Discussion unit 3 history of psychology

For this discussion, Choose a specific area of Freud’s influence and discuss what it was and your perspectives on this theory. The seduction theory, Oedipus complex, personality structures- id/ego/superego, defense mechanisms, psychosexual stages of development How did the information in the library article listed in your reading compare with the information about Freud in your textbook reading? Chapter Learning Outcomes After studying this chapter, you should be able to: 1.Give a biographical sketch of Freud that includes how he came to be interested in the area we would now call clinical psychology. 2.Discuss the key concepts associated with Freud, including the id, ego, and superego; the Oedipus complex; the libido; defense mechanisms; and the psychosexual stages of development. 3.Explain the current thinking about “repressed memories.” 4.Discuss the contributions of Anna Freud. 5.Discuss the variations made to Freud’s psychology by Jung, Adler, and Horney. When psychology became a science, it became first a science of conscious experience and later a science of behavior. Representatives of psychology’s early schools—for example, Wundt, Titchener, and James—were aware of unconscious processes but focused on conscious experience. how then did a psychology that emphasized the unconscious mind emerge? The answer is that it did not come from academic or experimental psychology. Rather, it came from clinical practice. Those who developed the psychology of the unconscious were not concerned with experimental design or the philosophy of science; they were concerned with understanding the causes of mental illness. By emphasizing the importance of unconscious processes as causes of mental illness, these early pioneers of psychoanalysis set themselves apart not only from the psychologists of the time but also from the medical profession of the day: a medical profession that had been strongly influenced by mechanistic-positivistic philosophy, according to which physical events caused all illness. If they used the term mental illness at all, it was as a descriptive term because they believed that all illnesses have physical origins. The stressing of psychological causes of mental illness separated this small group of physicians from both their own profession and academic psychology. Theirs was not an easy struggle, but they persisted; in the end, they convinced the medical profession, academic psychology, and the public that unconscious processes must be taken into consideration in understanding why people act as they do. Sigmund Freud was the leader of this group of rebels, but before we examine his work, we consider some of the antecedents of his ideas. Antecedents to the Development of Psychoanalysis As we saw in the last chapter, both hypnotic phenomena and Charcot’s proposed explanation of hysteria strongly influenced the development of Freud’s theory, but there were other influences as well. In fact, a case can be made that all components of what was to become psychoanalysis existed before Freud began to formulate that doctrine. Some of those components were very much a part of the German culture in which Freud grew up, and others he learned as a medical student trained in the Helmholtzian tradition. Leibniz (1646–1716), with his monadology, showed that depending on the number of monads involved, levels of awareness could range from clear perception (apperception) to experiences of which we are unaware (petites perceptions). Goethe (1749–1832) was one of Freud’s favorite authors, and the major thrust of psychoanalysis was certainly compatible with Goethe’s description of human existence as consisting of a constant struggle between conflicting emotions and tendencies. Hegel (1770–1831) also saw the resolution of conflicting forces (via the dialectic process) as a near-ubiquitous explanation for human nature and achievement. Resonating with this zeitgeist, Freud frequently focused on conflicts to explain his own ideas. Herbart (1776–1841) suggested that there is a threshold above which an idea is conscious and below which an idea is unconscious. He also postulated a conflict model of the mind because only ideas compatible with each other could occur in consciousness. If two incompatible ideas occur in consciousness, one of them is forced below the threshold into the unconscious. Herbart used the term repression to denote the inhibiting force that keeps an incompatible idea in the unconscious. As far as the notion of the unconscious is concerned, Boring said, “Leibniz foreshadowed the entire doctrine of the unconscious, but Herbart actually began it” (1950, p. 257). Schopenhauer (1788–1860) believed that humans are governed more by irrational desires than by reason. Because the instincts determine behavior, humans continually vacillate between being in a state of need and being satisfied. Schopenhauer anticipated Freud’s concept of sublimation when he said that we could attain some relief or escape from the irrational forces within us by immersing ourselves in music, poetry, or art. One could also attempt to counteract these irrational forces, especially the sex drive, by living a life of asceticism. Schopenhauer also spoke of repressing undesirable thoughts into the unconscious and of the resistance one encounters when attempting to recognize repressed ideas. Although Freud credited Schopenhauer as being the first to discover the processes of sublimation, repression, and resistance, Freud also claimed that he had discovered the same processes independently. