Early Childhood Development by Freud, Essay Example

Introduction

Freud has become an outstanding scientist and analyst in the sphere of the human unconscious, sexual basis of dreams, desires and behaviors and extended psychoanalysis that has found many followers. Much of his work is dedicated to symbolism, interpretation of dreams and psychopathology. Freud’s work has become revolutionary for understanding the hidden forces of sexuality and opened up many new stages at which sexuality reveals itself, even in the early childhood. The findings of Freud may be highly helpful in understanding the true origin and mechanism of sexuality, so his research in the present sphere needs to be examined more closely to make reasonable inferences and conclusions on the subject.

Freud’s activity was also outstanding in the sphere of examining neurosis and psychosis as human mental abnormalities. He dedicated much time to studies of family and social dynamics, modeling behavior patterns that can be met at these levels of human activity and interpreting them from the point of view of psychoanalysis. He also made a great contribution to the discovery of the innovative ways of psychological trauma overcoming, which will be discussed in the present paper as well.

Early Childhood Development

Sigmund Freud believed a child’s progressive evolution had a direct correlation to what he coined psycho sexual development. He observed that children seek pleasure from different parts of their bodies called erogenous zones and related these with specific stages of their development. Freud’s model of psycho sexual development consisted of the oral stage, anal stage, phallic stage, latency stage and genital stage (Slee 227).

The oral stage he relates to a newborn child until the age two.  The erogenous zone linked to this stage is the mouth where children find pleasure in nursing. This time in a child’s life is considered to depend on nurturing and close proximity to the mother (Thurschwell 45). Relationships of the child with parents are based on the child’s wish to be loved and nurtured, so here sucking represents not only the need for nourishment but pursuit of pleasure as well.

When the child moves to try to control the anal sphincter the child has shifted from the oral stage to the anal stage, which occurs between the age of two and three, where the erogenous zone is considered to be the bowel and bladder. There are fully reasonable biological explanations for the present psychological stage of development:

“Physically at this time children are maturing in the lower trunk region, and this maturation includes the development of the sphincter muscles, which control urination and defecation” (Slee 227).

Freud considered this stage to be in conflict with the id, the ego and superego as the child has to confront the parent’s demands while toilet training (Slee 227). As a result of the joint internal and external influence on the child his erogenous zones shift from oral to anal ones.

The third stage occurs during the age of three to six where the child’s erogenous zone is the genital area also known as the phallic stage. Because children at this age are still immature, genital stimulation is pleasurable however not relatable to that of an adult. This stage is strategically important for the development of the child’s personality because he tries to overcome the incestuous feelings towards his parents (Slee 51). Freud generated a theory of Oedipus Complex from the abnormalities in the child’s formation during the phallic period and analyzed much literature on the basis of this theory, finding a great number of incest cases and explaining them from the point of view of irregularities of the phallic stage flow in children (Thurschwell 50).

The latency stage is viewed more as hidden drives or a period between stages with unresolved issues and dormant sexual feelings. Freud considers this a time of great stability for the child and can occur between the ages of three to seven and can continue through puberty (Slee 227). During this period, according to Freud’s theory, the child’s sexual energy is transformed in other kinds – “turned away either wholly or partially from sexual utilization and conducted to other aims” (Freud and Brill 66). This process acquired a name of ‘sublimation’ and has become historically recognized as a very powerful component of cultural accomplishments (Freud and Brill 66).

The final stage or genital stage starts at the age of twelve when major detachment from the parents begins and leads to mature adult sexuality. The erogenous zone is again the genitals, but unlike the phallic stage, the focus here is sexual gratification. Freud emphasizes the fact that the human body, both male and female, is designed in such a way so that to make the organs that will further on become the tools and symbols of sexual pleasure palpable and easily reachable:

“The sexual activities of this erogenous zone, which belongs to the real genitals, are the beginning of the later normal sexual life. Owing to the anatomical position, the overflowing of secretions, the washing and rubbing of the body, and to certain accidental excitements …the pleasurable feeling which these parts of the body are capable of producing makes itself noticeable to the child even during the sucking age, and thus awakens desire for its repetition” (Freud and Brill 76).

