Sigmund Freud's Psychological Development

Sigmund Freud proposed that a child’s psychological development takes places in a series of fixed psychosexual stages in the first six years of a child’s life. These stages are, The oral stage, The Anal stage, The Phallic stage, The Latency stage and The Genital stage. In Freud’s view he believed each stage focused on sexual activity and the pleasure received from an area of the body.
Freud believed that the human psyche, which is one’s personality or soul, has more than one aspect. He saw the psyche as three parts. The Id, Ego and Super-ago. These different parts of the psyche are developed throughout different stages of one’s life. So as a child is going through the psychosexual stages of development, its psyche is also being developed.

This stage begins and birth and ends at the age of one and a half years old. In the oral stage children are mainly focusing on the pleasure they receive through actions carried out by their mouths, for example by sucking and biting on things. The infant finds pleasure in these activities as it has very minimal control on everything else in their life, so it takes pleasure out of these simple sensations they get from feeding or anything to do with their mouth. Freud said that oral stimulation could lead to an oral fixation in later life. Some of these oral personalities could include smokers, nails biters, finger chewers and even thumb suckers. Most of these oral behaviours occur when a person is under a great deal of stress in any age of

In the phallic stage, the focus now moves to the genitals and self-stimulation of the child. This happens from when the child is three years old and continues until they are about five or six years old. At this point in the child’s life they also become more aware of which sex they are. So, boys start to realise that not everyone has a penis, so he comes to the realisation that he is a male, and that females do not in fact have penis’. Freud believes in this phase that the child starts to form a strong love for the parent of the same sex as that child. This results in the child forming resentment towards the parent of the opposite sex out of jealousy that that parent receiving love and attention from the other parent. This is known as the Oedipus