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)—and later, Freud— saw humans as engaged in a perpetual battle between their irrational (Dionysian) and rational (Apollonian) tendencies. According to Nietzsche, it is up to each person to create a unique blend of these tendencies within their own personality, even if doing so violates conventional morality. Indeed, concepts closely akin to the id and superego can be found in Nietzsche, suggesting that his influence upon Freud may have been greater than is commonly acknowledged (Greer, 2002; Kaufmann, 1974). Like Herbart, Fechner (1801–1887) employed the concept of threshold in his work. Fechner also likened the mind to an iceberg, with consciousness being the smallest part—the mere tip—and the unconscious mind making up the rest. Besides possibly (see Green, 2019) borrowing the iceberg analogy of the mind from Fechner, Freud also followed Fechner in attempting to apply the recently discovered principle of the conservation of energy to living organisms. Freud said, “I was always open to the ideas of G. T. Fechner and have followed that thinker upon many important points” (E. Jones, 1953, p. 374). By showing the continuity between humans and other animals, Darwin (1809–1882) strengthened Freud’s contention that humans, like nonhuman animals, are motivated by instincts rather than by reason. According to Freud, it is our powerful animal instincts, such as our urges for sexual activity and willingness to be aggressive, that are the driving forces of personality, and it is these instincts that must be at least partially inhibited for civilization to exist. Representing the positivistic approach to medicine and psychology, Helmholtz (1821–1894) tolerated no metaphysical speculation while studying living organisms, including humans. His approach, which permeated most of medicine and physiology at the time, initially had a profound effect on Freud. however, Freud eventually abandoned Helmholtz’s materialism and switched from a medical (biological) to a psychological model in his effort to explain human behavior. Also important for Freud was Helmholtz’s adaptation of the conservation of energy. Helmholtz demonstrated that an organism is an energy system that could be explained entirely on the basis of physical principles. Helmholtz demonstrated that the energy that comes out of an organism depends on the energy that goes into it; no life force is left over. Taking Helmholtz’s idea of the conservation of energy and applying it to the mind, Freud assumed that only so much psychic energy is available at any given time and that it could be distributed in various ways. how this finite amount of energy is distributed in the mind accounts for all human behavior and thought. Brentano (1838–1917) was one of Freud’s teachers at the university of Vienna when Freud was in his early twenties. Brentano taught that motivational factors are extremely important in determining the flow of thought and that there are major differences between objective reality and subjective reality. This distinction was to play a vital role in Freud’s theory. Under the influence of Brentano, Freud almost decided to give up medicine and pursue philosophy; but Ernst Brucke (1819–1892), the positivistic physiologist, influenced Freud even more than Brentano, and Freud stayed in medicine. Karl eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906) wrote a book titled Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), which went through 11 editions in his lifetime. During the time that Freud was studying medicine and later when he was developing his theory, the idea of the unconscious was quite common in Europe, and no doubt every reasonably educated person was familiar with the concept. Hartmann was strongly influenced by both Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Jewish mysticism. For him, there were three types of unconsciousness: processes that govern all natural phenomena in the universe; the physiological unconscious, which directs the bodily processes; and the psychological unconscious, which is the source of all behavior. Although Hartmann’s position was primarily mystical, it had some elements in common with Freud’s theory, especially the notion of the psychological unconscious (Capps, 1970). Clearly then, the notions of an active, dynamic mind with a powerful unconscious component were very much part of Freud’s philosophical heritage. As we will see, other aspects of Freud’s theory—such as infantile sexuality, the emphasis on the psychological causes of mental illness, psychosexual stages of development, and even dream analysis—were also not original with Freud. Freud’s genius was synthesizing—and then promoting—all these elements as a comprehensive theory of personality: “Much of what is credited to Freud was diffuse current lore, and his role was to crystallize these ideas and give them an original shape” (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 548). Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was born in Freiberg, Moravia (now Pribor, Czech Republic). His father, Jakob, was a wool merchant who had 10 children. Both his grandfather and his great-grandfather were rabbis. Freud understood himself to be a part of the Jewish community but had a negative attitude toward all organized religions. Jakob’s first wife (Sally Kanner), whom he married when he was 17 years old, bore him two children (Emanuel and Philipp); his second wife apparently bore him none; and his third wife Amalie Nathansohn bore him eight children, of whom Sigmund was the first. When Sigmund was born, his father was 40 years old and already a grandfather, and his mother was a youthful 20. Among the paradoxes that young Freud had to grapple with were the facts that he had half brothers as old as his mother and a nephew older than he was. Sigmund was the oldest child in the immediate family, however, and clearly Amalie’s favorite. Freud and his mother had a close, strong, and positive relationship, and he always felt that being the indisputable favorite child of his young mother had much to do with his success. Because his mother believed that he was special, he came to believe it too; therefore, much of what he accomplished later was due, he thought, to a type of self-fulfilling prophecy. Freud’s father lived 81 years, and his mother lived until the age of 95. When Jakob’s business failed, the Freuds moved first to Leipzig and then, when Sigmund was age 4, to Vienna. From early on, Sigmund showed great intellectual ability; to aid his studies, he was given an oil lamp and a room of his own—the only one in the large household to have those things. His mother would often serve him his meals in his room, and she ordered a piano be taken away from one of his sisters because the music bothered him. Sigmund began reading Shakespeare when he was 8 years old, and he deeply admired that author’s power of expression and understanding of human nature all his life. Freud also had an amazing gift for languages. He knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Italian, and English, as well as being an acknowledged master of German prose (indeed, a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature and winner of the Goethe Prize). He entered school a year earlier than normal and was always at the head of his class; at age 17, he graduated summa cum laude. Until his final year of high school, Freud was attracted to a career in law or politics, or even in the military; but hearing a lecture on Goethe’s essay on nature and reading Darwin’s theory of evolution aroused his interest in science. Given that, he decided to enroll in the medical school at the university of Vienna in the fall of 1873. He also made this decision partly because, in anti-Semitic Vienna, medicine and law were among the only academic professions open to Jewish people. Although Freud enrolled in medical school in 1873, it took him eight years to complete the program; because he had such wide interests, he was often diverted from his medical studies. For example, Brentano caused him to become interested in philosophy, and Freud even translated one of John Stuart Mill’s books into German. According to Freud’s own account, the person who influenced him most during his medical studies was Ernst Brucke, who had, along with Helmholtz and Du Bois-Reymond, founded the materialistic-positivistic movement in physiology (see Chapter 8). In Brucke’s laboratory, Freud studied the reproductive system of male eels and wrote a number of influential articles on anatomy and neurology. Freud obtained his medical degree in 1881 and continued to work in Brucke’s laboratory. Even though doing physiological research was Freud’s main interest, he realized that jobs in that area were scarce, low-paying, and generally not available to Jewish people. Freud’s financial concerns became acute in 1882, when he became engaged to Martha Bernays. Circumstances and advice from Brucke caused Freud to change his career plans and seek a career in medical practice. To help prepare himself, Freud went to the Vienna General Hospital to study with Theodor Meynert (1833– 1892), one of the best-known brain anatomists at the time, and Freud soon became a recognized expert at diagnosing various types of brain damage. Freud considered Meynert the most brilliant person he had ever known. Many important events happened in Freud’s