Psychology for Dummies (32 page)
Read Psychology for Dummies Online
Authors: Adam Cash
Tags: #Psychology, #General, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Spirituality
The
oral stage
is Freud’s first stage of personality development. From the time of birth until about 18 months of age, an infant’s life centers on his mouth. I used to look on with disgust, as my teenage friend would give his little brother things to put in his mouth. Cola can: in the mouth. Car keys: in the mouth. It seemed disgusting, even dirty, but he couldn’t help himself. He put everything in his mouth. The main task of this stage is to satisfy oral desire by stimulating the erogenous zone of the mouth. Notice the infant’s reflexive sucking and the way her head and mouth turn toward her cheek as it’s gently brushed. Infants are born with a very well developed sense of taste, and their mouths are the most sophisticated tools they have to explore their world. Their mouths far outperform their hands and fingers in “grasping” the world around them.
One of the first objects “out there” in the world that provides an infant with oral satisfaction is his mother’s breast. The mother’s breast is a main source of connection and satisfaction. But could this ever be a problem? When was the last time you saw a 10-year-old breast-feeding? Eventually, all infants have to be weaned from their mother’s breast. Weaning presents the infant with the first conflict between his desire and reality. If the infant fails to wean or is weaned harshly or incompletely, he will become fixated at the oral stage. He will develop an
oral
character
in which he will be dominated by feelings of dependency and helplessness. Infants are not able to provide themselves with autonomous satisfaction; as long as they are in the oral stage, they depend entirely on (m)others.
Ultimately, as we successfully overcome the challenge of weaning and gaining control over our ability to satisfy our oral desires, we move on to the next stage of personality development. But for those of you that remain stuck there, you may find yourself preoccupied with oral things, like talking, eating, smoking, and drinking. You’ll never grow out of the need for constant oral stimulation. So that guy with the big mouth at the office Christmas party, he’s just an overgrown baby who never got over the fact that he couldn’t breast-feed forever. But I wouldn’t tell him to his face.
Take a minute to reflect on your childhood. It may be difficult to remember infancy, but most of us can conjure something up from the ages of 2 to 3 years. Did you have a pacifier? How long? Did you suck your thumb? Just how “oral” were you? Do you chew your pens now? Are you bitingly sarcastic? Freud may be tempted to say, “You are fixated!”
(M)otherFor a lot of people, the first human they ever meet is their mother. With the exception of the nurses and obstetrician in the delivery room, mom’s face is the first face you see. You’re dependent on her for everything. You’re not ready to be self-sufficient for a pretty long time. She’s the center of your world. Moms are held in pretty high regard in most (if not all) of the world. I once heard that the most common tattoo in the United States is “Mom” inside a heart. She’s the (m)other because there’s no other.
All babies have to grow up some time, and when they do, they graduate to the erogenous focus of the
anal stage,
Freud’s second stage of personality development. Think pleasure, your relentless libido striving for satisfaction. Think defecation. Say what? That’s right, Freud emphasized the control over defecating as the pleasure center from 18 months to 3 years old. The central conflict for toddlers is control! Kids in this stage want the ability to poop whenever they want and wherever they want. Like in their pants! But the reality that they have to hold it creeps in, conjuring images of long trips in the family car, “Are we there yet? I have to go!”
Who and what withholds such pleasure seeking, the desire to poop at will. Our parents and the constraints of reality do. (See “Id, Ego, and Superego” earlier in this chapter for more information about reality constraints.) In fact, some of your adult characteristics may be the consequence of how your parents handled your toilet training. Your creativity and productivity are indicators of how well you’ve successfully navigated the anal stage.
If you’re stuck in the anal stage, you’re dominated by anal satisfaction. This satisfaction can come in one of two ways:
If you’re messy, sloppy, or careless, it speaks of an expulsive rebellion against parental control.
If you’re withholding, obstinate, and obsessed with neatness, you’ve learned control in reaction to your toilet training experience.
Either way, you’re in control. Maturity and success in the anal stage result in your ability to control yourself. So let go, but make sure you do it in the right place and at the right time.
King OedipusFreud found ancient support for his ideas about a child’s sexual desire for his or her parents in the
famous (or maybe not) Greek play,
Oedipus Rex.
The basic story is about a king who has a male child who prophets predict one day will kill the king and marry the queen. To prevent this, the king takes the child to the woods and leaves him to die. The child is discovered by some peasants in the woods, however, and is raised to be a healthy adult. One day, he returns to the city to make his fortune, but on the road to the city, he encounters the king, neither of them aware of their relation to each other. There is a scuffle, and the king is killed. As the son arrives in the city, he soon makes his fortune, rising to the top of civic society. He soon attracts the eye of the mourning queen and eventually marries her, thus fulfilling the prophecy.
