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Psychoanalytic theory
Stages of childhood development
Psychoanalytic theory and psychosocial
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Abstract This paper explores Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual developmental theory. The articles, however, vary in their personal views of Freud’s model as it can be found as controversial. Freud’s ideas are highly influenced by personality, behavior, and developmental stages. This paper also examines the unconscious and conscious mind. Freud concluded that the mind is heavily influenced by the unconscious mind rather than consciousness. Stages from infancy to adulthood will also be examined. Keywords: freud, stages, development Sigmund Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual Development Sigmund Freud (1859-1939) advanced his theory of Psychosexual Development with the idea that the human mind is influenced subconsciously through birth. There
Sigmund Freud first theorized the psychosexual theory after studying a patients mental health. The theory states that a human develops from underlying unconscious motives in order to achieve sensual satisfaction.
In this crusade some inquisitive minds may come in contact with some erroneous opinions that - claims to be authority on the subject. Therefore our concern here is to expose and criticize some of these erroneous opinions on human sexuality; so as to prevent frail, emotional and gullible minds against easy assimilation of such misgivings especially when it is not compatible with the injunctions of moral standards. One of such erroneous doctrines was postulated by Sigmund Freud, who is our cynosure in this work. Sigmund Freud extended the meaning of sexuality to include early childhood sucking for nourishment and evacuation of the content of the bowel.
The oral stage takes place from birth until age 1, which involves the infant’s mouth as the focus of gratification derived from the pleasure of oral exploration of his or her environment and receiving primary nourishment from one’s mother’s breast. In addition to this, the anal phase takes place from age 1 until age 3, which involves the infant’s more erotic zone changing from the mouth to the anus. Finally, the phallic stage takes place from age 3 until age 6, which involves the child’s genitalia becoming his or her primary aphrodisiacal zone. It is in this third infantile development stage that children become aware of their bodies and the bodies of others. They gratify physical curiosity by undressing and exploring each other and their genitals, and so learn the physical and sexual differences between genders. These stages reflect base levels of desire, but they also involve fear of loss and mistreatment. To keep all of this conflict buried in one’s unconscious, Freud argued that one develops defenses: selective perception, selective memory, denial, displacement, projection, regression, fear of intimacy, and fear of death, among
Freud has multiple known theories all describing the unconsciousness, the human defense mechanism, the clinical conversation between patients and psychoanalyst, and most prominently he discussed about sexual desire. He explained sexual desire as the key motivating energy for humans, and he discussed about its magnitude. On the same topic of sexual desire, Freud also discussed about homosexuality and how it’s acquired (Freud’s View of Homosexuality, 2013). Sigmund Freud discussed the concept of homosexuality as deterministic. According to Feud, human beings are born with unfocused sexual libidinal d...
In "The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman", Freud discusses a case of a young woman brought to him by her parents for treatment as a homosexual. Although he states that Psychoanalysis is not truly a tool for curing homosexuality, but one to help those with inner conflict in one particular area or another, he attempts to study the girl to see if Psychoanalysis could be of any help to her. Once he realized that the girl had a deep rooted bitterness towards men, he called off his study of her and told her parents that if they were to seek more psychoanalysis for her it should be sought from a woman. Prior to this discovery he found a few things of interest that may have attributed to her choice of sexual object.
Up until 1925, Freud admitted to focusing mainly on the sexuality of boys due to the uncertainty of the female sexuality. The paper ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’ (Freud, 1925) is important because in this Freud attempts to explain the Psychical (mental) and the anatomical division between the sexes and what causes it. He highlights the notion that for girls, the leading sexual organ is the clitoris at first which is masculine in character and a ‘’wave of repression at puberty is required before the clitoris gives way to the vagina’’ (Freud, 1925) which means during the latency phase (6 to puberty) the girls sexuality will go from masculine (clitoris) to feminine (vagina). Freud talks about how
Personality, by definition, is the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual 's distinctive character. It is believed that the majority of a person’s personality is formed by the age of six and stays constant throughout their entire lives no matter the time or setting. Famous psychologist Sigmund Freud believed that personality is developed in the five psychosexual stages and that everyone goes through the same stages in the same order. The five psychosexual stages are oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. Each of the psychosexual stages focus on a specific part of the body called the erogenous zones, which are area of the body that produce pleasure, and Freud believed that if an individual had either an overindulgence
Freud emphasized that early childhood experiences are important to the development of the adult personality, proposing that childhood development took place over five stages; oral, anal. Phallic, latent and genital. The phallic stage is the most important stage which contains the Oedipus complex. This is where the child (age 4 - 6 yrs) posses the opposite sex parent and wants rid of the same sex parent. Freud argued that if the conflict is not resolved in childhood then it could cau...
