Freud- The Key Ideas

by Ruth Snowden

In this chapter you will learn:

  what Freud thought about infantile amnesia

  in more depth about Freud’s theories of psychosexual development

  the theory behind the Oedipus complex.

  Psychosexual development

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  Insight

  Psychosexual: relating to the mental aspects of sex, such as sexual fantasies.

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  The idea current when Freud was writing was that children have no sexual instinct until puberty. When occasional references were made in literature to sexual activity in children, such as masturbation, these were quoted as exceptional and horrifying oddities. Freud attacked this notion that children were essentially asexual as being a grave error, because it prevents people from understanding sexuality properly at all. He suggested that a proper study of childhood sexuality would reveal not only the essential characteristics of the sexual instinct, but also the way in which it develops and what influences it.

  Freud gradually developed his ideas about childhood sexuality in order to try and explain how people develop into social beings. His theories about childhood sexuality are really, therefore, part of an attempt at a much broader theory of human personality. Eventually, psychoanalytical thinking divided psychosexual development into several definite stages. Each stage followed on from the one before in a biologically determined manner, and the way a person coped with each stage influenced their adult personality. Freud did not explain these stages all at once in a neat and logical order, but added to his theories over a period of many years. The ideas are therefore scattered in different parts of his writing, but a lot of them are explained in the second essay of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, first published in 1905.

  From birth onwards, instincts or drives compel the infant to seek bodily/sexual pleasure. The development of the personality depends on progressing through various stages of psychosexual growth in which this is accomplished in different ways. Each stage is concerned with ways in which children experience sexual pleasure at that particular phase of development. Sexuality is a dominant theme in Freud’s work and he was very much concerned with the ways in which the libido can become blocked or redirected. Although he soon rejected the seduction theory as the cause of all adult neurosis, he did continue to believe that neurosis was connected with problems in sexual development and functioning.

  Freud suggested that there were two main characteristics of infantile sexuality:

  It is essentially autoerotic, finding its object in the child’s own body.

  It is made up of individual component instincts, each of which follows its own course in the search for pleasure.

  If everything goes according to plan, then sexual development in the child leads to a normal adult sexual life. In adulthood, the pursuit of sexual pleasure is controlled by the reproductive system, which harnesses the various component instincts of the sexual drive for the pursuit of a definite sexual aim, attached to an external sexual object.

  Because the child’s attempts to satisfy the pleasure drive are often met with disapproval and punishment, the developmental process leads the child through a whole series of conflicts. Normally the adult stage is reached smoothly; however, things can go wrong, and a person can get stuck at a particular stage in sexual development. This is what Freud refers to as fixation. It can occur at any of the various stages of development and it leads to pathological problems in later life that give rise to neurotic symptoms and behaviour. In some people fixation is relatively permanent, so that further psychosexual development becomes impossible. In other cases, usually as a result of stress of some kind, people will go back to behaving as they did at an earlier stage of development. This is called ‘regression’ and often occurs as a result of fixation.

  Infantile amnesia

  Freud suggests that the main reason people were convinced that children had no sexual feelings is that they had actually forgotten the events of their own childhoods. In 1916 he coined the phrase ‘infantile amnesia’ to describe this curious phenomenon of forgetting our earliest memories.

  He believed that it was very important to gain understanding of this phenomenon because early memories, if we could only unlock them, held the key to understanding all adult behaviour, from ‘normal’ behaviour right through to that of neurotic and even psychotic people.

  Freud said that in most of us the phase of infantile amnesia hides the earliest beginnings of childhood up until the age of six or eight years. It is true that in most people there seems to be a state of amnesia that blocks early memories right up until the sixth or eighth year of life. Recent studies have shown that most people cannot remember anything at all before the age of about three and a half, although girls tend to remember further back than boys.

  Up until the age of eight most people still have fewer memories than they can recall for later periods of life.

  Why, then, should the function of memory apparently lag so far behind the other functions in the developing psyche? After all, it is obvious that small children can see and hear perfectly well, and react to stimuli.

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  Insight

  Infantile amnesia: a lot of confusion has arisen because studies in the past have tended to focus on adults, who are often unable to remember much about their early childhood. In actual fact recent research has shown that very small children do remember events, but these memories are not always retained into adulthood.

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  Freud says that what is actually going on is not a real erasing of early memory traces, it is in fact a state of deliberately withholding these impressions from consciousness. Freud called this process repression. A similar repression process is seen in neurotic patients in connection with events in later life. But what forces bring about this repression? Freud says that if we could solve this riddle then we could probably explain hysterical amnesia as well. Because he laid great emphasis on sexual repression as the main cause of hysterical symptoms, then it was a logical step to suggest that infantile amnesia was also caused by repression of sexual impulses. Freud claims that early sexual impulses are taboo and frightening because they are directed towards the child’s parents, and so cannot be held intact in the psyche and have to be suppressed.

