Psychosexual Stages Of Development

11 Key excerpts on "Psychosexual Stages Of Development"

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  The Handy Psychology Answer Book

  • Lisa J. Cohen(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Visible Ink Press

    (Publisher)

  All of these theories propose that children develop through a series of predictable stages that occur at specific ages. Major developmental stage theories. What are Freud’s psychosexual stages? We will start with Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychosexual stages as it is the oldest and best known developmental stage theory. Moreover, it influenced later theories, particularly Erikson’s. Freud proposed five psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. Freud’s general theory of psychology (often referred to as his metapsychology) is difficult to understand in modern terms. He wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and framed his concepts in the physical science of the day. It was very important to him that his work was seen as having scientific merit. However, from a modern vantage point some of his theories seem like he was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Each stage of Freud’s theory refers to a part of the body known as an erogenous zone. This refers to the area of the body where libido (loosely translated as sensual pleasure) is most powerfully concentrated. Personality traits accompany each erogenous zone. For example, the anal stage is associated with either a rigid need for order or a messy lack of self-discipline. Later theorists interpreted Freud’s psychosexual stages less literally, interpreting his ideas in more metaphorical terms. Erikson translated these ideas into social constructs. What did Freud mean by the oral stage? The oral stage occurs during the first eighteen months of life. During this time the child’s primary erogenous zone is in the mouth. The personality traits associated with this stage include dependency and a kind of oceanic and all-encompassing emotional experience. When emotions are felt, they seem to take over the whole world. If we look at babies of this age, we can see why Freud called it the oral stage. For one thing, nursing is a central part of their life.

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  Investigating Pop Psychology

  Pseudoscience, Fringe Science, and Controversies

  • Stephen Hupp, Richard Wiseman, Stephen Hupp, Richard Wiseman(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Table 9.1 for an overview.

  Table 9.1

  Sigmund Freud's five psychosexual stages

  Stage	Age Range	Behavior Exhibited
  Oral	Birth–1 year	The mouth or oral zone was associated with infants’ natural instinct to nurse.
  Anal	1–3 years	Toilet training begins, and children start discovering pleasure in the voluntary control of defecation and urination.
  Phallic	3–5 years	Children discover the significance of their genitals and the pleasure experienced in that erogenous zone.
  Latency	5 years–puberty	Sexual drives are repressed or forgotten until adulthood.
  Genital	Adolescence	Teenagers balance basic sexual urges with the need to conform to societal norms.

  Freud indicated that children moved sequentially through these psychosexual stages, claiming virtually all areas of one's personality were influenced by successes or failures navigating developmental challenges related to each stage (Kalat, 2013 ). According to Freud, all normal and abnormal behavior was a result of early experiences forming the foundation of the personality (Miller, 1983 ). The corresponding erogenous areas associated with the oral, anal, and phallic stages generated sexual tensions that required stimulation or relief. Unhealthy levels of stimulation (i.e., too little or too much) at any one of these stages caused the child to be fixated, or stuck, resulting in the development of personality types associated with the specific stage (Greenwood, 2015

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  Visualizing

  The Lifespan

  • Jennifer Tanner, Amy Warren, Daniel Bellack(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Theoretical Perspectives on Development 15 Freud’s five Psychosexual Stages Of Development • Figure 1.10 Freud identified five developmental stages, each named after the part of the body where libidinal energy concentrates throughout development (Freud, 1949). As a result of mastering biological maturation and learning to behave according to society’s rules, Freud theorized that a different part of our personality arises during each stage.

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  The Early Years of Life

  Psychoanalytical Development Theory According to Freud, Klein, and Bion

  • Gertraud Diem-Wille, Benjamin McQuade, Norman Merems, Camilla Nielsen(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Five The psychosexual development of a child

  When we speak of the psychosexual development of a child instead of “sexuality”, this implies a broader understanding of sexuality also including seemingly asexual forms of behaviour. The development of infantile sexuality, as described by Freud in his “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905a), is a significant addition to the understanding of intra-psychical connections. Freud situates sexuality in the unconscious, which he sees as the liminal area between soma and psyche. Since it is a central notion of psychoanalytic understanding we will take a closer look at sexuality.

