Psychosexual development
According to Freud, personality develops through a series of childhood stages in which pleasure seeking energies from the child become focused on certain erogenous areas.
Sigmund Freud proposed that if the child experienced frustration at any of the psychosexual developmental stages, they would experience anxiety that would persist into adulthood as a neurosis, a functional mental disorder.
[1][2] Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) observed that during the predictable stages of early childhood development, the child's behavior is oriented towards certain parts of their body, for example the mouth during breast-feeding or the anus during toilet-training.
In psychoanalysis, the adult neurosis (functional mental disorder) is thought to be rooted in fixations or conflicts encountered during the developmental stages of childhood sexuality.
According to Freud, human beings are born "polymorphous perverse": infants can derive sexual pleasure from any part of their bodies and any object.
[7] Weaning is the key experience in the infant's oral stage of psychosexual development, their first feeling of loss consequent to losing the physical intimacy of feeding at their mother's breast.
The ideal resolution of the conflict is that the child adjusts to moderate parental demands that teach the value and importance of physical cleanliness and environmental order, thus producing a self-controlled adult.
[9] The feminine Oedipus 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 possess.
[10][11] The name derives from the 5th-century BC Greek mythologic character Electra, who plotted matricidal revenge with her brother Orestes, against their mother and stepfather, for the murder of their father.
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.
[17] 'Penis envy' in the girl is rooted in anatomic fact: without a penis, she cannot sexually possess the mother, as the infantile id demands.
As a result, the girl redirects her desire for sexual union toward the father; thus, she progresses towards heterosexual femininity that ideally culminates in bearing a child who replaces the absent penis.
After the phallic stage, the girl's psychosexual development includes transferring her primary erogenous zone from the infantile clitoris to the adult vagina.
Freud considered a girl's Oedipal conflict to be more emotionally intense than that of a boy, potentially resulting in a submissive woman of insecure personality.
The boy thus diminishes his castration anxiety, because his identification with the father reduces the rivalry and suggests the promise of a future potency.
Any neuroses established during the latent stage of psychosexual development might derive from the inadequate resolution of the Oedipus conflict, or from the ego's failure in attempts to direct the energies towards socially acceptable activities.
The psychological difference between the phallic and genital stages is that the ego is established in the latter; the person's concern shifts from primary-drive gratification (instinct) to applying secondary process-thinking to gratify desire symbolically and intellectually by means of friendships, a love relationship, family and adult responsibility.
[21] Some feminists criticize Freud's psychosexual development theory as being sexist and phallocentric,[22] arguing that it was overly informed by his own self-analysis.
[23] Contemporary cultural considerations have questioned the normative presumptions of the Freudian psychodynamic perspective that posits the son–father conflict of the Oedipal complex as universal and essential to human psychologic development.
The anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski's studies of the Trobriand islanders challenged the Freudian proposal that psychosexual development (e.g. the Oedipus complex) was universal.
