PSYCHOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT OF SIGMUND FREUD

INTRODUCTION
Sigmund Freud
(May 6, 1856 - September 23, 1939) was an Austrian psychiatrist and the
founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology, a movement that
popularized the theory that unconscious motives control much behavior.
He became interested in hypnotism and how it could be used to help the
mentally ill. He later abandoned hypnotism in favor of free association and
dream analysis in developing what is now known as "the talking cure."
These became the core elements of psychoanalysis. Freud was especially
interested in what was then called hysteria, and is now called conversion
syndrome. The name Freud is generally pronounced Froid in English and
Froit in German. Freud's theories, and his treatment of patients, were
controversial in 19th century Vienna, and remain hotly debated today.
Freud's ideas are often discussed and analyzed as works of literature,
philosophy, and general culture in addition to continuing debate around
them as scientific and medical treatises. He is commonly referred to as "the
father of psychoanalysis."

A child at a given stage of development has certain needs and demands,

such as the need of the infant to nurse. Frustration occurs when these
needs are not met; Overindulgence stems from such an ample meeting of
these needs that the child is reluctant to progress beyond the stage. Both
frustration and overindulgence lock some amount of the child's libido
permanently into the stage in which they occur; both result in a fixation. If a
child progresses normally through the stages, resolving each conflict and
moving on, then little libido remains invested in each stage of
development. But if he fixates at a particular stage, the method of
obtaining satisfaction which characterized the stage will dominate and
affect his adult personality.

Freud (1905) proposed that psychological development in childhood

takes place in a series of fixed stages. These are called psychosexual
stages because each stage represents the fixation of libido (roughly
translated as sexual drives or instincts) on a different area of the body. As a
person grows physically certain areas of their body becomes important as
sources of potential frustration (erogenous zones), pleasure or both.

Freud believed that life was built round tension and pleasure. Freud also
believed that all tension was due to the build up of libido (sexual energy)
and that all pleasure came from its discharge. In describing human
personality development as psychosexual Freud meant to convey that what
develops is the way in which sexual energy accumulates and is discharged
as we mature biologically. (NB Freud used the term 'sexual' in a very
general way to mean all pleasurable actions and thoughts).

Freud stress that the first five years of life are crucial to the formation
of adult personality. The id must be controlled in order to satisfy social
demands; this sets up a conflict between frustrated wishes and social
norms. The ego and superego develop in order to exercise this control and
direct the need for gratification into socially acceptable channels.
Gratification centers of different areas of the body at different stages of
growth, making the conflict at each stage psychosexual.

Stages of the psychosexual development

Freud's model of psychosexual development

Age Consequences of psychologic

Stage Erogenous zone
Range fixation
Orally aggressive: chewing gum and
the ends of pencils, etc.
Orally Passive: smoking, eating,
Birth–1
Oral Mouth kissing, oral sexual practices[4]
year
Oral stage fixation might result in a
passive, gullible, immature,
manipulative personality.
Bowel and Anal retentive: Obsessively organized,
Anal 1–3 years bladder or excessively neat
elimination Anal expulsive: reckless, careless,
 defiant, disorganized, coprophiliac
Oedipus complex (in boys and girls);
according to Sigmund Freud.
Phallic 3–6 years Genitalia
Electra complex (in girls); according to
Carl Jung.
Dormant sexual Sexual unfulfillment if fixation occurs
Latency 6–puberty
feelings in this stage.
Puberty– Sexual interests Frigidity, impotence, unsatisfactory
Genital
death mature relationships

The Oral Stage

Oral phase(0-1 year)

The oral stage in psychology is the term used by Sigmund Freud to

describe the child's development during the first eighteen months of life, in
which an infant's pleasure centers are in the mouth. This is the first of
Freud's psychosexual stages.
This is the infant's first relationship with its mother; it is a nutritive one. The
length of this stage depends on the society. In some societies it is common
for a child to be nursed by its mother for several years, whereas in others
the stage is much shorter. Suckling and eating, however, compose the
earliest memories for infants in every society. This stage holds special
importance because some, especially those in tribal societies commonly
found in the Southwest Pacific and Africa, consider the stomach to be the
seat of emotions.

The oral stage begins at birth, when the oral cavity is the primary focus of
libidal energy. The child, of course, preoccupies himself with nursing, with
the pleasure of sucking and accepting things into the mouth. The oral
character who is frustrated at this stage, whose mother refused to nurse
him on demand or who truncated nursing sessions early, is characterized
by pessimism, envy, suspicion and sarcasm. The overindulged oral
character, whose nursing urges were always and often excessively satisfied,
is optimistic, gullible, and is full of admiration for others around him. The
stage culminates in the primary conflict of weaning, which both deprives
the child of the sensory pleasures of nursing and of the psychological
pleasure of being cared for, mothered, and held. The stage lasts
approximately one and one-half years.

