Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [125]
Faulty child rearing—undue emphasis on eating or toilet training, or the failure to inhibit taboo impulses—can block the child’s development toward genital sexuality. The child remains fixated at an early level of development; the fixation can appear in adult life as a preference for exclusively oral sex or anal sex, but more commonly takes the form of traits of character. The child overindulged at the oral stage may in adulthood be obsessed with eating, drinking, and smoking; the child deprived or insufficiently gratified in the oral stage may grow up passively dependent on others for feelings of self-esteem. Similarly, difficulties of adjustment during the anal stage may result, in adult life, in compulsive neatness, stinginess (retentiveness), and stubbornness.
The later stages of sexual development: 75 The most crucial psychological event of the child’s life takes place at the “phallic” stage of development (Freud applied that term to both sexes), in the age range of three to six. The child’s sexuality, though chiefly autoerotic, is potentially responsive to persons of either sex, but by the phallic stage the child has divined from many clues the sort of person who might appropriately provide gratification of his or her sexual urges. The ideal model—and the closest at hand—is the parent of the opposite sex.
This, Freud had said earlier, leads directly to the Oedipus complex, which he had portrayed as a critical stage. Now, going further, he envisioned its resolution as central to character development. Freud theorized that the boy’s rivalry with his father causes him to fear that the powerful father will conquer him by castrating him (rather than killing him), and he reacts to that fear not only by totally repressing his sexual feelings toward his mother and replacing them with feelings of affection but by transforming his hostility and rivalry toward his father into identification with him and his role in life.
Things take a somewhat different course with the girl, who, in Freud’s later view of female development, imagines she has already been castrated. She suffers “penis envy”; her love of her mother turns into hostility (she fantasizes that her mother allowed her to be born without a penis or to be castrated); she dreams of making up for the loss by having a child by her father. But the dream proves impossible; eventually she gives it up and rids herself of her anxiety-producing hostility toward her mother by identifying with her. Since, however, she has no penis, her fear of harm is less powerful than the boy’s. Throughout life her feeling of having been deprived of a penis negatively influences her personality, her goals in life, her moral sense, and her self-esteem. As Gay puts it, “By the early 1920s, Freud seemed to have adopted the position that the little girl is a failed boy, the grown woman a kind of castrated man.” *76
Both boys and girls, at about the age of five, having undergone repression of their sexuality, enter the “latency” stage of life, during which they are largely freed of the concerns and anxieties caused by the sexual instinct and turn their attention and energy toward schooling and growing up. But the repressed sexual impulses have been only locked away, not eliminated, and they continually try to break through. They find indirect and disguised outlet in the form of dreams and, in those children who have not adequately resolved the Oedipal complex, pathological symptoms.
Finally, when the child is around twelve, the hormonal changes of puberty awaken the sleeping sexual impulse, and the repressed feelings begin to be directed outward, in socially approved fashion, toward people of the opposite sex outside the family. In this final “genital” phase of development, the sexual urge is transformed into “object love”—acceptable fulfillment of sexual and emotional desires through