Sigmund Freud: Three Years Of Childhood

Freud had no qualms in suggesting that adult personality traits are powerfully influenced by experiences in the first years of childhood. He suggested that a child goes through a series of psychosexual stages. The first stage is the oral stage, which occurs during infancy. Infants gain primary satisfaction from taking food and from sucking on the breast, a thumb or another object. Freud suggested that either excessive gratification or frustration of oral needs can result in fixation on oral themes of self-indulgence or dependence as an adult.
The second and third years of life, children enter the anal stage pleasure becomes focused on the process of elimination. During toilet training, the child is faced with society’s first attempt to control a biological urge. According to Freud, harsh toilet training can result in a fixation which produces compulsions, overemphasis on cleanliness, obsessive concerns with orderliness …show more content…
This is the time that Freud suggests, when children begin to deprive pleasure from their sexual organs. Freud believed that during this stage of early sexual awaking, the male child experiences erotic feelings towards the mother, desires to possess her sexually and views his father as a rival, but because of these feelings it results in a high feeling of guilt and fear that the father might find out and castrate him (castration anxiety). This situation involves love for the mother and hostility towards the father it is known as the Oedipus complex. The female counterpart of the Oedipus complex was termed the Electra complex. He believed that this time was a huge milestone in the development of gender identity, for children normally resolve these by repressing their sexual impulses and moving from a sexual attachment to the opposite sex parent to identification with the same sex parent. Boys take on the father traits and girls those of their