 The Anal Stage (1-3 years) Anal Stage (1-3 years)

The libido now becomes focused on the anus and the child derives great
pleasure from defecating. The child is now fully aware that they are a
person in their own right and that their wishes can bring them into conflict
with the demands of the outside world (i.e. their ego has developed).
Freud believed that this type of conflict tends to come to a head in potty
training, in which adults impose restrictions on when and where the child
can defecate. The nature of this first conflict with authority can determine
the child's future relationship with all forms of authority.

Early or harsh potty training can lead to the child becoming an anal-
retentive personality who hates mess, is obsessively tidy, punctual and
respectful of authority. They can be stubborn and tight-fisted with their
cash and possessions. This is all related to pleasure got from holding on to
their faeces when toddlers, and their mum's then insisting that they get rid
of it by placing them on the potty until they perform! Not as daft as it
sounds. The anal expulsive, on the other hand, underwent a liberal toilet-
training regime during the anal stage. In adulthood the anal expulsive is
the person who wants to share things with you. They like giving things
away. In essence they are 'sharing their s**t'! An anal-expulsive personality
is also messy, disorganized and rebellious.

The Phallic Stage(3 to 5 or 6 years)

The phallic stage is the setting for the greatest, most crucial sexual conflict
in Freud's model of development. In this stage, the child's erogenous zone
is the genital region. As the child becomes more interested in his genitals,
and in the genitals of others, conflict arises. The conflict, labeled the
Oedipus complex (The Electra complex in women), involves the child's
unconscious desire to possess the opposite-sexed parent and to eliminate
the same-sexed one.

In the young male, the Oedipus conflict stems from his natural love for his
mother, a love which becomes sexual as his libidal energy transfers from
the anal region to his genitals. Unfortunately for the boy, his father stands
in the way of this love. The boy therefore feels aggression and envy
towards this rival, his father, and also feels fear that the father will strike
back at him. As the boy has noticed that women, his mother in particular,
have no penises, he is struck by a great fear that his father will remove his
penis, too. The anxiety is aggravated by the threats and discipline he incurs
when caught masturbating by his parents. This castration anxiety outstrips
his desire for his mother, so he represses the desire. Moreover, although
the boy sees that though he cannot posses his mother, because his father
does, he can posses her vicariously by identifying with his father and
becoming as much like him as possible: this identification indoctrinates the
boy into his appropriate sexual role in life. A lasting trace of the Oedipal
conflict is the superego, the voice of the father within the boy. By thus
resolving his incestuous conundrum, the boy passes into the latency period,
a period of libidal dormancy.

On the Electra complex, Freud was more vague. The complex has its roots
in the little girl's discovery that she, along with her mother and all other
women, lack the penis which her father and other men posses. Her love for
her father then becomes both erotic and envious, as she yearns for a penis
of her own. She comes to blame her mother for her perceived castration,
and is struck by penis envy, the apparent counterpart to the boy's
castration anxiety. The resolution of the Electra complex is far less clear-cut
than the resolution of the Oedipus complex is in males; Freud stated that
the resolution comes much later and is never truly complete. Just as the
boy learned his sexual role by identifying with his father, so the girl learns
her role by identifying with her mother in an attempt to posses her father
vicariously. At the eventual resolution of the conflict, the girl passes into
the latency period, though Freud implies that she always remains slightly
fixated at the phallic stage.
The girl resolves this by repressing her desire for her father and
substituting the wish for a penis with the wish for a baby. The girl blames
her mother for her 'castrated state' and this creates great tension. The girl
then represses her feelings (to remove the tension) and identifies with the
mother to take on the female gender role.

Fixation at the phallic stage develops a phallic character, who is reckless,

resolute, self-assured, and narcissistic--excessively vain and proud. The
failure to resolve the conflict can also cause a person to be afraid or
incapable of close love; Freud also postulated that fixation could be a root
cause of homosexuality.

Latency Period (puberty)

The resolution of the phallic stage leads to the latency period, which is not
a psychosexual stage of development, but a period in which the sexual
drive lies dormant. Freud saw latency as a period of unparalleled repression
of sexual desires and erogenous impulses. During the latency period,
children pour this repressed libidal energy into asexual pursuits such as
school, athletics, and same-sex friendships. But soon puberty strikes, and
the genitals once again become a central focus of libidal energy.