life about this time. In addition to making the decision to practice medicine, Freud was making a name for himself as a neuroanatomist; he had just befriended Joseph Breuer (who, as we will see, introduced Freud to many of the phenomena that would occupy Freud’s attention for the next 50 years), and he obtained the opportunity to study with Charcot in Paris. All these matters were to have a significant influence on the development of Freud’s career. Freud’s Early Work with Cocaine In the spring of 1884, Freud became interested in the study of cocaine after learning that it had been used successfully in the military to increase the energy and endurance of soldiers. Freud almost decided not to pursue his interest when he learned from the pharmaceutical company Merck that the price of 1 gram of cocaine was $1.27 instead of 13 cents as he had believed (E. Jones, 1953). Freud persisted, however, and after taking the drug himself, he found that it relieved his feelings of depression and cured his indigestion, helped him work, and appeared to have no negative side effects. Besides taking cocaine regularly himself, Freud gave it to his sisters, friends, colleagues, and patients and sent some to his fiancée Martha Bernays “to make her strong and give her cheeks a red color” (E. Jones, 1953, p. 81). The apparent improvement caused by cocaine in Freud’s patients made him feel, for the first time, that he was a real physician. He became an enthusiastic advocate of cocaine and published six articles in the next two years describing its benefits. Carl Koller (1857–1944), one of Freud’s younger colleagues, learned from Freud that cocaine could also be used as an anesthetic. Koller was interested in ophthalmology and pursued Freud’s observation as it related to eye operations. Within a few months, Koller delivered a paper describing how eye operations previously impossible could now, using cocaine as an anesthetic, be done with ease. The paper caused a sensation and brought Koller worldwide fame almost overnight. Freud deeply regretted having just missed gaining this professional recognition himself. With the exception of the anesthetizing effects of cocaine, most all of Freud’s other beliefs about the substance eventually proved to be problematic. In 1884, he administered cocaine to his colleague and friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow (1846–1891), who was addicted to morphine. Freud’s intention was to switch Fleischl-Marxow, who was a prominent physicist and physiologist, from morphine to cocaine, believing the latter was harmless. Instead, he died with a cocaine addiction. Soon reports of cocaine addiction began coming in from throughout the world, and the drug came under heavy scrutiny from the medical community. Although cocaine still has limited medical use today, it certainly didn’t prove to be a viable career path. Freud’s Use of Nicotine. Although Freud himself avoided issues with cocaine, he was addicted to nicotine most of his adult life, smoking an average of 20 cigars a day. At the age of 38, it was discovered that he had a heart arrhythmia; his physician advised him to stop smoking, but he continued to do so. Being a physician himself, Freud was well aware of the health risks associated with smoking, and he tried several times to quit but without success. In 1923, when Freud was 67 years old, he developed cancer of the palate and jaw. A series of 33 operations eventually necessitated his wearing an awkward prosthetic device (which he called “the monster”) to replace the surgically removed sections of his jaw. He was in almost constant pain during the last 16 years of his life, yet he continued to smoke his cigars. Early Influences on the Development of Psychoanalysis Shortly before Freud obtained his medical degree, he developed a friendship with Josef Breuer (1842–1925), another one of Brucke’s students and the Brentano family’s physician. Breuer was 14 years older than Freud and had a considerable reputation as a physician and researcher. Breuer had made an important discovery concerning the reflexes involved in breathing, and he was one of the first to show how the semicircular canals influenced balance. Breuer loaned Freud money, and after Freud married in April 1886, the Breuer and Freud families socialized frequently. Case of Anna O. It is what Freud learned from Breuer concerning the treatment of a woman, anonymously referred to as Anna O., that essentially launched psychoanalysis. Because Breuer started treating Anna O. in 1880, while Freud was still a medical student, Freud (1910/1949) gave Breuer the credit for creating psychoanalysis: Granted that it is a merit to have created psychoanalysis, it is not my merit. I was a student, busy with the PASSing of my last examinations, when another physician of Vienna, Dr. [ Josef ] Breuer, made the first application of this method to the case of an hysterical girl (1880–82). (p. 1) Anna O. was a bright, attractive, 21-year-old woman who had a variety