You Just Don’t Understand

12 Pages 2926 Words

In Deborah Tannen’s #1 National Bestseller book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, Tannen explains in her book why men and women have such a hard time communicating between each other. Tannen explains what some of the problems are in our conversations between each other and how these problems occur in our conversations. Tannen further explains the differences in men and women’s conversation styles and how men and women’s talk differs from each other. Tannen and the other authors try to explain aggression. Some Sociolinguist and authors and other professionals in the area of linguistics disagree with some of Tannen’s ideas about conversations, and there are others agree with her.
Tannen says in her book “If we recognize and understand the differences between us, we can take them into account, adjust to, and learn from each other’s styles.” To fully understand Tannen’s ideas about conversations and about men and women’s conversation styles you have to first fully understand about what causes aggression, because Tannen blames many conversation difficulties on men’s aggression and dominance. In her book, Tannen states “No one could deny that men as a class are dominant in our society, and that many individual men seek to dominate women in their lives.”
Anne Campbell the author of Men, Women, and Aggression talked in her book about where aggression comes from, and about what many professionals think about the origins of aggression, including the greatest psychologist ever, Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud argued for two sources of human aggression: Eros, a drive that acts to prolong and reproduce life, and Thanatos, an innate drive toward disintegration that Freud believed was directed against the self. If he was right, how is it that we all don’t commit suicide? In part, it is because of a struggle between Thanatos and Eros, which, luckily for us, Eros usually wins. But it is also because ...