The Genital Stage (adult)

In the genital stage, as the child's energy once again focuses on his
genitals, interest turns to heterosexual relationships. The less energy the
child has left invested in unresolved psychosexual developments, the
greater his capacity will be to develop normal relationships with the
opposite sex. If, however, he remains fixated, particularly on the phallic
stage, his development will be troubled as he struggles with further
repression and defenses.
The Role of Conflict

Each of the psychosexual stages is associated with a particular conflict that

must be resolved before the individual can successfully advance to the next
stage. The resolution of each of these conflicts requires the expenditure of
sexual energy and the more energy that is expended at a particular stage
the more the important characteristics of that stage remain with the
individual as he matures psychologically.

To explain this Freud suggested the analogy of military troops on the

march. As the troops advance they are met by opposition or conflict. If
bthey are highly successful in winning the battle (resolving the conflict)
then most of the troops (libido) will be able to move on to the" next battle
(stage). But the greater the difficulty encountered of any particular point
the greater the need for troops to remain behind to fight and thus the
fewer that will be able to go on to the next confrontation.

Frustration, Overindulgence and Fixation

Some people do not seem to be able to leave one stage and proceed on to
the next. One reason for this may be that the needs of the developing
individual at any particular stage may not have been adequately met in
which case there is frustration. Or possibly the person's needs may have
been so well satisfied that he is reluctant to leave the psychological
benefits of a particular stage in which there is overindulgence.

Both frustration and overindulgence (or any combination of the two) may
lead to what psychoanalysts call fixation at a particular psychosexual
stage. Fixation refers to the theoretical notion that a portion of the
individual's libido has been permanently 'invested in a particular stage of
his development. It is assumed that some libido is permanently invested in
each psychosexual stage and thus each person will behave in some ways
that are characteristic of infancy, or early childhood.
Four points:

to test, but the evidence that has been gathered is not

favourable

crucial events (e.g., how the libido is used) are unobservable, and
there are no good means to measure them

here is an awfully long time between the occurence of the causal

stimulus and its presumed effect; relationships between early events and
later traits tend to be weak and inconsistent

theory of development was conceived without studying children;

rather, it was developed from patients' recollections, dreams and free
associations

Criticism of Freud's theory of psychosexual development

Feminist critique

Freud's theories were decidedly andocentric, which is why he has received

a great deal of criticism from feminists, as well as from gender theory
practitioners. Freud had difficulty incorporating female desire into his
theories. Freud attempted to provide a theoretical explanation for feminine
psychosexual development only rather late in his career. Freud personally
confessed a lack of understanding of female sexuality and did not hold out
hope that psychology would ever explain the phenomenon.

Freud argued that young girls followed more or less the same
psychosexual development as boys. Whereas the boy would develop a
castration conflict, the girl would go on to develop penis envy, "the envy
the female feels toward the male because the male possesses a penis."
After this stage, the woman has an extra stage in her development when
the clitoris should wholly or in part hand over its sensitivity and its
importance to the vagina. The young girl must also at some point give up
her first object-choice, the mother, in order to take the father as her new
proper object-choice. Her eventual move into heterosexual femininity,
which culminates in giving birth, grows out of her earlier infantile desires,
with her own child taking place of the penis in accordance with an ancient
symbolic equivalence. Freud wrote: "girls feel deeply their lack of a sexual
organ that is equal in value to the male one; they regard themselves on
that account as inferior and this envy for the penis is the origin of a whole
number of characteristic feminine reactions."

 McLeod, S. A. (2008). Simply Psychology; Psychosexual Development.

Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/psychosexual.html
 Bullock, A., Trombley, S. (1999) The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought
Harper Collins:London pp. 643, 705
 Myre, Sim (1974) Guide to Psychiatry, 3rd ed. Churchill Livingstone:Edinburgh
and London, p. 396
 Myre, Sim (1974) Guide to Psychiatry 3rd ed., Churchill Livingstone: Edinburgh
and London pp. 35, 407
 Leach, P. (1997) Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five 5th edition. New
York:Knopf p. 000
 Murphy, Bruce (1996). Benét's Reader's Encyclopedia Fourth edition, HarperCollins
Publishers:New York p. 310
 Bell, Robert E. (1991) Women of Classical Mythology: A Biographical Dictionary
 Hornblower, S., Spawforth, A. (1998) The Oxford Companion to Classical
Civilization pp. 254–55
 “freud on psychosexual development.
AN ASSIGNMENT
ON
P: psychology

PRESENTED TO
DR. epenyoug (LECTURER)
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
VERITAS UNIVERSITY ABUJA
(THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA)
OBEHIE CAMPUS

BY
Chris-worlu igwugwum
VUG/POL/11/323

15TH june, 2012