Question

Describe Freud’s psychosexual stages of personality development.

Answer 1

Freud proposed five stages of personality development(also called psychosexual stages of development)

• Oral - A newborn’s instincts are focused on the mouth. This is the infant’s primary pleasure seeking centre. It is through the mouth that the baby obtains food that reduces hunger. The infant achieves oral gratification through feeding, thumb sucking, biting, and babbling. It is during these early months that people’s basic feelings about the world are established. Thus, for Freud, an adult who considers the world a bitter place probably had difficulty during the oral stage of development.
• Anal - It is found that around ages two and three the child learns to respond to some of the demands of society. One of the principal demands made by parents is that the child learns to control the bodily functions of urination and defecation. Most children at this age experience pleasure in moving their bowels. The anal area of the body becomes the focus of certain pleasurable feelings. This stage establishes the basis for conflict between the id and the ego, and between the desire for babyish pleasure and the demand for adult, controlled behaviour.
• Phallic - This stage focuses on the genitals. At around ages four and five children begin to realise the differences between males and females. They become aware of sexuality and the sexual relationship between their parents. During this stage, the male child experiences the Oedipus Complex, which involves love for the mother, hostility towards the father, and the consequent fear of punishment or castration by the father (Oedipus was a Greek king who unknowingly killed his father and then married his mother). A major developmental achievement of this stage is the resolution of the Oedipus complex. This takes place by accepting his father’s relationship with his mother and modelling his own behaviour after his father. For girls, the Oedipus complex (called the Electra Complex after Electra, a Greek character, who induced her brother to kill their mother) follows a slightly different course. By attaching her love to the father a girl tries to symbolically marry him and raise a family. When she realises that this is unlikely, she begins to identify with her mother and copy her behaviour as a means of getting (or, sharing in) her father’s affection. The critical component in resolving the Oedipus complex is the development of identification with same-sex parents. In other words, boys give up sexual feelings for their mothers and begin to see their fathers as role models rather than as rivals; girls give up their sexual desires for their fathers and identify with their mothers.
• Latency - This stage lasts from about seven years until puberty. During this period, the child continues to grow physically, but sexual urges are relatively inactive. Much of a child’s energy is channelled into social or achievement-related activities.
• Genital - During this stage, the person attains maturity in psychosexual development. The sexuality, fears and repressed feelings of earlier stages are once again exhibited. People learn to deal with members of the opposite sex in a socially and sexually mature way. However, if the journey towards this stage is marked by excessive stress or over-indulgence, it may cause fixation to an earlier stage of development.
• Freud’s theory also postulates that as children proceed from one stage to another stage of development, they seem to adjust their view of the world. Failure of a child to pass successfully through a stage leads to fixation to that stage. In this situation, the child’s development gets arrested at an earlier stage. For example, a child who does not pass successfully through the phallic stage fails to resolve the Oedipal complex and may still feel hostile toward the parent of the same sex. This failure may have serious consequences for the child’s life. Such a boy may come to consider that men are generally hostile, and may wish to relate to females in a dependable relationship. Regression is also a likely outcome in such situations. It takes a person back to an earlier stage. Regression occurs when a person’s resolution of problems at any stage of development is less than adequate. In this situation, people display behaviours typical of a less mature stage of development.