Question

Freud suggests that difficulty in any stage of development can cause abnormal sexual behavior. Do you agree? Why or Why not?

Answer 1

I believe Sigmund Freud did not exactly say that under development in any of the stages would Cause abnormal sexual behavior. What you might be referring to are fixations.

There are 5 stages of development & fixations for each of them

1. Oral (example explained below)
2. Anal (example explained below)
3. Phallic (possible sexual abnormally & deviance in case of fixation)
4. Latency (example explained below)
5. Gentile (example explained below)

Fixation is Nothing but persistent focus of the ID’s pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier stage of psychosexual development. So basically, when these occur are, when an issue of conflict in the psychosexual stages remains unresolved. When the individual is left on that stage and is not able to move on to the next level, we can say that he or she is fixated on that stage.

Let’s take oral fixation for an example: Individuals with water fixation can have problems with respect to smoking it could be a possibility that they might be under breast red or over breastfed. Same as in the case of drinking eating that is compulsive eating or nail-biting.

Now taking anal stage as an example:

In the case of anal fixation, there could possibly be 2 consequences. 1) A person can be anal-attentive and anal-expulsive, That is in case of anal retentive individuals they could they might have probably experienced a very harsh potty training when they were children and they could end up being obsessed with orderliness and tidiness in their adulthood or adolescence. On the other hand, you have the people who put in the category of anal-expulsive, who might have lacked or overindulged in potty training which might bring them into being very messy and disorganised. This mess and disorganization could be something with respect to having a messy room or basically keeping things in a mess but might not exactly relate to sexual development.

Then you may have fear of phallic fixations where fixation is at this point could lead to adult personalities that are overly vain, & sexuality aggressive. This particular state may result in overindulgence or avoidance of sexual activities or it may also lead to confusion of sexual identity and other kind of sexual deviances.

Latency example: In case of the Latency period, it is not usually considered as a psychosexual stage of development but it is a point of time where the phallic stage leads to a resolution which later is labeled as the latency period. Apparently, Freud said that the latency period is an unparalleled repression of sexual desires and erogenous impulses. During this period children usually repress liberal energy into asexual pursuits such a school athletics and same-sex friendship but later on, eventually the focus of liberal energy reason resumes once the children hit puberty.

The last part is the genital stage which comes after the latency period. It is when the child focus gets back to the genital stage, where his interest turns towards heterosexual relationships. It is said that the less energy and the child has left invested in unresolved psychosexual development, his capacity is likely to be greater than he will develop normal relationships with the opposite sex. in case there is a fixation in his phallic stage, his development will be troubled as he will struggle with furthermore repression and defences.