The Pleasure Principle vs. the Reality Principle

The principles of pleasure and reality are closely connected with Freudian structure of personality that, according to his theory, is hierarchically designed. The meaningful components of the structure are id, ego and superego (Slee 49). The major influence on Freud that resulted in a suchlike structure was his theory of the mind’s division into the conscious and unconscious. All three parts, following the theory of Freud, are continuously interacting to shape the individual’s personality and conduct; nonetheless, each of them possesses certain peculiarities that need to be considered.

The ‘id’ part of a personality represents all its heritage, knowledge, drives that give him or her energy for actions, and instincts he or she is wiling to satisfy during the whole course of life. Two basic instincts are sex-related (“eros”) and death-related (“thanatos”) (Slee 50). According to Freud’s supposition, the “id” part of personality acts according to the pleasure principle. Freud describes the perception of pleasure as the reduction of tension of need. Increase of tension that identifies the individual’s need of something results in the feeling of unpleasure. Thus, according to these feelings of pleasure-unpleasure a human being regulates his or her activities, making the pleasure principle dominant in his or her life.

The second element of a personality, ‘ego’ is the covering of ‘id’ and is largely created and modeled by the external environment in which the individual lives and functions, i.e. reality. Freud emphasizes the role of ‘ego’ as operating at the conscious level according to the reality principle. Its mechanism looks as follows: ‘ego’ becomes a mediator between the demands for immediate satisfaction of instincts from ‘id’ that would result in the feeling of pleasure and the objective challenges for those demands that exist in the reality (Slee 50).

This opinion surely has the right for existence because the human being has always been driven by instincts in his or her survival in the turbulent conditions of the modern or ancient environment. As it comes from Freudian analysis of the infant, his life is governed by the pleasure principle only due to the fact that ‘ego’, the conscious level of his personality, has not yet been formed: Thurschwell (45) recollects Freud’s statement about the child’s ultimate goal of life to get as much pleasure as possible, to become the center of love for parents and to satisfy his need for pleasure. Further on, with the latency period gaining power in the personality of the child, such notions as morality and propriety emerge in the conscious level and restrict the fulfillment of immediate instincts. This process models the human ‘ego’ and designs it in such a way so that the restrictions posed on the individual by him- or herself would correspond to the set of moral, ethical and behavioral norms adopted during the process of education and breeding.

Unconscious and Freedom of the Will

The main assumption of Freud in his study of personality is his psychodynamic theory – it assumes that the individual’s personality is obsessed by forces that often occur in opposition with one another. Here his theory of the unconscious is revealed in detail. The key role in a personality is found in the activity of its ‘id’ part that conceals forbidden desires and painful impressions or recollections about which the individual does not want to remember.

Dreams play an important role in the communication of the conscious and unconscious in an individual – Freud assumed this by calling dreams the closest way to the unconscious (Freud). Trying to design the mechanism for relating dreams to psychic processes, Freud stated the following:

“On closer examination, it is plainly evident that the manifest form of the dream is marked by two characteristics which are almost independent of each other. One is its representation as the present situation with the omission of perhaps; the other is the translation of the thought into visual images and speech” (Freud 329).

Another powerful role in the unconscious and its revelations in the personality’s activity is attributed to fantasies. Freud referred to fantasies as fulfillment of wishes coming from the unconscious and argues that phantasizing appears in childhood plays, further on losing its dependence on real objects (Levine 72). The connection drawn between hallucinations and fantasies is also remarkable – Freud found the intentional role of ego in their formation as a response to the individual’s “disturbing demands” (Levine 72).

The next key concept Freud examined in his study of the unconscious was neurosis. At the beginning of the present section the conflict between forces in the human personality was already mentioned – this conflict and its revelations on the conscious level were coined as ‘neurosis’ by Freud. It was considered a natural state of any individual. The study of Freud presupposes the consideration of neurosis as a structural conflict, and as a result of his theoretical and empirical research Freud distinguished obsessional neurosis, psycho-neurosis and anxiety neurosis, each of which has its distinctive peculiarities and should be treated accordingly (Freud).

Finally, one more concept which Freud operated was psychosis as a condition of the human mind. Freud explained the nature of psychosis as a breakthrough of unconscious excitations under the condition that “the preconscious is cathected and the gates of motility are open” (Freud 349-350). In such situations these excitations dominate the human speech and action or create hallucinations, causing the irregular distribution of psychical energy (Freud 350).

Following the study of mind created by Freud, it is possible to see how much his psychodynamic theory aided the analysis of mental abnormalities. Freud discovered new layers of human personality, established their delicate and at times incomprehensible interrelations, thus enriching the psychoanalytical theory from many aspects and enabling treatment design with the help of more constructive approaches.

