“It is my conviction that no child – none, at least, who is mentally normal and still less one who is intellectually gifted –
can avoid being occupied with the problems of sex in the years before puberty.”
Oral Phase (Birth–1 year)
From birth to puberty, the sexual development of children is already beginning, which was counter to the prevailing thought at the time that puberty was the beginning of sexual development. For Freud, the late 19th century and its repressions led to all kinds of psychological problems in the early 20th century, especially ignorance of infantile sexuality. “One feature of the popular view of the sexual instinct is that it is absent in childhood and only awakens in the period of life described as puberty. This, however, is not merely a simple error but one that has had grave consequences, for it is mainly to this idea that we owe our present ignorance of the fundamental conditions of sexual life.”
Freud follows this line of reasoning based on pleasure found early in the infant’s life with feeding. He says that “in conformity with the way in which an infant in arms is nourished, the erotogenic zone of the mouth dominates what may be called the sexual activity of that period of life.” For Freud, erotogenic zones are the parts of the body that can give rise to sexual excitation. This first phase of infantile sexuality, the oral phase, is broken down into two parts for Freud. The beginning of the oral phase is characterized by the child having no ambivalence related to the object, in this case, the mother’s breast. Freud called it “cannibalistic pregenital sexual organization.” An oral incorporation which is a form of early identification. Incorporation in Psychoanalysis involves attempts to take in external objects inside oneself, to master them and thereby destroy the power external objects have over oneself, and consume them.
These phases can be forms of regression in later periods, and one predictable example is self-soothing with thumb-sucking. Here the thumb is a replacement for the breast where “the sexual activity, [is] detached from the nutritive activity, [and] has substituted for the extraneous object one situated in the subject’s own body.” One can get the sense that kissing and oral sex as an adult is connected with this first phase.
Freud elaborates on the motivation to find a substitute for the breast. “It was the child’s first and most vital activity, his sucking at his mother’s breast, or at substitutes for it, that must have familiarized him with this pleasure. The child’s lips, in our view, behave like an erotogenic zone, and no doubt stimulation by the warm flow of milk is the cause of the pleasurable sensation. The satisfaction of the erotogenic zone is associated, in the first instance, with the satisfaction of the need for nourishment. To begin with, sexual activity attaches itself to functions serving the purpose of self-preservation and does not become independent of them until later. No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life. The need for repeating the sexual satisfaction now becomes detached from the need for taking nourishment – a separation which becomes inevitable when the teeth appear and food is no longer taken in only by sucking, but is also chewed up. The child does not make use of an extraneous body for his sucking, but prefers a part of his own skin because it is more convenient, because it makes him independent of the external world, and which he is not yet able to control, and because in that way he provides himself, as it were, with a second erotogenic zone, though one of an inferior kind. The inferiority of this second region is among the reasons why at a later date he seeks the corresponding part – the lips – of another person. (‘It’s a pity I can’t kiss myself’, he seems to be saying.)”
The second stage involves this regression, and other activities as the mother is becoming frustrating with “time-lapses between feedings, and eventual weaning.” It leads to ambivalence with the mother, and with the arising of first teeth, the child can bite and animate the mouth as a defense against the challenging environment. As children grow older this addictive tendency can manifest in a myriad number of addictive habits like biting pencils, nails, smoking, overeating, and making sarcastic comments.
This later phase coincides with the beginning of the next phase. Freud says, “at a second level the sadistic and anal impulses come to the fore, undoubtedly in connection with the appearance of the teeth, the strengthening of the muscular apparatus and the control of the sphincter functions.”
