter Fritz Walter

Publisher Marketing: 'Normative Psychoanalysis: How the Oedipal Dogma Shapes Consumer Culture (Scholarly Articles, Vol. 14)' is a critique of Sigmund Freud's theory of the Oedipus Complex. This study demonstrates that Freudian psychoanalysis, applied to children, is not permissive, but castrative; in addition, it is normative, and actually a tool for forging the ideal consumer child within a consumer culture that is based on the economic paradigm of total consumption. Today, we have to make a clear choice, as parents, educators or child psychologists, if we want to follow the bioenergetic truth of children's innate emotional and sexual response, or the mythic projections of a 'cultural' conditioning system called psychoanalysis that was set in the world to veil the essential, that is, the fact that fully erotic children are bad consumers, and thus by definition bad citizens in a society that is based not upon love but upon codependence, not upon free choice relations, but the forceful adaptation of children to consumerism as the religion of the 21st century. As educators and psychologists sensitive to the emotional manipulation and abuse of children, in a society that confuses sex with violence, while violence is exactly the repression of sexual communication, we need to be pro-active regarding the free emotional and sexual life of children, instead of streamlining children to the needs of the industry.