Freud's Theory of Psychosexual Development

Running head: FREUD'S THEORY OF PSYCHOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT
FREUD'S THEORY OF PSYCHOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT
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FREUD'S THEORY OF PSYCHOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT
Sigmund Freud, clearly one of the greatest and most controversial thinkers of our
times, has explored the dark and repressed side of human psyche through the construction of
a mode of treatment he named psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is not only the clinical study
of the repressed fears and desires of the human unconscious and how they manifest under
certain traumatic situations, but also a theoretical study which discerns a pattern of human
behaviour and sexuality in general and how they are shaped in the nascent childhood days
through their association and/or dissociation to their parents’ reproductive organs. This was
Freud’s war on the traditional notion of ‘sex’ prevalent in the medical lexis – ‘sex’,
‘sexuality’ or anything related simply meant genital contact and/or the act of intercourse
itself. (Rennison, 2015, p.34)
In Three Essays on Sexuality (1905), Freud pointed out the anomalies within the
dominant approach. Seemingly the most controversial of them all, was the hypothesis on
child sexuality and sexual development. This caused a great uproar among the European
intelligentsia, but this could perhaps be explained through Freud’s theory itself: the child
represses early sexual thoughts through a process of infantile amnesia, and any attempt to
unearth the repressed unconscious would be violently resisted. (Freud, 2014) The
psychosexual development of the human mind occurs in five stages: oral, anal, phallic, latent
and genital. The oral stage is conditioned by the act of sucking, of mother’s breasts and the
child derives pleasure from it. The anal stage is when the child learns to control bladder and
bowels. The phallic stage is when the child becomes conscious of its genital, and it is when
the child discovers its sexual difference from the mother. This is what Freud names the
Oedipus complex after the play by Sophocles where a king kills his father and marries his
mother. In the post-Oedipus stage, the male child fears castration by his father and aware of
his power, diverts his sexual attention to other objects of desire. The female child becomes
aware of her castration and suffers from penis envy. This stage is called the latency period.