  5.1 A broader understanding of sexuality

  Freud (1917: 320) uses the notion of sexuality differently than it is commonly employed in everyday language. He not only uses it to refer to the differences between the sexes, the sexual act, and procreation but to describe every form of pleasure and satisfaction which can be derived from its objects—that is, also eating, playing, and much more. Most of our thoughts and acts are based precisely on these acts—and they are also activated in sleep. Sexuality is meant in a much broader sense, and Freud (1917: 320) uses the term “libido” to refer to it. This broader understanding of sexuality is linked to the development of personality (Nietzschke, 1988). Freud himself suggested using the term “psychosexuality” in psychoanalytic theory, since the psychic factor is decisive in connection with the relationship to parents and siblings (Freud, 1910: 119). Here the issue is the individual’s capacity to love, linked with an intense, emotional, and affective experience during the sexual act and not an erection or ability to achieve an orgasm. The personality is the product of the development of infantile sexuality into the mature psychosexuality of the adult. Psychosexuality thus cannot be identified with sexual behaviour measured by experimental means (Kinsey, 1948, 1953). It can be influenced by psychic factors such as anxiety, hate, and guilt feelings and be intensified by tenderness and love. Thus a technically successful sexual intercourse without tender feelings can leave behind a shallow, even repulsive feeling, in lieu of happiness and fulfilment. Freud was able to attain an understanding of the unconscious roots of psychosexuality by studying abnormal behaviour, perversion, and sexual aberrations. Freud (1905: 170) assumed that “normal” manifestations of sexual drives could essentially not be separated from “abnormal” ones:

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  Hergenhahn's An Introduction to the History of Psychology

  • Tracy Henley(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  To resolve the female Oedipal complex in a healthy way, the female child must repress her hostility toward her mother and her sexual attraction to her father. Thereafter, she “becomes” the mother and shares the father. Psychosexual Stages of Development Although Freud considered the entire body to be a source of sexual pleasure, he believed that this plea-sure was concentrated on different parts of the body at different stages of development. At any stage, the area of the body on which sexual pleasure is con-centrated is called an erogenous zone . The erogenous zones give the stages of development their respec-tive names. According to Freud, the experiences a child has during each stage determine, to a large extent, his or her adult personality. For this reason, Freud believed that the foundations for one’s adult personality are formed by the time a child is about five years old. The Oral Stage. The oral stage lasts through about the first year of life, and the erogenous zone is the mouth. Pleasure comes mainly through the lips and tongue, and such activities as sucking, chewing, and swallowing. If either overgratification or under-gratification (frustration) of the oral needs causes a fixation to occur at this level of development, as an adult the child will be an oral character . Fixation during the early part of the oral stage results in an oral-incorporative character . Such a person tends to be a good listener and an excessive eater, drinker, kisser, or smoker; he or she also tends to be depen-dent and gullible. A fixation during the latter part of the oral stage, when teeth begin to appear, results in an oral-sadistic character . Such a person is sarcastic, cynical, and generally aggressive. The Anal Stage. The anal stage lasts through about the second year of life, and the erogenous zone is the anus-buttocks region of the body. Fixation during this stage results in an anal character .

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  Human & Social Development NQF4 SB

  TVET FIRST

  • M Ryan(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  In each stage, there are important inner conflicts that the individual must resolve by finding a balance between forces in his or her environment (social and psychosocial forces) and his or her own biological and psychosexual forces. The table below shows Erikson’s eight stages of emotional development, and the inner conflict that he believed was part of each stage. psychosexual: an individual’s mind and it’s relationship to their sex organs, such as their genitals and mouth psychoanalyst: a doctor who investigates the way people’s minds work, especially in terms of their emotions and personality Words & Terms Stage Conflict 1: Infancy Trust versus mistrust 2: Early childhood Autonomy (being an individual, not an extension of your parents) versus shame and doubt 3: Preschool Initiative (doing things independently) versus guilt 4: School age Industry (being active) versus inferiority 5: Young adulthood Expectation of entering an institution (marriage, family) versus idea of self as belonging or isolated 6: Middle adulthood Generativity (providing goods and services, producing and socialising children) versus stagnation (‘being stuck’ because of not being able to see self as productive) 7: Maturity Ego integrity (being true to yourself as an individual) versus sense of despair (because you know you coming to the end of your life) 8: Old age Satisfaction (because you have lived your life to the full) versus sense of despair (because you feel that you have wasted opportunities in your life) 86 Module 1 As you can see from Erikson’s stages, he believed that emotional development is both biological (according to the age of an individual) and social (according to the pressures placed on an individual by their family, or the workplace). If individuals do not progress from one stage to the next by resolving these conflicts, they will experience emotional problems in the stages that follow.

