by Ruth Snowden
c) Anal
d) Homosexual
3. To what cause did Freud ascribe perversions?
a) Childhood sexual experiences
b) A conscious rejection of appropriate sexual behaviour
c) A failure to control one’s sexual urges
d) Out-of-control sexual fantasies
4. Which of the following did Freud not consider to be an example of sexual deviance?
a) Oral sex
b) Anal sex
c) Kissing
d) Sadism
5. Why, according to Freud, had infantile sexuality remained unacknowledged?
a) People believed that childhood was a time of innocence
b) Discussion of sex, in general, was taboo
c) People repressed their memories of childhood sexual experiences
d) All of the above
6. What, according to Freud, could cause children to experience sexual trauma?
a) The sight of the genitalia of the opposite sex
b) The sight of adults having sex
c) The sight of their own genitals
d) The sight of their mother’s breasts
7. At what point does the child first experience sexual pleasure?
a) In the womb
b) During birth
c) During breastfeeding
d) During puberty
8. What is ‘fixation’?
a) Any obsession
b) Falling hopelessly in love with someone
c) Where an individual becomes stuck at a certain stage during his or her childhood psychosexual development
d) None of the above
9. What is sublimation?
a) The channelling of the sex drive into a non-sexual pursuit
b) Taking pleasure in awe-inspiring landscapes
c) The repression of the sex drive
d) Excessive attention to the libido
10. Which one of the following descriptions do you think best characterizes Freud’s understanding of female sexuality?
a) Tentative
b) Blinkered
c) Ground-breaking
d) Courageous
Freud gradually developed his ideas about childhood sexuality in order to try to explain how people developed into social beings. Eventually, he divided psychosexual development into several defined 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.
Freud was very much concerned with the ways in which the libido can become blocked or redirected, taking the form of neuroses in the adult personality. In order to explain the mechanisms involved in this process, he eventually developed a new tripartite model of the psyche, made up of the id, ego and superego. These parts of the psyche can readily come into conflict, creating anxiety and neurosis when they are not held in balance.
THE ORAL STAGE
This is the first stage of psychosexual development and it lasts from birth to about one year old. The infant indulges in sucking various parts of its body, especially the thumb, an activity that follows on from sucking the mother’s breast. The sucking is rhythmic, and often involves rubbing movements as well. Freud says that these later lead on to masturbation. 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 becomes the first love object. The baby feels love or hate accordingly, as the breast is offered or withdrawn. The source of love is also the food source, and it gradually becomes a source of sexual pleasure. Freud broadened the concept of sexual pleasure, allowing it also to encompass sensual pleasure.
Withdrawal of the breast is seen as withdrawal of love and fixation at this stage is called ‘oral fixation’. Freud says that this fixation sometimes occurs when babies have not been breast-fed. It manifests later on in all sorts of ways, for example:
• thumb sucking in older children
• chewing gum, pens, pencils, fingernails, etc.
• smoking, excessive eating or drinking
• feeling a constant need to be loved.
This seems to cover the vast majority of the adult population, so presumably none of us is very good at getting past this first stage!
THE ANAL STAGE
This lasts from about the age of one to three years old, and coincides with the ‘potty training’ phase, when the child learns to control the bladder and bowels. The child feels very proud when he or she produces stools and often sees them as part of him- or herself. However, the adults who care for the child may express disgust, especially if the child produces offerings at an inappropriate time or place. The child has to learn when the activity is socially acceptable and when it is not.
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 on to its stools. This is because it wants to enjoy the erotic pleasure of producing the stool in private! Producing a huge stool also apparently stimulates the mucous membrane of the anus. (A more acceptable argument today is that stool retention can happen because the baby is constipated and producing huge compacted stools hurts.)
The anal phase is where 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.
• ‘Anal retentiveness’ follows on from withholding stools. The adult stuck at this stage is compulsively neat and tidy, orderly and conformist.
The anal retentive…?
Parental disapproval at this stage can also lead to a later neurotic obsession with dirt and cleaning.