Anal Phase (1–3 years)
Following the oral phase, the anal phase emerges based on the anus being able to gain pleasure, another erotogenic zone. Freud originally called it the sadistic-anal phase connecting it with the oral sadism of the prior phase. Both are the early developments of Freud’s later aggressive drive. In Character and Anal Eroticism (1908), Freud goes into detail on how this pleasure can arise. “Children who are making use of the susceptibility to erotogenic stimulation of the anal zone betray themselves by holding back their stool till its accumulation brings about violent muscular contractions and, as it passes through the anus, is able to produce powerful stimulation of the mucous membrane. In so doing it must no doubt cause not only painful but also highly pleasurable sensations. One of the clearest signs of subsequent eccentricity or nervousness is to be seen when a baby obstinately refuses to empty his bowels when he is put on the pot – that is, when his nurse wants him to – and holds back that function till he himself chooses to exercise it. He is naturally not concerned with dirtying the bed, he is only anxious not to miss the subsidiary pleasure attached to defaecating. Educators are once more right when they describe children who keep the process back as ‘naughty’…The retention of the fecal mass, which is thus carried out intentionally by the child to begin with, in order to serve, as it were, as a masturbatory stimulus upon the anal zone or to be employed in his relation to the people looking after him, is also one of the roots of the constipation which is so common among neuropaths. Further, the whole significance of the anal zone is reflected in the fact that few neurotics are to be found without their special scatological practices, ceremonies, and so on, which they carefully keep secret.” This is where the term anal-retentive comes from.
Naturally these behaviours lead to chastisement from the parents during toilet training. Freud references Lou Andreas-Salomé (1916), who shows “how the history of the first prohibition which a child comes across – the prohibition against getting pleasure from anal activity and its products – has a decisive effect on his whole development. This must be the first occasion on which the infant has a glimpse of an environment hostile to his instinctual impulses, on which he carries out the first ‘repression’ of his possibilities for pleasure. From that time on, what is ‘anal’ remains the symbol of everything that is to be repudiated and excluded from life.” Freud says, “the devil is certainly nothing else than the personification of the repressed unconscious instinctual life.”
This leads to three characteristics of anal people that Freud calls, “orderliness, stinginess, and stubbornness.” Orderly behaviours are a reaction formation, or a repressive change of attitude to its opposite. Reaction formations are a defense mechanism against criticism. Stinginess involves greed, and stubbornness with rage and revengefulness related to controlling what is pleasurable. These behaviours to Freud are a sublimation, or replacement of anal-eroticism. Freud even connects anal behaviours to the old superstition of finding treasure with defecation. Money can be dirty and valuable at the same time. He uses an obscure symbol of the figure of the Dukatenscheisser, or the “shitter of ducats”, to connect it to adult interests in money.
Freud also makes a connection between bedwetting and the chastisement of weakness leading to another reaction formation of a burning ambition for success in adulthood. Even if these examples are too simplistic there is a tendency for children to avoid behaviours they like for fear of punishment and abandonment by parents. These fears and reaction formations can form life long habits of the opposite behaviour given enough repetition.
During these early phases, there is less complication related sexual differentiation, but they can be distinguished by their active or passive character. The distinction between sexes happens next, in the phallic phase.
Phallic Phase (3–4 years)
During the phallic phase the leading erogenous zone becomes the genitals. Children attempt masturbation during this time but are often suppressed in doing so by their parents. This can manifest in a castration complex in boys when parents threaten to damage the penis if masturbation doesn’t stop. Boys are also shocked at seeing their sister, mother or other girls missing a penis and begin to have infantile theories of mutilation and fear losing their penis. Freud painstakingly fleshes out childhood theories that confuse children about sexuality, including stories of the stork providing the baby, or how babies come out of the stomach. He also describes confusion that children have when they happen on their parents having sex and equating it to sadism and masochism. All are early influences that children take into their adult opinions. He also describes how some boys devalue the genitalia of women, or find them horrifying, and can overvalue the penis leading to homosexuality. (See Part 1: The Aberrations https://rumble.com/v1gtn0r-sexuality-pt-1-the-aberrations-sigmund-freud.html, for more on Freud’s views of homosexuality)
The biggest influence for Freud in this phase is the Oedipus complex, and Female Oedipus Complex. Motivated by wanting to keep the mother to himself the boy comes in conflict with the father over the attention of the mother. The hostility aimed at the father leads to a valuing of women and a devaluing of men, and eventually a surrender of desire for the mother and makes the father a model of behaviour, in the dissolution of the Oedipus Complex for boys. Some of the dissolution can come from seeing that the mother has moved her attention to a new arrival.