Family and Social Dynamics

Freud conducted extensive research of family and social dynamics and had many findings on the subject. He analyzed individuals separately and in family context and examined them on the subject of their social identity acquisition and reconsideration of their social origin depending on the stages of their sexual development. One of successful illustrations of Freud’s opinion on the matter is his work Family Romance written in 1908. Following the plot, one can see that Freud discovers the rules of obtaining social privileges and sexual hegemony in a family, and the family image he considers is characterized by paternal authority and classic phallic masculinity (Heller 22).

Freud speculates on the theory of family formation and assumes that it is a mix of ego and history working together to become comprehensible through interpretation (Heller 22). The overall intention of Freud in his studies of family dynamics was to create a common algorithm for analysis of the family concept as a catalyst between private fantasy and public belief relations (Heller 22).

“By elaborating the stages of familial disentanglement, Freud laid the groundwork for theorizing that the family, like the romance that constitutes it, is poesy – which is to say that it is constructed through a collaboration of ego and history and made accessible to consciousness through the interpretative process” Heller 22)

Freud has worked out the process of the child’s liberation from the influence of his parents that is also closely connected with manifestations of sexuality. This process, in his opinion, is divided into two stages, one of which is asexual and the other is sexual. Being at the first stage, the child lacks sexual motivation but is already introduced to the world, understands his role and possibilities in broader social life, thus coming to the re-estimation of parents’ role in his world (they used to be the center of his universe, the most powerful, authoritative and knowledgeable figures for him). Logically, the child is engaged in the psychological process of lowering his opinion about parents and substituting their images by other models that occupy a higher social role (Heller 24).

Freud, however, is excessively preoccupied by his considerations of class rank that, in his opinion, also produces direct influence on the child’s socialization. In addition, he constructs a family as a “fixed inscription of a mutually productive subversion and recuperation” unifying the whole idea with the phallic metaphor (Heller 25).

The second stage of liberation from the influence of parents is sexual, and the child starts to explore the uncertainty of paternity. Fantasies take him over, and he is occupied by such ideas as the fantasy about maternal infidelity calling the child for the rediscovery of his social origin, revenge fantasies of a younger sibling that also have sexual roots, the fantasies of multiple paternity that allow him to reconsider his relatives’ sexuality without the fear of incest etc. (Heller 27).

Following the assumptions of Freud’s Family Romance one can feel that Freud was deeply concerned with social dynamics that naturally comes from the family, and private fantasies that allow children and adults reconsider their social rights, roles, opportunities and status in a broader social context. These findings, especially when applied practically to the psychoanalysis and family therapy, become genuinely valuable in the context of modern reality.

Conclusion

Freud’s childhood development theory was met with much criticism as scholars claimed he had a tendency to generalize his research and most of his research was based on adult subjects and never observed from the extensive study of children. His studies had very little female subjects as well, though Freud rarely made particular differentiation between the male and female early formation. Nonetheless, the result of his studies and the theory of personality as well as the stages of sexual development in the early childhood studied in the present paper made a considerable move in the psychoanalysis and psychiatry studies.

The levels of personality discovered and examined by Freud opened many innovative opportunities for the psychoanalytic theory and analysis, including the human interactions and dynamics of personality formation in the family and broader social context. Freud’s study of neurosis and psychosis also represented a revolutionary contribution due to the discovery of hidden forces that govern the personality at all levels of his cognition. Generalizing the present study of concepts introduced by Freud, it is possible to say that he has conducted extensive research in all psychoanalytical and psychopathological areas, so his findings may not find a unanimous recognition but still they appear highly important in many cases of psychoanalysis, which can be proven by extensive application of Freudian theories and inferences in empirical psychoanalytical work nowadays.

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 3^rd ed. Plain Label Books, 1932.

Freud, Sigmund, and Abraham Arden Brill. Three contributions to the theory of sex. 4^th ed. Plain Label Books, 1930.

Heller, Dana Alice. Family plots: the de-Oedipalization of popular culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

Levine, Michael Phillip. The analytic Freud: philosophy and psychoanalysis. Routledge, 2000.

Slee, T. Phillip. Child, adolescent, and family development. 2^nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Thurschwell, Pamela. Sigmund Freud. Routledge, 2000.