  Freud said that early sexual urges were often disguised by neutral and innocuous ‘screen memories’. He describes one of his own persistent childhood memories in this way. In this memory he is playing in a field of flowers, accompanied by two of his half-brother’s children, John and Pauline. Freud says that this innocent memory conceals the neurotic need he felt for a male playmate and also the unacceptable competitive and aggressive urges that he knew would arise if this wish were granted.

  He recalled that the arrival of his own younger brother had been greeted with adverse wishes and profound jealousy. When this brother subsequently died, Freud was left with a huge sense of guilt.

  Freud’s theory about screen memories tends to fall down for two reasons:

  In fact, traumatic or disturbing memories of early childhood are just as common as in later periods of life.

  It does not explain why there is a general state of infantile amnesia – what happens to all the neutral or pleasant memories about everyday events?

  Freud thought that the period of infantile amnesia was necessary to the development of a healthy psyche because it was essential to block out material of a sexual and aggressive nature that was directed towards the parents. Only then could a person have a normal adult sex life. This idea is interesting in the light of Freud’s own death wish towards his father, and it shows that once again he was tending to generalize on the basis of flimsy data.

  Freud maintained that if the sex drive was allowed to be expressed openly, all sorts of wild fantasies and childish passions would burst forth and the person would begin to act out their sexual and aggressive urges. Neurotic symptoms arise when the repression process fails and hidden urges begin to rise to the surface of the unconscious. The aim of psy
chotherapy was to try to take the person back into childhood to examine hidden repressed memories in the light of adult, logical thinking, so that they would then lose their hold over the psyche.

  As was so often the case, Freud’s ideas about infantile amnesia were rather vague and ambiguous. As well as suggesting that screen memories were put in place, he also suggested that there was a process of selective reconstruction going on. The idea is that we cannot remember very much from childhood because the actual method of processing information in the brain has changed.

  This seems somewhat closer to the truth in the light of modern experimental psychology, but there is still disagreement as to what might cause such a change in mental processing.

  More modern research is still shedding light on the phenomenon of infantile amnesia, and many psychologists are coming to the conclusion that it does not really exist. Some people can remember events from the very early period of their lives, and many of these memories show that small children have definite emotions and are capable of insight and judgement. Some people believe that all the memories are still there somewhere; it is just a case of finding a trigger to unearth them. Certainly some people are able to recall early childhood events under hypnosis, although this leads to another dilemma in trying to find out if such memories are genuine. But babies as young as one year old show perfectly normal long-and short-term recall, and are able to find hidden objects and so on. What they cannot do at this stage is describe their memories verbally and it is here that a partial explanation for the amnesia may lie.

  The oral stage

  Freud identifies two ‘pregenital’ stages of sexual development. These are the oral and anal stages, which he suggests almost seem to hark back to earlier forms of animal life. The oral stage is the first stage of psychosexual development and it lasts from birth to about one year old. Freud gives it an alternative name – the cannibalistic stage. At this stage all the infant’s libidinal desire is orientated towards the lips and the mouth. The aim is to ingest milk, food, and almost anything else that comes to hand – babies are always putting everything into their mouths. Because sexual activity is not yet separated from the ingestion of food, the sexual aim is incorporation of the object. The infant also indulges in auto-erotic stimulation, sucking various parts of the body, especially the thumb. This activity obviously develops from sucking the mother’s breast. The sucking is rhythmic, and often involves rubbing movements as well. Freud says that these lead on to masturbation later. The activity is very absorbing and comforting and often sends the infant off to sleep.

  Sucking is obviously by far the most important activity at this stage in the baby’s life, and so the mother’s breast becomes the first love/sex object. The baby feels love or hate for the mother accordingly, as the breast is offered or withdrawn. This dual aspect of the love object – bringing both pleasure and pain – is common to later stages of sexual development as well. The source of love at the oral stage is also the food source, and it gradually becomes a source of sexual pleasure. Freud broadened the concept of sexual pleasure, allowing it to encompass what is now usually called sensual pleasure.

  Withdrawal of the breast is seen as withdrawal of love. Fixation at this stage is called ‘oral fixation’ by Freud, who says that this fixation sometimes occurs when babies have not been breast-fed. It manifests in the adult in all sorts of ways, for example:

  thumb sucking in older children

  chewing gum, pens, pencils, finger nails, etc.

  smoking, over-eating or over-drinking

  feeling a constant need to be loved

  passivity and over-dependence.

  This seems to cover the vast majority of the adult population, so presumably we are not very good at getting past this first stage.

