PDA: Freud's Psychosexual Stages

• Freud believed that personality developed through a series of childhood stages in which the pleasure seeking energies of the id (libido) become focused on certain areas of the body.

  The Five Psychosexual Stages are:

  1. Oral
  2. Anal
  3. Phallic
  4. Latency
  5. Genital
• Little Hans was a 5 year old whose father wrote to Freud for help with his phobia of horses after Hans saw one collapse in the street. In his letters to Freud, Hans' fathers said (amongst other things) that; at 3 years old, Hans had shown a preoccupation with his 'widdler,' he had asked his mother to touch his penis and his mother said his widdler would be cut off if he carried on touching it.
• Positive Evaluation:

  Fischer and Greenberg (1996) found that there is some evidence for Freud's oral and anal personality types. They also found that these types could be identified through standardised questionnaires.
• Negative Evaluation:


  Freud believe that girls never fully resolve their penis envy (instead they sublimate it with their desire for a baby) and that all women remain somewhat fixated on this stage. This is disputed by psychologists such as Horney who criticised the theory as inaccurate and demeaning to women; instead Horney proposed that men experience feelings of inferiority because they cannot give birth to children, a concept she referred to as womb envy.