In this video I describe Freud’s psychosexual stages of personality development. Each of the stages has a focus of pleasure and a conflict which needs to be resolved. Failure to properly resolve a conflict could result in a fixation, which could then cause anxiety later in life.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to continue with our psychoanalytic approach to thinking about personality and we’re going to do this by looking at Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual stages of personality development. So Freud believed that our early childhood experiences were fundamental for shaping our personalities and he thought that as we progressed through childhood we faced a number of difficulties or conflicts and these needed to be successfully resolved in order for us to develop properly. And he thought if we didn’t properly resolve these conflicts then they would manifest later as anxiety or mental illness.
The goal of psychoanalysis was to look back into the person’s past into the childhood and try to uncover the contents of the unconscious, figure out what the early conflict that hadn’t been resolved was, and then work to resolve it in order to reduce the current anxiety. So Freud’s theory is a stage-based theory and the idea is that the child moves through each of these stages and there’s a focus of pleasure for each stage, or an erogenous zone, and there’s the conflict that needs to be properly resolved, and that if a child didn’t properly resolve one of these conflicts this could result in a fixation. And so this is sort of a sticking point in their development and it would then follow them throughout the rest of their life until it was properly resolved.
The first stage in Freud’s theory is the oral stage and so this lasts from birth until about 12 or 18 months and during this stage, as you might guess, the focus of pleasure is the mouth. And of course we see this in young children at this age from birth to about 18 months, they’re constantly putting things in their mouths; they’re biting and chewing and that’s sort of how they’re mostly exploring the world. Now the conflict that’s being worked on during this stage relates to feeding. So the idea is that the child needs to learn that they can trust that somebody’s going to feed them and they’re gonna be fed when they need to be fed and they’re not gonna be overfed or underfed. And so if this didn’t happen properly, if there was over-feeding or under-feeding, or the child didn’t have this sort of reliable source of food then they might develop an oral fixation.
Freud thought you could see signs of an oral fixation in later life through behaviors that focused pleasure on the mouth. So what he would say is if you saw somebody, you know, who was addicted to smoking cigarettes, that could be a manifestation of some sort of oral fixation. Or somebody who is excessively talkative, right? He thought that would be another representation of the focus of the mouth as the focus of pleasure. Or somebody who’s overeating or had some eating disorders, that would be considered to be related to an oral fixation.
Ok, after the oral stage the child moves to the anal stage and this lasts from 18 months to about 3 years of age and, again, as you can probably guess, the focus of pleasure during the anal stage is the anus. So what this refers to the idea that this is the time when children have to learn proper toilet training and so that’s the main focus. And that’s the potential source of conflict, is they have to learn control over their own body and they have to learn how to properly retain or expel feces. And again if they had problems with this then this would result in a fixation.
And Freud thought there were two personality types that were associated with fixation during the anal stage. And so the first of these would be an anal-retentive type. The idea here, and you’ve probably heard this term used, is somebody who’s obsessed with order, right? They’re obsessed with cleanliness and orderliness and so Freud thought that this type of person, somebody with an obsession with things being clean or things being very, very neat, would relate to during the anal stage, this would have caused him to become anal-retentive. On the other hand, he thought conflict during this stage could also show itself and what he called the anal-expulsive type. The idea here is this is somebody who enjoyed producing feces so much that they are now very messy and disorderly, but he thought they could also be highly creative and productive, right? In the same way of producing lots of feces as you know being interested in the idea of producing and being creative and expelling things out into the world so to speak. So he thought there was also a relationship here with creativity.
So Freud would have found a perfect example of somebody he would call an anal-expulsive type in an artist like Mary Barnes. Mary Barnes suffered from schizophrenia and when she was institutionalized she would paint with her feces, until of course she was given actual paints, she preferred those. So that would be an idea of somebody who Freud would have said must have had some conflict during the anal stage of development.
Ok, after the anal stage the child moves to the phallic stage and this is probably the most famous of these stages. You’ve probably heard about some of the parts of this before. So the focus in the phallic stage is the penis and this is, of course, going to sound particularly male-centric and we’ll get to that but the idea, first we’ll talk about a male, and then I’ll introduce the idea for a female, the idea is that the child, the focus of pleasure is on the penis. Or in the case of females that they they don’t have a penis. And the conflict actually relates to the relationship with the mother.
