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.
Development
1905
introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
Relations
- 1905 introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
Works
- 1905
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Freud's three essays, published by Deuticke in 1905, deal with the sexual aberrations, with infantile sexuality and with the transformations of puberty. Together they argue that the sexual drive is present from infancy, that it is made up of component drives bound to erotogenic zones, and that it reaches its adult genital form only through a course of development. Later editions added an account of the pregenital organisations of the libido.
- 1950
Erikson's first book brings clinical psychoanalysis together with cultural anthropology and history to argue that a child's development cannot be understood apart from the society that raises it: each culture meets the stages of the body and of the ego with its own methods of child training, and through them shapes the kind of adult it needs. The first part sets out the method through case histories, in which a symptom is read at once as a bodily event, an ego event and a social one, and restates Freud's theory of infantile sexuality as a scheme of zones and modes: each body zone carries a characteristic mode of approach (taking in, holding on, letting go, intruding, including) that becomes a modality of social life. The second part draws on Erikson's field work among the Sioux of South Dakota and the Yurok of northern California. It shows how the child training of a buffalo-hunting and of a salmon-fishing people fits their economies and their images of the world, and how the Sioux, cut off from their historical way of life, were left without an identity they could live by. The third part turns to the growth of the ego: the early ego failure of a schizophrenic child, children's play as a way of mastering experience, and the chapter "Eight Ages of Man", which extends the libidinal stages into a sequence of psychosocial crises across the whole life cycle, from basic trust versus mistrust in infancy to ego integrity versus despair in old age. The last part, "Youth and the Evolution of Identity", carries the notion of identity into history: the polarities of American identity, Hitler's imagery of his own childhood read as an appeal to the adolescent rebellion of German youth, and the Soviet film of Maxim Gorky's youth read as a document of an emerging Russian revolutionary identity. Revised and enlarged in 1963, the book brought the psychosocial stages and the identity crisis to a wide readership.
See also
People
References
- Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality1905Evidence for a relation
- Childhood and Society1950Evidence for a relation
- Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics1947Evidence for a relation