Five Stages Of Development And Few People example essay topic

Evaluate Freud's psychosexual theory of development. Sigmund Freud was born on May 6th 1856 in a small town called Freiberg in Moravia. When he was four or five he and his family moved to Vienna, Austria. A highly intelligent child, always top of his class he progressed on to medical school where he fell under the tutorlidge of a physiology professor named Ernst Bruce. After this he went on to study with the eminent psychiatrist, Charcot, in Paris. And then with Charcot's rival, Bernheim, in Nancy.

Freud was forced to flee Austria after the rise of nazi Germany and fled to England. During Freud's education he developed his psychosexual theory of development. This suggested that all people are born unbridled pleasure seekers who develop through the successful transition of five developmental stages. People, Freud suggested, seek pleasure through the stimulation of a series of erogenous zones. And these erogenous zones, when stimulated in childhood, form the social relations necessary for adulthood.

This will become clear as we progress through the individual stages of development. Freud argued that all that we are as adults is determined in our childhood development, that how we learn to solve problems in childhood is a template for decision making in adulthood. According to Freud all humans are powered by psychic and sexual energy he called libido, how this libido is expressed depends on each stage of development. Inherent in each stage there are frustrations.

If these frustrations are not successfully resolved in each stage then the libido may become fixated more in that stage than in another. As Freud believed that each of us only has a limited amount of libido to use, more in one stage will lead to deficiency in another stage. Overuse of libido in this way can have one of two consequences. Fixation. This is when the person has lingering desires for the pleasure associated with the source experienced at that stage.

Reaction formation. This is when the person takes the lingering desire for pleasure from some source and acting in the opposite way. Freud suggested there were five stages of development and few people successfully completed all of them. He felt most people fixed their libido to one stage of development and this prevented them using this energy at a later stage. The oral stage. The oral stage starts from birth and goes on to about one year, here the libido is concentrated on the mouth and is characterised by sucking and putting things in the mouth.

Frustration may occur due to the person having to wait on and be dependent on another person. Libido fixation in this stage is characterised by excessive use of oral stimulation such as smoking, drinking and overeating. The anal stage. The anal stage goes from about two years to three years old. This is where people first encounter rules and regulations, as they have to learn the rules regarding potty training. This early brush with rules and regulations dictates how the individual deals with rules and regulations in later life.

Here the libido is focussed anally and frustration may occur with having to learn complicated motor and cognitive skills. Here fixation may result in the individual being stingy, stubborn and mean, anally retentive. Or messiness, anally expulsive. The phallic stage.

This stage generally occurs during the ages of four to five. Freud believed that some critical developmental episodes happened during this stage but they are different for boys and girls. The Oedipus conflict pertains to the development of the boy. Here the boy starts to feel sexual attraction to his mother and views his father as a potential rival for her affections. The boy begins to fear that his father is aware of the feelings he has towards his mother and will punish him for his desires. This punishment, the boy fears, will come in the form of castration.

The second part of the phallic stage for the boy is castration anxiety. This is where the anxiety of being hated and punished by the boy's father leads the boy to give up his sexual feelings towards his mother and chooses to identify with his father. And hopes to have a fulfilling relationship with a woman (not his mother) later on in life. Girls go through what is known as the Electra conflict. This is where the object of their desires is not the mother but the father. Girls realise they do not have a penis and develop what is known as penis envy.

They notice their mother does not have a penis either and so believes that their mother was punished (castrated) as a child and so is not worthy, and becomes attracted to her father, as he does have a penis. As in the Oedipus conflict, the girl believes the mother knows of her desires towards her father, and that the mother hates her for it. Again this anxiety results in the girl renouncing her desires for her father and identifying with her mother instead. The latency stage. The latency stage occurs from about the age of seven and lasts right through to puberty.

This stage occurs after all the conflicts in the phallic stage have been resolved and all feelings that were aroused in that stage are resolved. This is a period where the libido can rest and there are no significant developmental events. The genital stage. This stage begins at puberty and is involved in the development of the genitals. And the libido starts its function as a sexual tool. Freud's psychosexual theory is by no means conclusive, his results are not scientific by any stretch of the imagination, they are basically drawn from Freud's own perceptions after taking patients recollections, dreams and free associations and drawing conclusions from them.

Freud grew up in an age of sexual repression, a time when sex was taboo. This I feel was the driving force behind his theories. Sex was unspoken in these times and I believe Freud was employing the shock factor, more than anything else, to put forward his ideas. None of his studies involved children, all adults describing their childhood, the time factor involved in this method could not possibly give accurate results.