of symptoms associated with what was then termed hysteria. At one time or another, she had experienced paralysis of the arms or legs, disturbances of sight and speech, memory loss, and general mental disorientation. Breuer hypnotized the young woman and then asked her to recall the circumstances under which she first experienced a particular symptom. For example, one symptom was the perpetual squinting of her eyes. Through hypnosis, Breuer discovered that she had been required to keep a vigil by the bedside of her dying father. The woman’s deep concern for her father had brought tears to her eyes so that when the weak man asked her what time it was, she had to squint to see the hands of the clock. Breuer discovered that each time he traced a symptom to its origin, which was usually some traumatic experience, the symptom disappeared either temporarily or permanently. One by one, Anna O.’s symptoms were relieved in this way. It was as if certain emotionally laden ideas could not be expressed directly but instead manifested themselves in physical symptoms. When such pathogenic ideas were given conscious expression, their energy dissipated, and the symptoms they initiated disappeared. Because relief followed the emotional release, Breuer called the treatment the cathartic method. Aristotle originally used the term catharsis (from the Greek katharsis, which means “to purify”) to describe the emotional release and the feeling of purification that an audience experienced as they viewed a drama. Anna O. called the method the “talking cure.” Breuer’s treatment of Anna O. started in December 1880 and continued until June 1882. During that time, Breuer typically saw her several hours each day. Soon after treatment started, Anna O. began responding to Breuer as if he were her father, a process later called transference. All emotions Anna had once expressed toward her father, both positive and negative, she now expressed toward Breuer. Breuer also began developing emotional feelings toward Anna, a process later called countertransference. Because of the excessive amount of time involved and because his emotional involvement in the case began to negatively impact his marriage and his other professional obligations, Breuer decided to terminate his treatment of Anna O. The story of Anna O. usually ends with the revelation that Anna’s real name was Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936) and that she went on to become a prominent social worker in Germany. Ellenberger (1972), however, discovered that Anna O. was institutionalized after Breuer terminated her treatment. Little is known about her life between the time of her release from the sanatorium and her emergence as a social worker in the late 1880s. however, Pappenheim did eventually go on to become a leader in the European feminist movement, a playwright, an author of children’s stories, a founder of several organizations for women without family ties and from low socioeconomic standing, and an effective spokesperson against slavery. Her feminism is evident in the following statement she made in 1922: “If there is any justice in the next life women will make the laws there and men will bear the children” (E. Jones, 1953, p. 224). It is interesting to note that throughout her professional life she maintained a negative attitude toward psychoanalysis and would not allow any of the girls in her care to be psychoanalyzed (Edinger, 1968, p. 15). Breuer and Freud published Studies on Hysteria (1895/1955), in which the case of Anna O. was the first presented, in 1895, and that date is usually taken as the official founding of the school of psychoanalysis. Freud’s Visit with Charcot As we saw in the last chapter, Freud studied with the illustrious Jean-Martin Charcot from October 1885 to February 1886. Until this visit, although Freud was aware of Breuer’s work with Anna O., he remained a materialistic-positivistic physiologist; he sought to explain all disorders, including hysteria, only in terms of neurophysiology. As did most physicians at the time, Freud viewed psychological explanations of illness as nonscientific. As we have seen, Charcot assumed hysteria to be a real disease that could be triggered by dissociated ideas. Taking hysteria seriously and proposing a partially psychological explanation of the disease set Charcot apart from most of his colleagues. It is also significant for the subsequent development of psychoanalysis that Freud claimed to have overheard Charcot say about hysteria, “But in this kind of case it is always something genital—always, always, always” (Boring, 1950, p. 709). Furthermore, Charcot insisted that hysteria occurred in males as well as females. This contention caused a stir because from the time of the Romans it had been assumed that hysteria was caused by a disturbance of the uterus. Freud returned to Vienna and, on October 15, 1886, presented a paper entitled “On Male Hysteria” to the Viennese Society of Physicians, in which he presented