And so this brings the part you’ve probably heard of which is the idea of the Oedipal complex. So this is named after the story of Oedipus, the idea was that, you know, he was fated to marry his mother and murder his father. And you know this is eventually what happened; in battle he kills his father and he takes over this area where he marries the woman who turned out to be his mother. Of course he didn’t know that at the time. Ok, so the idea of the Oedipal complex is that the child harbors unconscious desires to marry his mother and murder his father.
Now this is often sort of mocked as, you know, really believing some three-year-old child really wants to like kill his dad but that’s really not the right way to think about it. We should think of it the same way we think about these sorts of myths is they maybe are a bit preposterous but there’s a lesson in them and there’s there’s a reason why this myth is used. And so the idea is the conflict is the relationship with the mother and this is the age where children have to start separating from their mother. They have to realize that mom is not the whole world, you know, at a younger age that might seem to be the case. You know, mom is the child’s everything, and then as the child is getting older, well that’s not true and you can’t have mom all to yourself. Mom has other aspects of her life and you need to be willing to separate a bit from the mother. And then there’s this guy dad who’s taking up some of mom’s time as well.
And so the idea is in the, in the oedipal complex, that the child wants to have mom all to himself and dad is getting in the way of that. And so that’s why he would have this unconscious desire to get rid of dad, right? So that he could be alone with the mother, have her all to himself. And of course, this is also a difficulty for the mother. The mother has to recognize, she has to be willing to let her child go and get out into the world, and be separated from her, right? This relationship has to change and this is around the age it starts changing. Ok, so the idea of the Oedipal complex is that the child wants to get rid of dad so he can have mom all to himself, potentially and he’s afraid that dad knows this. I mean dad is this much larger, you know, scary guy who the child fears could harm him.
And so the idea is he suffers castration anxiety; he thinks the father is going to realize that, you know, “I wish he weren’t around and he’s gonna punish me in some way for this” and the way that the child properly resolves this conflict is to realize that he can’t have this close relationship with his mother. She can’t be the only thing in his world. He needs to break away from that and the way that he does that is by identifying with the father. There’s something to be learned from this guy that, you know, I’m competing with here for mom’s affections. And so if I can be like dad then I can grow up to be the kind of guy who will find a, you know, a new mother figure. I can find a woman to be with in place of mom. And so that’s the process of identification with the father and Freud believed that this was essential for learning proper gender roles and sexual behavior. So he thought that variations in gender role; so things like transvestitism or variants in sexual behavior like homosexuality or fetishes would have resulted from conflicts that weren’t properly resolved during this phallic stage.
Ok, so what about females? That was a very male centric approach to thinking about this stage. Now obviously females don’t have a penis and so they experience penis envy and the idea here is that they realize that they don’t have a penis and it is around this age 3 to 5 that kids start becoming more aware of physical differences, and so Freud thought young girls realize they don’t have a penis and they blame their mother for this. You know they think that mom’s the reason that I don’t have a penis and this makes them maybe somewhat resentful of the mother and maybe they have some desire to be with the father or to have a better relationship with the father. And again the idea was the way that this is resolved is through identification with the mother; realizing that if the girl acts like mom then she can resolve this and develop proper gender roles in sexual behavior.
Now Freud didn’t refer to this the Elektra Complex, you might see this term, this is what Carl Jung used to describe this situation and it’s based on the myth of Elektra. The idea is her father Agamemnon was killed by her mother and she plots revenge on her mother. But Freud preferred to call it a feminine Oedipal complex, right? He didn’t think that the story of Elektra mapped on to it quite right and this was one of the points Freud and Jung disagreed. But, in any case, that’s the general idea of the phallic stage and the conflict that is resolved leads to proper adoption of what were considered correct gender roles or correct sexual behavior.
Ok, now following this stage the child moves to the latency stage and this is pretty boring. There’s not really a strong conflict here and this lasts from age six to about puberty and Freud sort of thought of this as these earlier conflicts have been resolved or maybe are just finishing being worked through and then it’s sort of like, think of like a jello mold sitting in the fridge and setting, right? Everything’s been sort of mixed together and now it’s just solidifying. And then after puberty the child moves to, well maybe no longer a child, moves into the genital stage and so the focus pleasure here is still the genitals but in this case it comes with a desire for mutual sexual gratification. They want to be in an intimate relationship with another person that benefits both of them and they also have a desire to be productive members of society and so essentially if you’ve gone through all these other stages appropriately and you’ve resolved the conflicts, the you’re now ready to be a productive member of society and fit in with the rest of all the other people, who hopefully have also gone through this healthy process of development.
Ok, so that’s essentially Freud’s overview of personality development and any problems at any of these different stages would result in different forms of anxiety occurring later in life. Ok, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
