Freud's Concept of the Family

Freud did not self-consciously develop a theory of the family. He speaks of it at many points in case studies, in technical papers on psychoanalysis, in studies of metapsychology, in interpretive works on history, society and culture. But everywhere his dominant concepts are the individual personality and the psychoanalytically reduced social totality, a focus which systematically disfigures the referential social relations. Freud states that the structure of the psyche receives its final form during childhood, specifically at the time of the Oedipus complex. Yet childhood is never conceptualized as a social experience of a structured nature, mediated and mediating a larger social system

Epistemology · Focus (optics · Metapsychology · Oedipus complex · Personality · Psyche · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Sociology · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology Research · Psychology · Social Psychology