For girls it becomes more complex. They go through a similar shock with the difference boys have to them and feel cheated in not having a penis, that Freud famously called penis envy. This can manifest in wishes to be a boy, to desire to have a man, and then a wish to have a baby. The girl can hold her mother responsible for not giving her a penis. The solution for the girl then is to aim her sexual desire to her father to give her a baby to satisfy her. This leads to a similar competition, as in the Oedipus Complex for boys, but instead a competition with the mother, and a consequent valuing of men, leading to a surrender of the father and emulation of the mother, in the dissolution of the female Oedipus complex. The dissolution can also come from the non-response of the father to her daughter’s desires. There is a feeling for both that boy and girl that they need to find new objects of desire.
As suppression of sexuality by the parents continues, plus the direction of their child’s energy towards school, friends, and hobbies, the latency period begins.
Latency Period (4–puberty)
Freud says of the latency period, “it is during this period of total or only partial latency that are built up the mental forces which are later to impede the course of the sexual instinct and, like dams, restrict its flow – disgust, feelings of shame and the claims of aesthetic and moral ideals.” Sexuality takes a different course through parental love that involves hugs, kisses, strokes and rocking the child. The mother looks at it as pure love but the child is actually learning how to love others. The danger here is spoiling which makes the child “incapable in later life of temporarily doing without love or of being content with a smaller amount of it. One of the clearest indications that a child will later become a neurotic is to be seen in an insatiable demand for his parents’ affection.” This is a kind of precursor in psychology to emotional incest where the boundaries of the child are violated, especially when parents treat their children as a friend or a surrogate mate. Finding a proper balance of love and discipline can be tricky for parents during this period. Here Freud warns, “here are ways more direct than inheritance by which neurotic parents can hand their disorder on to their children.”
Puberty
When the child reaches puberty a major shift occurs when the complete sense of male and female emerge. Freud says, “it is not until development has reached its completion at puberty that the sexual polarity coincides with male and female. Maleness combines subject, activity and possession of the penis; femaleness takes over object and passivity. The vagina is now valued as a place of shelter for the penis; it enters into the heritage of the womb. This is also a time when he or she gives up auto-eroticism and directs sexual energy towards other people.” Yet there is a psychological obstacle. Freud says, “a child sucking at his mother’s breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.” This parental influence is very strong and can pose problem for the adolescent. Freud says that the detachment from parental authority, “is so important for the progress of civilization. At every stage in the course of development through which all human beings ought by rights to pass, a certain number are held back; so there are some who have never got over their parents’ authority and have withdrawn their affection them either very incompletely or not at all. They are mostly girls, who, to the delight of their parents, have persisted in all their childish love far beyond puberty. It is most instructive to find that it is precisely these girls who in their later marriage lack the capacity to give their husbands what is due to them; they make cold wives and remain sexually anaesthetic. We learn from this that sexual love and what appears to be non-sexual love for parents are fed from the same sources; the latter, that is to say, merely corresponds to an infantile fixation of the libido.”
Here’s a great modern example, thanks to Daniel Mackler, of how hard it is to psychologically move beyond the unhealthy influence of parents:
At this point Freud moves to his famous prediction that children look for their parents in their choice of partner. “Even a person who has been fortunate enough to avoid an incestuous fixation of his libido does not entirely escape its influence. A man, especially, looks for someone who can represent his picture of his mother, as it has dominated his mind from his earliest childhood; and accordingly, if his mother is still alive, she may well resent this new version of herself and meet her with hostility. In view of the importance of a child’s relations to his parents in determining his later choice of a sexual object, it can easily be understood that any disturbance of those relations will produce the gravest effects upon his adult sexual life. Jealousy in a lover is never without an infantile root or at least an infantile reinforcement. If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to a neurotic illness. A child’s affection for his parents is no doubt the most important infantile trace which, after being revived at puberty, points the way to his choice of an object.”
