CAN DECOM P/P ARAF AC

Freud believed that every person normally progresses through five psychosexual stages.

During the 5 five years of life, pleasure is successively focused on three zones of the body as the oral, anal, and phallic stages unfold. Then comes a quiet latency period of about 5 or 6 years. Finally, if progress through each stage has been successful, the person reaches the mature or genital stage after puberty. But special problems at any stage may retard or arrest (fixate) development and leave enduring marks on the person’s character throughout life.

Stages of Development Oral

The oral stage occurs during the first year of life when pleasure is focused on the mouth and on the satisfactions of sucking, eating, and biting in the course of feeding (but see In Focus 7.3). The dependent, helpless person is said to be fixated at this stage, when the infant is totally dependent upon others for satisfaction of his or her needs.

7.17 Describe the five psychosexual stages and indicate how unresolved conflicts at the early stages create personality traits.

IN FOCUS 7.3

HOW ORAL IS THE INFANT?

Although the feeding situation is a critical phase of early development, it is only one part of the total relationship between the growing organism and the world. Thus, the baby is more than an ‘‘oral’’ creature. Babies respond to stimulation of the mouth, lips, and tongue, but in addi-tion, they see, hear, and feel, obtaining stimulation visually, aurally, and from being handled.

Professor Burton L. White of Harvard University in the 1960s carefully observed infants as they lay in their cribs. (The participants were physically normal infants in an orphanage.) He and his colleagues recorded the quan-tity and quality of visual–motor activity to study the babies’

attention. On the basis of these observations, they plotted the development of the infants’ tendency to explore the

visual surroundings, as depicted in Figure 7.2. The findings surprised the investigators:

One important revelation for me which resulted from these weekly observations was that, contrary to my academically bred expectations, infants weren’t really very oral dur-ing the first months of life. In fact, between two and six months, a far more appropriate description would be that they are visual-prehensory creatures. We observed subject after subject spend dozens of hours watching first his fists, then his fingers, and then the interactions between hands and fingers. Thumb-sucking and mouthing were rarely observed except for brief periods when the infant was either noticeably upset or unusually hungry. (White, 1967, p. 207)

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50 40 30 20 10 0 Visual attention (percentage of time)

4 12 30 45 60 75 91 106 121

Age (days)

Figure 7.2 The development of the tendency to explore the surroundings.

Source: Adapted from White, B. L., & Held, R. (1966). Plasticity of sensorimotor development in the human infant. In J. F. Rosenblith

& W. Allinsmith (Eds.), The causes of behavior II (pp. 60–70). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

These observations were among the first to point out how much more we need to know about the details of the infant’s perceptual and cognitive activities before we can reach conclusions about what goes on in early development.

In fact, as this investigator’s comments suggested, the ‘‘oral’’

infant is turning out to be much more attentive and cog-nitively active, and less oral and passive, than was believed in early formulations. More wakefulness and alertness, greater receptivity to stimulation, more directed attention, and less fussing begin to characterize the baby very early in life (Sroufe, 1977). Stimulation becomes less unsettling and may be sought out actively as the baby becomes more and more attentive, even to its own movements.

Indeed, in the last few decades, an explosion of research on early development, using close observation and in-genious experiments, suggests a dramatic increase in the infant’s understanding, perceptual skills, and cognitive

competence by the second or third month. Experiments by Elizbeth Spelke and her colleagues at Harvard University, for example, continue to probe the origins of human cog-nitive capacities. They are discovering the presence even at birth of remarkably rich and specialized ‘‘core knowl-edge’’ that soon enables all sorts of understanding within the infant. Included in such core knowledge, according to the researchers, is the capacity for understanding numbers and ultimately formal mathematics, for constructing and using symbolic representations, for categorizing objects, and for reasoning about other people and their mental states (e.g., Dehaene, Izard, Pica, & Spelke, 2006; Spelke, 2000). The findings are revolutionizing the understanding of the extraordinary richness of the infant mind. They are standing the earlier view of the newborn mind as a blank slate on its head (e.g., Talbot, 2006), and making it clear that the newborn is already much more than oral.

7.18 Does research support Freud’s conception of the infant as primarily ‘‘oral’’?

According to Freud, the oral stage is divided into two periods: (1) sucking and (2) biting and chewing. Later character traits develop from these earliest modes of oral pleasure. More specifically, oral incorporation (as in sucking and taking in milk in the first oral period) becomes the prototype of such pleasures as those gained from the acquisition of knowledge or possessions. In his view, the gullible person (who is ‘‘easily taken in’’) is fixated at the oral, incorporative level of personality. The sarcastic, bitingly argumentative person is fixated at the second oral period—the sadistic level associated with biting and chewing.

Anal

In the second year of life, the anal stage is marked by a shift in body pleasure to the anus and by a concern with the retention and expulsion of feces. According to Freud, during

toilet training, the child has his first experience with imposed control. The manner in which toilet training is handled may influence later personal qualities and conflicts. For example, extremely harsh, repressive training might produce a person characterized by obstinacy, stinginess, and a preoccupation with orderliness and cleanliness.

Phallic

The phallic stage is the period in which the child observes the difference between male and female and experiences what Freud called the Oedipus complex. This complex, symbolized in the father–son conflicts of ancient Greek myths, occurs at about age 5.

