So, as you can see, Freud has a developmental theory, we started off as an id, develop an ego, and then develop a super-ego. But, for Freud this was just the beginning and he has an elaborated theory that talks about the development of the mind, from birth to adulthood. Focusing largely on sex and sexuality and psychosexual stages. There's a series of stages where you focus on different parts of the body through development. There are five main stages each associated with a different part of the body. What Freud described as fixation, is that if you get into a problem at a certain stage, if you don't adequately resolve the problems posed by that stage you could end up stuck there, fixated there, and stay there as an adult. What this will mean is, that as an adult, you will try to achieve pleasure in ways that are equivalent in a way it's achieved in those stages. So, the first stage, running from about the first year of life is the oral stage, the mouth is associated with pleasure. There the problems that are posed might have to do with breastfeeding. For instance, weaning a child incorrectly, can lead to fixation for Freud. Fixation can lead to an oral focus, an oral fixation in adulthood. In the literal sense, that could mean somebody might eat too much or chew gum or smoke. In a more metaphorical sense, they could be dependent or needy. The next stage is the anal stage from roughly the first year to about age three. There, the anus is associated with pleasure and here, the key challenges involve toilet training. If toilet training isn't handled correctly, for Freud it can lead to fixation and lead to problems. So, an adult who had struggles through this stage of development might be compulsive, clean, stingy, unwilling to part with his or her own feces, Freud would say, metaphorically. In fact that this has ended up in language, so we might describe somebody saying, "Oh, he's so anal", meaning he's so obsessively concerned and so clean and everything has to be right. Then there's the phallic stage where the focus of pleasure shifts to the genitals. There, there are all sorts of challenges. For Freud, fixation at this stage could lead to excessive masculinity in males and a need for attention or domination in females. For each boy, the key event that happens during this stage is what Freud called the Oedipus Complex and this is based on the story of the king who killed his father and married his mother. The idea for Freud is that analogous event happens for every boy in the course of his life. So, he's in the phallic stage and he seeks an external object of affection, he's going to focus on his penis and in some complicated and rather indirect sense. He wants to have a sexual object to have contact with and the obvious candidate here is his mother, who loves him and who he loves. But the problem is, there's also his father and so Freud believed that a child wants his father to die, he comes to hate his father and wants his father out of the way. Now, what's interesting for Freud, is Freud believed that a child was limited in his understanding of how thoughts work and believed that his thoughts are not private, but actually public. This is interesting in part, because there's a lot of developmental psychology research that we'll discuss later. Exploring what children think about their minds and other people's minds and exploring the extent to which children understand, for instance, that thoughts really are private but we'll get to that later. But Freud believed that his father, the child's father, would discover his plans and then in response will castrate him. So, children are terrified, boys are terrified of castration. So, the anxiety becomes unbearable and the child comes to give up on his plans to seduce his mother and kill his father and now, instead identifies with his father. Then move to the latency period, where it's sort of all submerged and sexuality is repressed, there's not much sexuality. Having made it through the whole Oedipal event, the child focuses on hobbies and schools and friendship and it's only later on in puberty that it all comes raging back. At puberty, sexual feelings reemerge and healthy adults find pleasure in sexual relationships as well as other sort of pursuits. It's the fixated adults to adults who for some reason have problems with breastfeeding or toilet training or the proper separation from their parents. They get their energy tied up in earlier stages and they spend their lives trying to struggle with problems that they should have, if they were luckier, resolved during development. I'll also just note a lovely phrase, "Love and work". It's not actually a quote from Freud. I've been unable to find out exactly its origin. But the idea that the most important things in life are love and work. Romantic and sexual and friendly pursuits combined with a rich fulfilling struggles to achieve things and interact with people and explore life, seems like a lovely phrase, and "Love and work" seems to summarize a lot.