Freud emphasizes on the life history of individuals. As a result, he created 3 parts of human personalities. The first one being Id which is the largest portion of the mind. This portion is unconscious which results in being present at birth. The next one is ego; this portion is conscious and begins to emerge in early infancy. Lastly is superego which is the conscience. This part begins to develop from ages three to six. Freud also explains the five psychosexual stages which are oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. “Psychoanalytic theory suggested that personality is mostly established by the age of five.” (Cherry, n.d.). All five psychosexual stages help establish a personality at a young age.
Freud’s psychosexual theory and Erikson’s psychosocial theory are two very renowned developmental concepts. Erikson was persuaded by Freud’s ideas but he elaborated on the theory differently.
Sigmund Freud developed the psychosexual stages of development to describe the chronological process of development that took place from birth through later adulthood. The stages of psychosexual are oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital. Freud developed that as children grow they progress from self-pleasing sexual activity to reproductive activity. Through this developmental process one will develop adult personality. Freud put much emphasis on sexual context of how ones libido, which is one sexual desires played a role in each stage of development. Freud emphasizes that individuals will strive to obtain pleasures in each stage of development, which becomes the basis of ones personality.
Developmental psychology is an area of research dedicated to the understanding of child-development. Throughout history many theories have been used to attempt to explain the complex process. Two of those theorists, Freud and Erikson, were instrumental in creating a foundation for child-psychology to build on. From a Freudian perspective, human development is centered on psychosexual theory. Psychosexual theory indicates that maturation of the sex drives underlies stages of personality development. Alternatively, Erikson is considered a neo-freudian scholar who developed psychosocial theory. In Erikson models there are eight major conflicts that occur during the course of an individual’s life.
For Freud, psychosexual theory occurred when personality arises, as it tries to resolve conflicts between unconscious sexual and aggressive impulses and the societal demands to suppress these impulses. In general, psychoanalytic theorists are permeated with notions of human development, and how the child changes during the course of his maturation in an explicit and implicit perspective.
Freud believed that humans develop through stages based on particular erogenous zones. Freud theorized that to gain a healthy personality as an adult, a person would have to successfully complete a certain sequence of five stages. Within the five stages of Freud’s psychosexual development theory, Freud assumed there would be major consequences if any stage was not completed successfully. The stages, in order, were the oral stage, the anal stage, the phallic stage, the latency stage, and the genital stage. In general, Freud believed that an unsuccessful completion of any stage would make a person become fixated on that particular stage. The outcome would lead the person to either over indulge or under indulge the failed stage during adulthood. Freud truly believed that the outcomes of the psychosexual stages played a major part in the development of the human personality. Eventually, these outcomes would become different driving forces in every human being’s personality. The driving forces would determine how a person would interact with the world around them. The results from Freud’s theory about the stages of psychosexual development led Freud to create the concept of the human psyche; Freud’s biggest contribution to
The theory does a good job at delineating the stages of psychosexual development; our childhood has a great influence on our personalities. Referring to Freud’s ‘psychosexual stages’, it is very clear that parents’ role in an infant’s life is the foremost step to structure the personality. Not to forget, the oral and anal stages are focal fundamental to character traits in a person’s behavior. The inner ‘instincts’ of sexuality and aggression meeting with the socially acceptable norms creates a conflict zone, wherein it is decided what we are to do and what we would become.