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  Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

  A Handbook

  • Matthias Elzer, Alf Gerlach, Matthias Elzer, Alf Gerlach(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Joyce and James Robertson (1976, 1989), a couple doing attachment research together with John Bowlby, an English psychoanalyst who conducted a great deal of research concerning attachment theory during the 1960s, observed young boys and girls during periods of separation from their parents to explore how this disruption of the relationship to the parents affects the children. It is very moving to observe how sensitive young children react to such a separation and how this affects their attachment system.

  Fourth to sixth year: the infantile-genital (oedipal) stage

  Christine Gerstenfeld

  A mong the developmental concepts put forth by psychoanalysis, those related to the oedipal stage belong to the most intriguing and most discussed by anthropology, ethnology, and other branches of the cultural sciences. This might be due to the fact that these concepts offer an explanation as to why, in the everyday affective yearnings of children and their parents at this age, one encounters the conflictual dynamics of love, desire, jealousy, aggression, and murderous wishes that have so often inspired mythology and art in many cultures. Depending on the analytical school, the concepts tend to emphasise more the side of sexual development (the “genital” aspect) or the side of psychic maturation inherent in the conflicts of this stage (the “triadic” or “triangulation” aspect).

  It is important not to look at any psychosexual “stage” in isolation. We should always keep in mind that the previous developmental steps (especially the quality of the emotional attachments in early infancy) greatly influence the intensity and the outcome of the developments that we will be discussing below.

  We should start by remembering the physical, cognitive, and emotional development of the child at this age of 4–6 years: we see a little boy or girl who has mastered the sensory–motor development of the previous years, achieving control over his or her body functions. The child has acquired language and symbolic function, sometimes even being able to decipher letters and to count. He or she has acquired a core gender identity as male or female (around age 2–3), and is able to make a more stable distinction between reality and fantasy. The child has internalised a range of objects and has some experience of tolerating separations from them. Hence, the child is entering a phase in which he or she feels distinctly as an individual, developing a sense of his or her own personality and exerting a strong autonomy. One could say that the child almost feels a kind of imaginary “maturity”. Therefore, the new conflicts arising at this age hit especially hard and inflict painful narcissistic injuries.

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  Empowerment Series: Understanding Human Behavior and the Social Environment

  • Charles Zastrow, Karen Kirst-Ashman, Sarah Hessenauer, , Charles Zastrow, Karen Kirst-Ashman, Sarah Hessenauer(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Freud did not identify the precise pro-cesses for resolution of the Electra complex in girls. Latency Stage This stage usually begins at the time when the Oedipus/Electra complexes are re-solved and ends with puberty. The sexual instinct is relatively unaroused during this stage. The child can now be socialized and become involved in the educa-tion process and in learning skills. Genital Stage This stage, which occurs from pu-berty to death, involves mature sexuality. The person reaching this stage is fully able to love and to work. Again, we see Freud’s emphasis on the work ethic , the idea that hard work is a very important part of life, in addition to being necessary to attaining one’s life goals. This ethic was highly valued in Freud’s time. Freud theorized that personality development was largely completed by the end of puberty, with few changes thereafter. Psychopathological Development Freud theorized that disturbances can arise from several sources. One source was traumatic experi-ences that a person’s ego is not able to cope with directly and therefore strives to resolve using such defense mechanisms as repression. Breuer and Freud (1895) provide an example of a woman named Anna O. who developed a psychosomatic paralysis of her right arm. Anna O. was sitting by her father’s bed-side (her father was gravely ill) when she dozed off and had a nightmare that a big black snake was at-tacking her father. She awoke terrified and hastily repressed her thoughts and feelings about this night-mare for fear of alarming her father. During the time she was asleep, her right arm was resting over the back of a chair and became “numb.” Freud theo-rized that the energy connected with the repressed material then took over physiological control of her arm, and a psychological paralysis resulted. In addition to unresolved traumatic events, Freud thought that internal unconscious processes could also cause disturbances.

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  Theories of Development

  Concepts and Applications

  • William Crain(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Some of Freud’s followers have argued that sexual and aggressive fantasies do not disappear at this time as completely as Freud implied (Blos, 1962, pp. 53–54). For example, an 8-year-old boy is still interested in girls’ bodies, and he typically discovers the real facts of life at about this age. Nevertheless, most Freudians agree that sexual concerns lose their frightening and overwhelming character. In general, the latency-age child possesses a new composure and self-control.

