Stages of Psycho Sexual Development

Humans will pass through various stages of growth throughout their lives. This is known as development, and according to Louw (2007), development is defined as all transformations experienced by people throughout their life span. One of the developments that go through by human is psycho-sexual development suggested by Sigmund Freud as he believed that “human development involves the transfer of libidinal energy from one erogenous zone to another” (Rathus, 2012, p. 342). As stated by S. Dave and A. Dave (2005), psychosexual development is “a dynamic process encompassing biological and psychological change affecting one’s sexuality through the ages” (p. 42). There are five psycho-sexual stages of development that will be experienced by people, which are oral stage, anal stage, phallic stage, latency stage and lastly, genital stage (refer to Figure 1 in Appendix 1).

The first stage of human psycho-sexual development is undergoing oral stage. As stated by Sigelman and Rider (2014), this stage occurs from a child’s birth until the age of one. The erogenous zone or the source of sexual energy in this stage is the mouth (Louw, 2007). As mentioned by Rathus (2007), oral activities will provide children with sexual pleasure in conjunction with nourishment. The examples of oral activities among children in this stage are sucking, biting, and spilling. During this stage, children will spend most of their times with their mothers, or their main caretakers. Thus this stage is mainly determining on how children connect to the mothers or their main caretakers and if a child fails to go through this stage, he or she is has been in hunger or physically abused (Neukrug, 2012). A child who experiences cessation of breast feeding which is known as...

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