and endorsed Charcot’s views on hysteria. The presentation was poorly received because, according to Freud, it was too radical. Sulloway (1979), however, indicates that the paper was poorly received not because it was shocking but because such views on hysteria, including the fact that hysteria was not a disorder confined to women, were already widely known within the medical community. According to Sulloway, Freud’s account of the reaction to his paper on hysteria was perpetuated by his followers to enhance the image of Freud as a bold innovator fighting against the medical establishment. In April 1886, Freud established a private practice as a neurologist in Vienna, and in September 1886, he married Martha Bernays after a four-year engagement. The Freuds eventually had six children—three boys and three girls. The youngest, Anna (1895–1982), went on to become a world-renowned child psychoanalyst and assumed leadership of the Freudian movement after her father’s death. Freud soon learned that he could not make an adequate living treating only neurological disorders, and he made the fateful decision to treat hysterics, becoming one of the few Viennese physicians to do so. At first, he tried the traditional methods of treating neurological disorders—including baths, massage, electrotherapy, and rest cures—but found them ineffective. It was at this point that everything that he had learned from Breuer about the cathartic method and from Charcot about hypnosis became relevant. In 1889, Freud visited the noted physicians Auguste Ambroise Liebeault and Hippolyte Bernheim at the Nancy school in hopes of improving his hypnotic skills. From Liebeault and Bernheim, Freud learned about posthypnotic suggestion, observing that an idea planted during hypnosis could influence a person’s behavior even when the person was unaware of it. This observation—that intact ideas of which a person was unaware could play an important role in that person’s behavior—confirmed what Freud had learned from Charcot and was to become an extremely important part of psychoanalysis. He also learned from Liebeault and Bernheim that although patients tend to forget what they had experienced during hypnosis (a phenomenon called posthypnotic amnesia), such memories could return if the patient is strongly encouraged to remember them. This observation, too, was important to the development of psychoanalysis. The Birth of Free Association Upon returning to his practice, Freud still found hypnosis to be ineffective and was seeking an alternative. Then he remembered that, while at the Nancy school, he had observed that the hypnotist would bring back the memory of what happened during hypnosis by putting his hand on the patient’s forehead and saying, “Now you can remember.” With this in mind, Freud tried having his patients lie on a couch, with their eyes closed but not hypnotized. He asked the patients to recall the first time they had experienced a particular symptom, and the patients began to recollect various experiences but usually stopped short of the goal. In other words, as they approached the recollection of a traumatic experience, they displayed resistance. At this point, Freud placed his hand on the patient’s forehead and declared that additional information was forthcoming, and in many cases it was. Freud found that this pressure technique was as effective as hypnosis, and soon he learned that he did not even need to touch his patients; simply encouraging them to speak freely about whatever came to their mind worked just as well. Thus, the method of free association was born. With free association, the important phenomena of resistance, transference, and countertransference still occur but with the major advantage that the patient is conscious. Even though it is often more difficult to arrive at the original traumatic experience when using free association, once attained it is available for the patient to deal with in a rational manner. For Freud, the goals of psychotherapy are to help the patient overcome resistance and rationally ponder early traumatic experiences. This is why he said that true psychoanalysis started only when hypnosis had been discarded (Heidbreder, 1933). Freud likened the use of free association to an archaeologist’s excavation of a buried city. It is from only a few fragmented artifacts that the structure and nature of a civilization must be ascertained. Similarly, free association provides only fragmented glimpses of the unconscious, and from those glimpses the psychoanalyst must determine the structure and nature of a person’s unconscious mind. During a therapeutic session, Freud had his patients lie on a couch while he sat out of sight behind them. Freud gave two reasons for this arrangement: (1) It enhanced free association, for example, by preventing his facial expressions and mannerisms from influencing the flow of his patients’ thoughts and (2) he could not tolerate being stared at for eight, or more, hours a day (Storr, 