THE PHALLIC STAGE
This stage is from about three to five years. The genitals now become the erogenous zone and the child starts to masturbate. The infant genital zone is stimulated frequently by washing, rubbing dry, peeing and so on. The child soon learns to stimulate the area itself, by rubbing with the hand or by pressing the thighs together. Freud’s views on this stage reveal a misogynistic attitude – the phallus is seen as all-important, and in fact he seems to regard it as the only sexual organ. This is the stage where sexual differences are often discovered by children, giving rise to the castration complex in boys and penis envy in girls. Freud says that girls see themselves as already castrated and never really recover from the shock of the revelation about penises.
This is also the stage when the notorious ‘Oedipus complex’ emerges. (A complex is a related group of ideas that are usually repressed and can cause emotional problems and conflicts.)
THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX
Freud formed his ideas about the Oedipus complex during the period of his own self-analysis. In a letter to Fliess at this time, he describes discovering that as a small boy he had been in love with his mother and jealous of his father. The Oedipus complex is named after a character in an ancient Greek story. Oedipus was the son of King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes. It was prophesied that Oedipus would murder his father and marry his mother, and so, in fear of this, his father had him left to die on a mountain soon after his birth. However, the baby was rescued by shepherds and brought up by a foreign king and queen.
Eventually, Oedipus met his father by chance on the road to Thebes and murdered him in a fit of rage. He then went to Thebes and rid the city of a tiresome Sphinx, which had been eating anybody who was unable to answer her riddle correctly. Oedipus answered the riddl
e and was rewarded by being made king, and so ended up unknowingly marrying his mother, Queen Jocasta. When Oedipus found out what he had done, he blinded himself as a punishment.
In putting forward his theories on the Oedipus complex, Freud argued the following:
• All little boys of about four or five fall in love with their mothers.
• The boy expresses his desire in various ways, such as by announcing that he is going to marry her, or by insisting on climbing into bed with her all the time.
• He becomes curious about her naked body.
• The boy wants total possession of the mother and becomes jealous of his father; he wants to kill him to get him out of the way.
• Because the father is obviously so big and powerful, the boy is afraid that he will be punished by his father castrating him. This fear eventually makes him abandon his mother as a sexual object.
The picture Freud paints for girls is even more bizarre and he is typically much less clear about his views.
• The little girl is also involved with lusting after the mother initially, but then comes the awful revelation that she has no penis.
• The little girl believes she has lost hers and (for some obscure reason) blames her mother for this.
• The little girl cannot fear castration because she sees herself as already castrated. For her, the corresponding fear is a fear of loss of love.
• She then turns to the father as a sex object, hoping that he will impregnate her. The resulting baby would partly make up for the lost penis.
• The conflict is gradually resolved as she turns her attention away from her father towards other men.
Freud saw the Oedipal conflict as being basic to psychosexual development. Failure to resolve the incestuous conflict results in neurosis later in life.
To us today the theory can seem contrived, but this is partly because it has been overstated by Freud and he seems to make the mistake of generalizing on the basis of his own childhood experiences. However, if we look at the theory again we can see some elements of truth in it:
• Small boys do sometimes fall in love with their mothers, and may consequently get very jealous of the father.
• The same can be true with small girls and their fathers.
• The blinding of Oedipus is symbolic of the shock, self-disgust and self-punishment that may arise when dark, inner wishes are revealed. Many people do feel guilty about their own natural sexual urges.
• Men and boys sometimes do fear damage to the penis – it is rather vulnerable, after all. In the past, little boys were actually threatened with having their penis cut off if they masturbated, which would obviously lead to considerable anxiety.
• In Freud’s day, girls were seen as being very inferior and making a baby was probably one of the few important things they felt they could do.
For Freud, successful psychosexual development led to ‘normal’ sexual interest in the opposite sex.
THE LATENCY STAGE
According to Freud, the feelings from the Oedipal stage are eventually suppressed and the sexual drive goes dormant until puberty. In fact, subsequent research has shown that this is not really the case. On the contrary, sexual curiosity, sexual play and masturbation all gradually increase. However, in Freud’s time such activity would largely have been concealed from adults.
THE GENITAL STAGE
The final stage in development is the genital stage, which takes place from puberty onwards. There is now a renewal of sexual interest and a new object is found for the sex drive. This is seen as the final stage, the completion of development, which seems rather odd considering the angst and confusion most of us go through in our teens and early adulthood! The Oedipus complex is now resolved and the natural aim of the sex drive becomes sexual intercourse with an opposite-sex adult.