Just when you thought that all of your personality traits had been described, Freud comes up with his third stage:
the phallic stage.
I’ve explained your orally fixated gum-smacking officemate. The pile of clothes on the floor of your room will never look the same after learning about the anal stage. But I’ve promised you sex, and it’s time to deliver, well sort of. The 3- to 5-year-old child is focused on the erogenous stimulation of the genital area, the penis and vagina specifically. In the phallic stage, gratification begins with autoeroticism. That means masturbation to the rest of us. But our need for satisfaction soon turns toward our parents, typically the parent of the opposite sex. As our sexual satisfaction expands, we find ourselves within the realm of one of Freud’s most controversial and strange contributions to the study of personality, the Oedipus complex.
As adults, most of us cringe at the idea of marrying someone like our mothers or fathers, least of all having sex with them, but we’ve all known a little boy or girl who wants to grow up one day and marry his or her parent. There’s just one problem: Nearly every culture on the planet has a taboo against sex between parents and their children. Freud observed that children in the phallic stage of personality development shifted from self-gratification to seeking gratification from their opposite-sex parent. But the taboo is not the only thing that stands in the child’s way; the other parent seems precariously in the way, an obstacle. How would your father feel if you tried to make a move on your mom, or vice versa? But the libido knows no bounds and must have satisfaction. It feels that the opposite-sex parent is its rightful object of desire. Why?
This is where Freud gets a little complex. Basically, all children are initially attracted to their mothers because she’s often their primary caregiver. She’s their primary source of pleasure and satisfaction. She’s the end all and be all of satisfaction. From there, kids split by sex (or gender, as most people refer to it).
For the male child, this attraction to the mother continues to develop into what Freud called the
Oedipus complex.
The male child’s father blocks him from his mother. This gets to be really frustrating for the male child. It’s so bad that the frustration eventually blossoms into full-blown hatred for his father. You might say, as the prophets in
Rex
did, that his hatred for his father becomes murderous.
This complex is riddled with conflict as boys find themselves afraid of their fathers because they want their mothers all to themselves. Freud called this fear
castration anxiety.
The male child is afraid that his father will cut off his genitals. Because of this fear, the male child takes an alternative route: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Junior learns to identify with his father, adopting his masculinity and seeking his own “mother” of sorts. He can’t have sex with his mother, but he can live vicariously through his father. This supplies him with symbolic access to his mother and satisfies his libidinal desire.
Freud was thoroughly criticized for his neglect of female sexuality. So, he consulted the Greeks again, finding a similar Oedipal tale about a woman named Electra. Electra gets someone to kill her mother to avenge the death of her father.
For girls, their attraction shifts to their fathers because they come to resent their mothers for a very strange reason,
penis envy.
According to Freud, little girls stop desiring their mothers because they realize that they lack a penis like their fathers. How can they have sex with their mothers without a penis? So what about that “can’t beat ’em, join ’em” philosophy? Like little boys, little girls also can’t identify with their fathers because they lack a penis. So what are they supposed to do? They spend the rest of their lives looking for a penis. Essentially, they spend the rest of their lives looking for a man to make them complete.
Many of Freud’s ideas have been met with harsh criticism. You may be sitting there right now saying to yourself, “Come on, this is too much!” In order to benefit from Freud’s ideas and get past the preposterous nature of such a thing as wishing to have sex with your mother and murder your father, think metaphor; think analogy. Freud’s ideas are best understood when processed more symbolically. For example, try to picture Oedipus as a frustrated little kid that has to share his mother’s attention with his father. Daddy stands in the way, he must be eliminated. Remember, don’t get caught up in the theatrics!
That’s a lot to take in, I know, and it all seems a little weird. Did I say a little? Okay, it seems really weird! How does it relate to personality? If a boy or man successfully aligns himself with his father, he turns his conflict into a deep striving for success and superiority in society, conquering women, conquering the business world, and becoming the captain of the football team. This is a successful response to the male castration anxiety of the phallic stage. Unfortunately, not all men get to this point. If he finds himself fixated because he fails to join forces with Dad, he’s been successfully emasculated. He becomes a failure at life, unable to strive for achievement because of the disabling guilt generated from competing with his father for his mother’s attention.
With successful resolution of the Electra complex, a girl finds herself equipped to deal with her adult sexual and intimate relationships. She turns her penis envy into a healthy search for a good “fatherly” husband. But if she fails, she becomes fixated and may be overly seductive and flirtatious. I know, I know. . . but women’s liberation happened a long time after Freud!