1989). Studies on Hysteria In Studies on Hysteria (1895/1955), Breuer and Freud put forth a number of the basic tenets of psychoanalysis. They noted that hysteria is caused by a traumatic experience that is not allowed adequate expression and, therefore, manifests itself in physical symptoms. As such, symptoms could be taken as symbolic representations of an underlying traumatic experience that is no longer consciously available to the patient. Given that the experience is traumatic, it is repressed—that is, actively kept in the unconscious—because to ponder it would provoke anxiety. Resistance, then, is a sign that the therapist is on the right track. Repression often results from conflict—the tendency both to approach and to avoid something considered wrong. The fundamental point is that repressed experiences or conflicts do not go away. Rather, they go on exerting a powerful influence on a person’s personality. The only way to deal with repressed material properly is to make it conscious and thereby process it rationally. For Freud, the most effective way of making repressed material conscious is through free association. By carefully analyzing the content of free associations, gestures, and transference, the analyst could determine the nature of the repressed experience and help the patient become aware of it and deal with it. Thus, in Studies on Hysteria, Freud clearly outlined his belief in the importance of unconscious motivation. Freud and Breuer wrote separate conclusions to the book, and Freud emphasized the role of sex in unconscious motivation. At the time, Freud contended that a person with a normal sex life could not become neurotic. Project for a Scientific Psychology In 1895, the same year that Breuer and Freud published Studies on Hysteria, Freud completed Project for a Scientific Psychology. The purpose of Project was to explain psychological phenomena in purely neurophysical terms. In other words, he intended to apply the principles of Helmholtzian physiology, in which he was trained, to the study of the mind. Freud was not satisfied with his effort, and Project was not published (in his lifetime). Frustrated in his attempt to create a neurophysical (medical) model of the mind, Freud turned to a psychological model, and his development of psychoanalysis truly began. The Seduction Theory In April of 1896, Freud delivered a paper to the Psychiatric and Neurological Society in Vienna titled “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” The paper stated that, without exception, Freud’s hysteric patients related to him a childhood incident in which they had been sexually molested. Freud concluded that such an event was the basis of all hysteria. He stated his conclusion forcefully as follows: Whatever case and whatever symptom we take as our point of departure, in the end we infallibly come to the field of sexual experience. So here for the first time we seem to have discovered an aetiological precondition for hysterical symptoms. (Masson, 1984, p. 259) Freud went on to say, “In all eighteen cases (cases of pure hysteria and of hysteria combined with obsessions, and comprising six men and twelve women) I have . . . come to learn of sexual experiences in childhood” (Masson, 1984, p. 268). Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902), the illustrious physician and head of the department of psychiatry at the university of Vienna, chaired the meeting at which Freud’s paper was presented. In a letter to his then close friend Wilhelm Fliess (1858–1928), himself a proponent of these ideas, Freud described how the paper was received: A lecture on the aetiology of hysteria at the Psychiatric Society met with an icy reception from the asses, and from Krafft-Ebing the strange comment: It sounds like a scientific fairy tale. And this after one has demonstrated to them a solution to a more than thousand-year-old problem, a “source of the Nile”! They can all go to hell. (Masson, 1984, p. 9) Masson (1984) suggests that this hostile reception by the medical community of Freud’s paper was at least partially responsible for his subsequent abandonment of seduction theory. An eventual reconsideration of his evidence, and of Fliess, likely contributed as well (but, see also Esterson, 2002). Indeed, Freud abandoned his seduction theory in late 1897, concluding that the sexual experiences had not really taken place. Rather, the patients had imagined the encounter. Freud decided that the imagined incidents were very real to his patients and, therefore, just as traumatic as if they had actually occurred. His original belief remained intact: The basis of neuroses was the repression of sexual thoughts, whether the thoughts were based on real or imagined experience. Freud’s Self-Analysis Because of the many complexities involved in the therapeutic process, Freud soon decided that to be an effective analyst, he had to be psychoanalyzed himself. Freud (1927) later insisted that to be a qualified psychoanalyst, one did not