Freud insisted that psychosexual development was central to all social and emotional development. His theories about the way the child’s sexuality developed provided a model of the way the whole personality developed. But Freud did not say that the whole mind was concerned only with sex – otherwise there would be no conflicts. A lot of the opposition to his theories has arisen because of the way he defined what was ‘sexual’. For him, the concept had a much broader meaning than just sex itself. Nevertheless, most people now feel that his emphasis on the sexual was exaggerated.
ID, EGO AND SUPEREGO
In 1923 Freud proposed a new dynamic model of the mind. (A dynamic model in psychology is a simplified description of a system, emphasizing motives and drives.) Freud’s new model involved three main parts: the id, ego and superego. These are not physical parts of the brain but represent different aspects of the way we think. They are an attempt to explain the apparent battle that goes on between different levels of consciousness. Conflicts between them result in anxiety and stress. Anxiety acts as an alarm signal that something is wrong; the commonest cause of anxiety, according to Freud, is sexual frustration. A particular source of anxiety is attached to each developmental stage.
THE ID
From the Latin word for ‘it’, the id is the primitive, unconscious part of the mind that we are born with. It is a dark, inaccessible area, seething with instinctive urges, and its only reality is its own selfish needs. It is the source of the motive force behind the pleasure principle. As a child develops through the various oral, anal and phallic stages, it begins to realize that the world ‘out there’ is real too. This new awareness is closely linked to sexual development. Gradually, the child begins to realize that it cannot always instantly have what it wants, and begins to suppress the id urges in order to fit in with society. Adults who are selfish or impulsive may be unable or unwilling to suppress the id. The desires of the id are commonly expressed in dreams.
THE EGO
From the Latin word for ‘I’, the ego is the part of the mind which reacts to external reality and which a person thinks of as the ‘self’. The ego is where consciousness comes from, although not all of its functions are carried out consciously:
• The ego tells us what is ‘real’. It is a ‘synthesizer’ or a ‘maker of sense’.
• It is practical and rational, and is involved in decision making.
• Anxiety arises from the ego. This is seen as a mechanism for warning us that there is a weakness somewhere in the ego’s defences.
• A whole system of unconscious defence mechanisms protects the ego.
• The ego is seen as being rather weak in comparison with the id, but it is better organized and more logical, so that it usually maintains a tenuous upper hand.
Freud explains, somewhat confusingly, that the ego is part of the id, which develops in order to cope with threats from the outside world. He compares the ego and the id with a rider and his horse. The horse supplies the motor energy, but the rider decides where to go. The ego constantly has to devise little plans to satisfy the id in a controlled way. For example, a child is hungry but knows that it will have to wait until teatime until it gets a slice of cake.
THE SUPEREGO
This is the part of the mind that acts like an ‘inner parent’, giving us a conscience and responding to social rules. A very small child is amoral and has little sense of inhibition. Any controls over its behaviour are provided by the parents and carers who look after it. In normal development this state of affairs slowly changes. The superego develops as the Oedipus complex begins to be resolved. As the repression of Oedipal urges commences, the child feels a mixture of love, fear and hostility towards the parents. Gradually, a sort of inner parent evolves and the child has feelings of guilt and of being ‘watched’ and controlled. This is the superego:
The superego…
• The superego gives us our sense of right and wrong, pride and guilt.
• It often gets us to act in ways that are acceptable to society, rather than to us as individuals. For example, it might make a person feel guilty for having extramarital sex. The superego incorporates the teachings of
the past and of tradition.
• It monitors behaviour, decides what is acceptable and controls taboo urges.
• It is bossy, always demanding perfection of the ego.
The way the superego works is, in a sense, opposite to that of the id. The id wants to satisfy the needs of the individual, regardless of what society wants. Like the ego, large parts of the superego can operate in unconscious ways. Freud acknowledges that the distinctions between id, ego and superego are not easy to grasp and that the three are not always sharply separated. If an adult has achieved a reasonably mature, mentally healthy personality, the id, ego and superego will be acting in a balanced way.
ANXIETY
Conflicts between the different aspects of the personality result in anxiety and stress. Freud said that anxiety acts as an alarm signal that something is wrong. He identified three types of anxiety:
1 Realistic anxiety This arises from real events in the external world, perceived by the ego.
2 Neurotic anxiety This arises from the id, and often seems enigmatic and unfocused. It is not necessarily connected with external events in the real world.