Reflection Of The Five Stages Of Personality Development

Before this class began I was just a bit skeptical about taking it. I was worried that I would not be able to grasp all the information that was being thrown my way but to my surprise, learning information that I am actually interested in makes it so much easier. We covered so many topics but my favorite ones or the ones that caught my interest the most were the interpretation of dreams by Freud in chapter 4, the study of personality in chapter 13, and the many disorders we discussed in chapter 14. I do not necessarily agree with Freud’s interpretation and we have discovered through the semester that not many people did either. I chose this particular topic because his reasoning behind his interpretations definitely caught my attention. His

This was such a broad topic but I chose it because people come from all walks of life and it helped me understand better some of their actions and why they are the way they are. The area I will spend most of my time discussing is the five stages of personality development . They are oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. I found it particularly interesting that if something went wrong or a certain experience happened in one of these stages that the person can become fixated on that certain stage. I feel as if this is very beneficial to know about because it explains so much about a person. I wish I would have known about these five stages a lot earlier in my life because I have encountered many people that cannot keep things out of their mouths and I was always somewhat disgusted because of germs and what not but now I realize they were probably fixated on the oral stage. The third stage was probably my favorite to learn about and I feel like this was the most important. The phallic stage occurs from ages 3-6 and is a very important point of development. In this stage, children are basically in love with their opposite sex parent but they do not want the other parent to know because they think if they knew they would take it away from them so they begin to act like their same sex parent. This is how castration anxiety and penis envy come about. All this information is super relevant to my life. I have a three year old nephew and after this stage was explained in class all I could think about was how he was experiencing it. It was like a lightbulb came on and everything he did now made sense to me. The phallic stage plays a huge role in the process of