7.19 How does the Oedipus complex promote male sex role development?

Freud thought that both boys and girls love their mother as the satisfier of their basic needs and resent their father as a rival for their mother’s affections. In addition, the boy fears castration by the father as punishment for desiring his mother sexually. This castration anxiety is so terrifying that it results in the repression of the boy’s sexual desire for his mother and hostility toward his father. To reduce the anxiety of possible castration by the father, the boy tries to become like him or to identify with him. In this identification, he gradually internalizes the father’s standards and values as his own, becoming more like his father rather than battling him.

Identification with the father in turn helps the boy gain some indirect satisfaction of his sexual impulses toward his mother. In this last phase of the Oedipus complex of the male, the superego reaches its final development as the internalized standards of parents and society, and the opposition to incest and aggression becomes part of his own value system.

In the female, penis envy, resulting from the discovery that she lacks the male organ, is the impetus to exchange her original love object—the mother—for a new object—the father. Unlike the boy’s Oedipus complex, which is repressed through fear, the girl—having nothing to lose—persists in her sexual desire for her father. This desire does, naturally, undergo some modification because of realistic barriers.

Latency

After the phallic stage, a latency period develops. Now there is less overt concern with sexuality; the child represses his or her memories of infantile sexuality and forbidden sexual activity by making them unconscious.

Genital

This is the final, mature stage of psychosexual development. Now the person is capable of genuine love for other people and can achieve adult sexual satisfactions. No longer characterized by the selfishness (narcissism) and mixed, conflicting feelings that marked the earlier stages, he or she can relate to others in a mature, heterosexual fashion. But before he or she reaches the genital stage, excessive stress or overindulgence may cause the person to become fixated at earlier levels of psychosexual development.

Fixation and Regression

The concepts of fixation and regression are closely connected with Freud’s conceptu-alization of psychosexual stages of development. Fixation means that a sexual impulse is arrested at an early stage. Regression is reversion to an earlier stage in the face of unmanageable stress. Fixation occurs when conflict at a particular stage of psychosexual development is too great. Severe deprivation or overindulgence at a particular stage, or inconsistent alterations between indulgence and deprivation, also may lead to fixation.

7.20 How do fixation, regression, and identification enter into personality

development?

In sum, personality is intimately related to the individual’s mode of coping with problems at each stage of psychosexual development. The result is reflected in the nature

Personality Development 䉳 173 of character formation, symptoms, and relations with other people. When individuals’

resolution of problems at any stage of development is inadequate, later stress may cause them to regress to that earlier stage. They then display behavior typical of that less mature period.

Freud’s Theory of Identification

Parts of Freud’s theory of psychosexual stages have been modified and even rejected in recent years. Some of his closely related concepts regarding identification, however, have continued to be influential.

Early personality development occurs in the setting of the family. In that context, you saw Freud strongly emphasize the child’s attachment to the mother and the rivalry between son and father for her attentions. This triangle of relations, called the Oedipal situation, is the basis for identification with the standards of the parent.

This identification process Freud attributed to two mechanisms that operate during psychosexual development.

Anaclitic identification is based on the intense dependency of a child on the mother, beginning early in the course of the infant’s development. Because of the helplessness of the infant, the dependency upon the caretaker is profound. Identification for girls is based mainly on this early love or dependency relation with the mother. In anaclitic identification, the child must first have developed a dependent love relationship with her caretaker (usually the mother). Later, when the mother begins to withdraw some of her nurturant attention, the child tries to recapture her by imitating and reproducing her in actions and fantasy.

For boys, dependency or anaclitic identification with the mother is followed later by identification with the aggressor. The ‘‘aggressor’’ is the father during the Oedipal phase of development. Identification with the aggressor is motivated by fear of harm and castration by the punitive father in retribution for the son’s fantasies and his sexual wishes toward the mother. Freud described the situation vividly:

When a boy (from the age of two or three) has entered the phallic phase of his libidinal [sexual] development, is feeling pleasurable sensations in his sexual organ and has learnt to procure these at will by manual stimulation, he becomes his mother’s lover. He wishes to possess her physically in such ways as he has divined from his observations and intuitions about sexual life, and he tries to seduce her by showing her the male organ which he is proud to own. In a word, his early awakened masculinity seeks to take his father’s place with her; his father has hitherto in any case been an envied model to the boy, owing to the physical strength he perceives in him and the authority with which he finds him clothed.

His father now becomes a rival who stands in his way and whom he would like to get rid of. (1933, p. 46)

The hostile feelings that the boy experiences in the Oedipal situation create great anxiety in him; he desires the mother but fears castration from the father. To defend against the anxiety, he resolves the Oedipal conflict, repressing his aggres-sive wishes against his father and trying to become more like him. It is as though the boy believes that if he ‘‘is’’ the father, he cannot be hurt by him. Identi-fication with the aggressor requires that the boy have a strong (but ambivalent) relation with the father. In this relationship, love for the father is mixed with hos-tility because the father possesses the mother and interferes with the son’s urges.

Freud thought that through identification with the aggressor, boys develop a stricter superego.

䉴 IMPACT OF FREUD’S THEORIES