Psychosexual Development

1905

Sigmund Freud (1856­–1939)

Sigmund Freud suggested that a normal part of psychological development is the experience of the Oedipus Complex, in which the child longs for possession of the parent of the opposite sex and the demise of the same-sex parent.

Freud’s clinical and theoretical work led him to posit that children from the time of birth are polymorphously perverse, or capable of experiencing pleasure from the stimulation of any part of the body. As physical and psychological development progresses, specific parts of the body become the focal points of pleasure. These erogenous zones change with each stage, linked to a particular part of the body where pleasure is most intense. These psychosexual stages are oral, anal, phallic, then a period of latency, and finally the genital stage.

In the oral stage, pleasure is gained primarily through the mouth. As the child develops, say from age two to three, the erogenous zone becomes the anus, with the socially acceptable expression of pleasure being bowel control. In the phallic stage of psychosexual development, pleasure is gained from the child’s own genitals. A heightened attention to pleasure occurs, resulting in the Oedipal conflict; how the child handles the conflict determines the adult personality. The immediate, always imperfect, resolution of the conflict comes when the child identifies with the same-sex parent. The child then enters the latency period, where there is little psychosexual development. At the onset of puberty is the genital stage, in which the normal and acceptable expression is interest in the genitals of a person of the opposite sex, eventually compelling the child to fulfill the social norms of procreation within the conventions of heterosexual marriage.

According to Freud, things can and do go wrong at any point in psychosexual development, with serious implications for the adult. The serious work of Psychoanalysis is to mitigate the always-present failure of psychosexual development. As Freud famously put it, the goal of psychoanalysis is to move the patient from misery to common unhappiness.

SEE ALSO Hysteria (1886), Oedipus Complex (1897), Psychoanalysis (1899) The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

Electra Mourning, a painting by German artist Johann Heinrich Tischbein the Elder, 1784. In 1913, Freud’s collaborator Carl Jung proposed the Electra complex—the female equivalent to the Oedipus complex—which occurs during the third, phallic psychosexual stage and takes its name from the Greek mythological character who, along with her brother, Orestes, plotted matricide against their mother, Clytemnestra.