Psychosexual development
In psychoanalysis, psychosexual development is a central element of the sexual drive theory. According to Freud, personality develops through a series of childhood stages in which pleasure seeking energies from the child become focused on certain erogenous areas. An erogenous zone is characterized as an area of the body that is particularly sensitive to stimulation. The five psychosexual stages are the oral, the anal, the phallic, the latent, and the genital.[1] The erogenous zone associated with each stage serves as a source of pleasure. Being unsatisfied at any particular stage can result in fixation.[1] On the other hand, being satisfied can result in a healthy personality. Sigmund Freud proposed that if the child experienced frustration at any of the psychosexual developmental stages, they would experience anxiety that would persist into adulthood as a neurosis, a functional mental disorder.[2][3]
Criticisms[edit]
Scientific[edit]
A criticism of the scientific validity of the psychoanalytical theory of human psychosexual development is that Sigmund Freud was personally fixated upon human sexuality. According to this criticism, he favored defining human development with a normative theory of psychologic and sexual development.[22] The phallic stage proved more complex, as it drew on clinical observations that Freud interpreted as supporting the Oedipus complex.
Freud stated that his patients commonly had memories and fantasies of childhood seduction. Critics hold that these were more likely to have been constructs which Freud created and forced upon his patients.[23] According to Frederick Crews, the seduction theory that Freud abandoned in the late 1890s acted as a precedent to the wave of false allegations of childhood sexual abuse in the 1980s and 1990s.[23]