  The anal stage

  This is the second stage, and Freud gives it the alternative name of the ‘sadistic-anal’ phase. It lasts from about the age of one to three years, and coincides with the potty training phase, when the child learns to control the bladder and bowels. The child feels very proud when it produces stools and often sees them as part of itself. Because they are a product of his own body, the child sees the faeces as a kind of precious gift, but to his surprise the reaction of his parents or carers is not what he expects! The adults who care for the child may express disgust, especially if the child produces offerings at an inappropriate time or place, or tries to handle his gift, or smear it around the place. So the child has to learn when producing faeces is socially acceptable and when it is not, and also that it is ‘dirty’ to handle them.

  The child soon finds that it can gain power over the adult by withholding stools, or by producing them at the wrong time. According to Freud, producing or withholding stools is all very pleasurable. When potty training begins, the baby often deliberately hangs onto its stools because it wants to enjoy the erotic pleasure of producing the stool in private! Producing a huge stool also apparently causes a wonderful stimulation of the mucous membrane of the anus. (A more acceptable argument today is that stool retention happens because the baby is constipated and producing huge compacted stools is painful.)

  Freud says that by the time of the anal stage, opposition has already developed between the two currents that run through all sexual life. These two opposing energies cannot yet be described as masculine and feminine, but merely as active and passive. The first is represented in the urge to control the muscles of the anus, the second in the stimulation of the erotogenic mucous membrane.

  There is another aspect to this duality: the child can either conform and produce the stool at the right time and place, or it can wield power by withholding the stool or producing it at an inopportune moment. The anal phase is the time when social conditioning really begins to come into play. The child is praised for being ‘clean’ and getting things ‘right’. On the other hand, repressive guilt and disgust begin to appear when the child gets it ‘wrong’. Fixation at this stage can take more than one form:

  Anal expulsiveness follows on from producing stools inappropriately. Adults stuck at this stage are often scruffy, disordered and anti-social. Interestingly, our language reflects the connection between the anti-social character and faeces with phrases such as ‘he’s a real shit’.

  Anal retentiveness follows on from withholding stools. The adult stuck at this stage is compulsively neat and tidy, orderly and conformist, and there is a close association with money and miserliness, because of the sense of trying to hang on to possessions. This is because the psyche still retains a dim memory of the early childhood belief that the faeces are a precious gift. Again, our language reflects the connection between money and faeces with phrases such as ‘filthy rich’ and, ‘where there’s muck there’s brass’. Obstinate people are also stuck at this stage because they are rebelling against the parental insistence that there is a correct time and place to produce a stool.

  Parental disapproval at the anal stage can also lead to a later neurotic obsession with dirt and cleaning.

  Freud’s assumption about the existence of the two pregenital sexual phases is based on his analysis of neuroses. He suggests that further work of this kind would provide more information about the structure and development of normal sexual functioning.

  Passing on the anal fixation.

  The phallic stage

  This stage is from the age of about three to five years, and involves the third and final erotogenic zone of infancy. The genitals – that is the penis or the clitoris – now become the erogenous zone and masturbation begins. Initially, Freud thought that early sexual awakening in this area must usually involve some deliberate involvement on the part of another person, such as a parent, sibling or nurse. But later he decided that a lot of the early childhood seduction scenes related to him by patients were actually fantasies, cooked up at a later stage in order to block out a real memory, as he describes happening in the case of his famous patient the Wolf Man (see Chapter 10).

  Freud eventually decided that the chi
ld has a natural tendency to explore his own body. In addition to this, the infant genital zone is stimulated frequently by washing, rubbing dry, urinating and so on. The child soon learns to stimulate the area itself, by rubbing with the hand or by pressing the thighs together. The child becomes fascinated by urination, and derives pleasure from both retaining and expelling urine. Freud’s views on this stage reveal a misogynist attitude – the phallus is seen as all-important. In fact, he almost seems to regard it as the only sexual organ, saying (rather obscurely) that for both sexes only the phallus counts. However, he does admit that he can only describe what happens in little boys, because the corresponding process in girls is not known to him.

  At first the male child assumes that everybody has the same genital apparatus as himself, i.e. a penis. He can see that men and women are different, but he has no reason to suppose that there is any difference in genitalia. (Remember that in Freud’s day everybody was decently covered all the time.) But the phallic stage is when sexual differences are often discovered by children, by chance glimpses of genitalia, or through observing others urinating. This shocking revelation gives rise to the castration complex in boys and penis envy in girls (see Chapter 6).

  At first the little boy goes into denial when he discovers that girls do not have a penis. He tells himself that there is a penis there really, that it will get bigger in due course and so on. Then slowly, he comes to the horrid conclusion that there must have been a penis there to begin with and it has been taken away – hence the castration complex. But, he reasons to himself this cannot be true of all females, it has only happened to females who have had bad sexual thoughts (like himself) and had therefore needed to be punished by castration. Therefore, being a woman does not necessarily equal not having a penis. Meanwhile, girls see themselves as already castrated and never really recover from the shock of the revelation about penises.