  Puberty (The Genital Stage)

  The stability of the latency period, however, does not last. As Erikson said, “It is only a lull before the storm of puberty” (1959, p. 88). At puberty, which begins at about age 11 for girls and age 13 for boys, sexual energy wells up in full adult force and threatens to wreak havoc with the established defenses. Once again, oedipal feelings threaten to break into consciousness, and now the young person is big enough to carry them out in reality (Freud, 1920, p. 345).

  Freud said that from puberty onward, the individual’s great task is “freeing himself from the parents” (p. 345). For the son, this means releasing his tie to the mother and finding a woman of his own. The boy must also resolve his rivalry with his father and free himself of his father’s domination of him. For the daughter, the tasks are the same; she too must separate from the parents and establish a life of her own. Freud noted, however, that independence never comes easily (1905, p. 346). Over the years we have built up strong dependencies on our parents, and it is painful to separate ourselves emotionally from them. For most of us, the goal of genuine independence is never completely attained.

  Anna Freud on Adolescence

  Although Freud sketched the general tasks of adolescence, he wrote little about the distinctive stresses and behavior patterns of this stage of life. It was his daughter, Anna Freud, who made many of the first contributions to the psychoanalytic study of adolescence.

  Anna Freud’s starting point was the same as that of her father: The teenager experiences the dangerous resurgence of oedipal feelings. Typically, the young person is most aware of a growing resentment against the parent of the same sex. Incestuous feelings toward the other parent remain more unconscious.

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  Theories of Personality

  • Duane P. Schultz; Sydney Ellen Schultz, Duane Schultz, Sydney Schultz(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Boys develop castration anxiety; girls develop penis envy. Boys resolve the Oedipus complex by identify-ing with their father, adopting their father ’ s superego standards, and repressing their sexual longing for their mother. Girls are less successful in resolving the complex, which leaves them with poorly devel-oped superegos. During the latency period, the sex instinct is sublimated in school activities, sports, and friendships with persons of the same sex. The genital stage, at puberty, marks the beginning of heterosexual relationships. Freud ’ s image of human nature is pessimistic. We are doomed to anxiety, to the thwarting of impulses, and to tension and conflict. The goal of life is to reduce tension. Much of human nature is inherited, but part is learned through parent – child interactions. Two methods of personality assessment are free association and dream analysis. In free association, a patient spontaneously expresses ideas and images in random fashion. Sometimes resistances develop in which a patient resists talking about disturbing memo-ries or experiences. Dreams have both a manifest con-tent (the actual dream events) and a latent content (the symbolic meaning of those events). Freud ’ s research method was the case study, which does not rely on objective observation. It is not controlled and systematic, nor is it amenable to dupli-cation and verification. Freud ’ s data are not quantifi-able, may be incomplete and inaccurate, and were based on a small and unrepresentative sample. Some Freudian concepts have been supported by empirical research: the unconscious, repression, projec-tion, displacement, verbal slips, and some characteris-tics of oral and anal personality types.

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  The Origins and History of Consciousness

  • Erich Neumann, R. F.C. Hull(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  407 PSYCHOLOGICAL STAGES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY movement. Henceforward the life of the adolescent who has emerged from the family circle into the collective will largely be claimed and used by these contents. The criterion of being grown up is that the individual is led out of the family circle and initiated into the world of the Great Life-Givers. Accordingly, puberty is a time of rebirth, and its symbolism is that of the hero who regenerates himself through fighting the dragon. All the rites characteristic of this period have the purpose of renewing the personality through a night sea journey, when the spiritual or conscious principle conquers the mother dragon, and the tie to the mother and to childhood, and also to the unconscious, is severed. The final stabilization of the ego, toilsomely achieved stage by stage, has its coun-terpart in the final dispatch of the mother dragon in puberty. Just as the detachment of the anima from the mother is effected in real life at this point in ontogenetic development, and the mother's importance is eclipsed by that of the soul-partner, so this time normally sees the conclusion of the fight with the mother dragon. The reborn is reborn through the father prin-ciple with which he identified himself in the initiation. He be-comes the father's son without a mother, and, inasmuch as he is identical with the father, he is also the father of himself. 7 Through the prepubertal period the ego has gradually been taking up a central position; now, in puberty, it finally becomes the carrier of individuality. The detachment from the uncon-scious—so far as this is necessary for the production of tension between the two systems—is complete. The puberty initiations are an expression of the activated collective unconscious, which is now linked to the community, since, in these rites, the archetypal canon is handed down as the spiritual world of the collective by the elders who represent heaven.

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