In this way, he focussed on the effect that childhood could have on the development of a person as an adult. Psychosexual stages of development were utilised to describe the stages of development a person goes through from birth to adulthood. The stages of psychosexual development were as follows: oral, anal and phallic. Each stage represents the fixation of libido on a different area of the body. As a person grows physically certain areas of their body become important as sources of potential frustration (erogenous zones), pleasure or both. Each of the psychosexual stages is associated with a particular conflict that must be resolved before the individual can successfully advance to the next stage. The oral stage (0-1year old) is the first stage of personality development. In this instance, the libido is centered in a baby’s mouth. Freud suggested that oral stimulation could lead to oral fixation later in life, which could be observed as smoking, biting nails and chewing fingers as an adult. The next stage is the Anal stage (1-3 years old). In this case, the libido becomes centered on the anus and children gain pleasure from defecating. Freud proposed that conflict arose in this stage from restrictions on defecation during potty training. It is such forms of conflict that could lead to an anal-retentive personality; that is, someone who hates …show more content…
This is evident in Rogers approach via the dichotomy between Wills perceived and experienced self. He views himself as a perfect individual who does not need a psychological intervention, and who is mentally superior to his peers. In reality, he is severely troubled. He routinely gets into trouble with the law, he cannot maintain relationships with people as he avoids commitment and he refuses to push himself intellectually as a mechanism for coping with potential failure and criticism. Further, due to his unstable and abusive childhood, he lacked unconditional positive regard from the people who should have loved him. This ultimately led to his lack of trust for other people and his inability to commit to relationships and career prospects as he feared he would fail. Additionally, Maslow’s approach to humanistic psychology would indicate an unhealthy personality that had not reached self actualisation or the fully functioning person as Will did not progress from certain stages of the hierarchy of needs. While he had most of the elements for the physiological needs, he lacked major elements in the safety needs. He did not have a stable job as he kept getting himself fired, he did not have a family, his living arrangements were precarious and relied on the help of his friends and he lived in a dangerous area. He was unable to achieve self actualisation as he, in part,