Concept
Psychosexual development
Freud's account of how the sexual drive, present from infancy, passes through a sequence of organisations, each centred on a different bodily zone and its pleasures: oral, anal and phallic, then, after a period of latency, genital at puberty. Fixation at an earlier organisation, or regression to it, was held to shape character and the form of neurosis. Freud founded it in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), and added the anal and oral organisations in 1913 and 1915 and the phallic phase in 1923.
- Narrower concepts
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 3
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1905 Freud laid out infantile sexuality and its organization by body zones in the second of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905); the oral, anal and phallic phases were added in later editions and papers.
gave rise to
- Psychosocial development Erikson's first four ages correspond to Freud's oral, anal, phallic and latency phases; Childhood and Society starts from Freud's zones and modes and adds to each the social crisis it brings.
diverged into
- Character orientation Fromm acknowledged that his receptive, exploitative and hoarding orientations correspond to Freud's oral and anal character types, but grounded character in a person's ways of relating to the world and to others rather than in the stages of libidinal organization.