Here’s Alain de Botton list out all the early cultural influences, including family, that leads us to marry the wrong person:
Sexual theories of children
A lot of the reason why Freud felt that early experiences in childhood were important to the overall personality of the adult was how society educated children about sex. By looking at sex as bad and keeping it a mystery, children would piece together theories that would affect how they viewed their sexuality and that of the opposite sex. Seeing parents engaging in sex could make children think it was a violent sadistic operation and colour their views on relationships with men and women. Not understanding the value of female genitalia could lead to a devaluation of female sexuality. Repression could lead to conversion symptoms, that at the time could be diagnosed as neurasthenia, which is a fatigue and irritability, or hysteria, where patients have neurological problems and emotional problems, related to the repression. The only way forward for Freud is a form of sex education that people take for granted today.
Component instincts
For Freud, all these mistakes in upbringing can transform an inherently positive energy of libido into anxiety like wine into vinegar. The excessive shaming, spoiling, ignorance of sexuality in parenting and schooling, leads to the neuroticism of adolescence and adulthood. What can also be found from these deviations of libido is the component instincts, which become particularly prominent when there are perversions. In The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest (1913), Freud says, “Infantile sexuality exhibits two other characteristics which are of importance from a biological point of view. It turns out to be put together from a number of component instincts which seem to be attached to certain regions of the body (‘erotogenic zones’) [Eg. oral, anal] and some of which emerge from the beginning in pairs of opposites – instincts with an active and a passive aim.” An example would be an oral-sadistic component instinct, or an anal-sadistic component instinct. For example, they can have an aim to incorporate and consume, and therefore destroy, objects of desire in the oral-sadistic phase, or to sadistically master objects in the anal phase.
Fixation
Erotogenic zones and component instincts want to independently pursue pleasure and reduce unpleasure, and they eventually fuse together into a genital primacy where the genitals are the main source of pleasure during the phallic phase and especially during puberty. When there is regression, the subject may have an excessive amount of pleasure in these early phases and or a trauma or repression that influences the subject to return to a prior stage in their sexual development, or to choose sexual partners that are comfortable and remind them of their parents. The need to avoid pain and to pursue pleasure makes it easy to regress to early comfortable stages. In Freud’s theories this can lead to addictions, impotence, a sadistic need to master, masochistic dependency needs, and disgust towards the opposite sex. Then with the automatic push in the patient’s mind to repress their thoughts for fear of embarrassment over these problems, compounded by childhood sexual seductions, and Oedipal wishes, the work is cut out for the Psychoanalyst.
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: The 1905 Edition – Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781784783587/
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Regular edition) – Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781784783594/
My Views On The Part Played By Sexuality In The Aetiology Of The Neuroses (1906): https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781473319950/
Hysterical Phantasies And Their Relation To Bisexuality (1908): https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780099426622/
On The Sexual Theories Of Children – Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781473319912/
On The Universal Tendency To Debasement In The Sphere Of Love (1912): https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781473319929/
Contributions To A Discussion On Masturbation (1912): https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780099426653/
The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest (1913): https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780099426660/
The Infantile Genital Organization (1923): https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780099426745/
The Dissolution Of The Oedipus Complex (1924): https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780099426745/
Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes (1925): https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780099426745/
New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis (1933): https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393007435/
Theories of Personality (8th Edition) – Jess Feist, Gregory Feist, Tomi-Ann Roberts: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780073532196/
Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis – Salman Akhtar: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781855754713/
The Language of Psychoanalysis – Jean Laplanche, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis: Hardcover: https://amzn.to/2JlNSdd
Daniel Mackler’s YouTube Channel and book: https://www.youtube.com/user/dmackler58 and Breaking from your parents: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781980607878/
Silently Seduced: When Parents Make Their Children Partners by Kenneth Adams Ph.D. (Author), Patrick Carnes Ph.D.: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780757315879/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/