Starting a new save, in Martian Dreams, Sigmund Freud asks me if I'm closer to my father or my mother.

I always felt closer to my mother than my father, so I chose the latter.

He then said "Woman often see themselves closer to their mothers, though many can be closer to their fathers"

So without choice, that option made my character female.

What the hell? Yeah, I know they're trying to make it simple enough so the player knows what they are supposed to say. But it's not that that bothers me, but the fact that "SIGMUND FREUD" himself, the greatest psychologist who ever lived, is written to assume I'm a woman from that statement.

That just really pisses me off that they actually had Sigmund Freud say something so stupid and out of character.

Edit: But then again after hearing the Avatar utter the lines "What's a Paladin?" and "What's the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom?" I really shouldn't be surprised and take it with a grain of salt.

SIGMUND FREUD is well known for being *cough*... totally absolutely wrong about psychoanalysis.

also didn't he used to think people can't get addicted to crack cocaine, and that the cure for women's hysteria is to *cough cough cough* give them great pleasure down there?

SJWs should hate him more than videogames.
http://psychology.about.com/od/sigmundfreud/p/freud_women.htm

So he's a fraud? All those contributions he gave to the world of psychology is just crap?

post-modernism and modern science "killed" a lot of early "research" on psychology. it was a long time ago, mate. just hundreds of years ago, most learnt men thought the world was flat!

hell, Carl Jung was fucking wrong too.
http://www.quora.com/Was-Carl-Jung-as-profoundly-wrong-as-Freud

It should be noted that being influential in a field doesn't necessarily make them unequivocally and unquestionably correct about everything in said field. Development of a field and the ideas central to it is a process, and they change and shift and are corroborated or debunked or added to or simplified or some combination thereof as time moves on. "He didn't have everything right" doesn't automatically make him a fraud or any less important a figure in the field and its history - Newton hasn't diminished in importance in physics despite the fact he was missing out on the relativistic components of it that Einstein would elaborate on.

...and while we're splitting hairs, in-game, Freud, as a character, isn't assuming anything about the player character's gender by that statement. They're kinda sitting in front of him at the moment, he can see perfectly well for himself. Simply because you, as a player, haven't explicitly defined it yet doesn't mean Freud's suddenly gone blind and can't see what's right in front of him. It's less Freud assuming something about the player character's gender and more a perhaps-too-well-disguised method of a male/female selector during character creation. (I did the exact same thing the first time I fired up Martian Dreams.)

So getting back to the question the topic is asking... frankly, no, I don't think it's worth getting mad about. An idea somewhat awkwardly implemented, perhaps, but... well, I'd be more baffled if a 19th-century German outright asked someone he's staring at "Are you a man or a woman?" instead.

So really, it's a Schrodinger setup. As my character isn't really either gender until the game confirms me as one or the other.

It's just classic Ultima chargen, where you answer questions instead of selecting stats.

Sigmund Freud wrote, ""Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own." He was against the woman's emancipation movement. He wrote and spoke many negative and critical things of woman.

He was also a product of his time. In those times, woman were expected to be mothers or maybe secretaries at best. They were mostly uneducated as they were not expected to supply for the family, but to merely be at home and care for the kids. Considering society imprisoned woman in the house, discriminating against them at every opportunity, it's no great surprise woman often were uneducated and confined to motherhood or prostitution and frequently seen to be incapable of equaling men. It was a self-fulfilling thing.

Now that society has freed them, woman have proven to be capable and the equals to men in their value to society. Now the question is: Will the race stay even, or will men prove themselves to be lacking when things are fair?

The point of 'Schrödinger's cat' is to demonstrate the absurdity of the claims made by early quantum mechanics researchers, yet pop culture has forever misconstrued the thought experiment as a philosophical exercise in support of it. Basically it was Schrödinger's way of saying 'you guys are morons' but laymen are so fascinated with the imagery and say 'aaah I get it, until we investigate the cat could be either dead or alive', while in reality the proponents of quantum mechanics were arguing that a quantum particle exists in both states simultaneously until measured which causes it to collapse into one state. It is not that the cat COULD be dead or alive, which is a reasonable claim, but the cat physically IS both dead and alive until observation itself causes it to become either, which makes no everyday sense at all. The claim was not philosophical, it was hard fact, which Schrödinger and Einstein could not agree with.

Your own adaptation of the thought experiment deviates and misses the mark like 99% of the people who uses it. The point is that quantum mechanics is so unreal it can not easily be applied to real world analogies. Your own interpretation should have claimed that until the game asks, you are literally both male and female, not as a philosophical idea about lack of knowledge but as hard reality. It is not that the game does not yet know and believe you could be either, but that until questioned you exist in both states at which time your reality collapses into one or the other. Yeah, this isn't really helping us understand everyday reality, is it...

I apologize for being an idiot, I really do. I will never bring that up ever again :(

Don't apologise, the whole field of quantum mechanics is a mess of metaphysics and theories that even the greatest minds to have ever lived can not wrap their heads around. It is quite literally one step beyond reality. Schrödinger's cat is a simplistic thought experiment with a purpose not easily understood, but the funny imagery is very easy to mutate into more digestible claims. I think the most common misunderstanding is that it has to do with not knowing if the cat is dead or alive because that is the only real world sense to the experiment. A pointless excercise, but at least one that you can see some logic in, ie for the sake of argument before the box is opened there are two possible outcomes at any given moment but afterwards there is only one. Dead OR alive makes sense, but the real thought experiment intended to highlight the absurdity of saying it is dead AND alive until observed.

As I said, almost every pop culture reference to Schrödinger's cat misses the point. You're one of the 99,999% which isn't something to apologise for. Hell, even I probably got it very wrong, I'm no quantum physicist and most likely never will be. I'm just waiting for this stuff to lead to personal teleporters and ridiculously fast computers. At least quantum computing may become reality in our life time! It will either screw up DOSbox completely, or it might perhaps make it extremely accurate.

I was way over my head ^^;

Nevermind Schrodinger's Cat. In this game, you're Schrodinger's Character - you only collapse into a specific gender-state when Sigmund Freud makes an observation about you.