need to be a physician, but one did need to be psychoanalyzed. In addition to being psychoanalyzed, one needed at least several years of supervised practice as a psychoanalyst. Because no one was available to psychoanalyze Freud, he took the job on himself. Along with a variety of insecurities, such as an intense fear of train travel, a major motivation for Freud’s self-analysis was his reaction to the death of his father in the fall of 1896. Although his father had been very ill and his death was no surprise, Freud found that his father’s death affected him deeply. For months following the death, Freud experienced severe depression and could not work. His reaction was so acute that he decided he should regard himself as a patient. Analysis of Dreams. Clearly, Freud could not use free association on himself, so he needed another vehicle for his self-analysis. He assumed that the content of dreams could be viewed in much the same way as hysterical symptoms. That is, both dreams and hysterical symptoms could be seen as symbolic manifestations of repressed traumatic thoughts. If one properly analyzed either the symbols of dreams or hysterical symptoms, one could get at the roots of the problem. Dream analysis, then, became a second way of tapping the unconscious mind (the first way being free association) and one that was suitable for Freud’s self-analysis. Freud said, “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” (1900/1953, p. 608), and Freud’s self-analysis culminated in what he considered to be his most important work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900/1953). Like the physical symptoms of hysteria, dreams require a knowledgeable interpretation. During sleep, a person’s defenses are down but not eliminated, so a repressed experience reaches consciousness only in disguised form. Therefore, there is a major difference between what a dream appears to be about and what it really is about. What a dream appears to be about is its manifest content, and what it really is about is its latent content. Freud concluded that every dream is a wish fulfillment. That is, it is a symbolic expression of a wish that the dreamer could not express or satisfy directly without experiencing anxiety. Wishes expressed in symbolic form during sleep are disguised enough to allow the dreamer to continue sleeping because a direct expression of the wish involved would produce too much anxiety and disrupt sleep. According to Freud, dream interpretation is complex business, and only someone well versed in psychoanalytic theory can accomplish the task. One has to understand the dream work that disguises the wish actually being expressed in the dream. Dream work includes condensation, in which one element of a dream symbolizes several things in waking life, such as when a family dog symbolizes an entire family. Dream work also involves displacement, in which, instead of dreaming about an anxiety-provoking object or event, the dreamer dreams of something symbolically similar to it, such as when one dreams of a cave instead of a vagina. Freud believed that although the most important dream symbols come from a person’s own experience, there also are universal dream symbols, which have the same meaning in everyone’s dreams. For example, travel symbolizes moving toward death; falling symbolizes giving in to temptation; containers, gardens, or PASSages symbolize the vagina; and cannons, snakes, trees, and swords symbolize the penis. Freud, Dreams, and Originality. In 1914, Freud said about dreams, “I do not know of any outside influence which drew my interest to them or inspired me with any helpful expectations” (1914/1966c, p. 18). He also said that, prior to his work, for a physician to suggest there was scientific value in the interpretation of dreams would have been “positively disgraceful,” and such a physician would have been “excommunicated” from the medical community. All of this is Freudian myth. The use of dream interpretation for diagnosing physical and mental disorders goes back at least to the early Greeks. Plato described dreams in a way reminiscent of Freud’s later description. Rosemarie Sand (1992) indicates that, before Freud, some of the most prominent physicians in Europe were convinced of the scientific significance of dream interpretation: Among them were Charcot, Janet, and Krafft-Ebing. These individuals suggested that often important information about a patient could be ascertained only through the interpretation of dreams. For example, Krafft-Ebing observed that some non-heterosexuals dream of heterosexual relations and concluded that, for them, their sexuality was acquired and not congenital. In his personal library, Freud had four editions of the book by Krafft-Ebing describing how dreams could be used to explore the unconscious mind. The Oedipus Complex Freud’s self-analysis did not result in any major theoretical breakthroughs, but it served to confirm many of the theoretical notions that he entertained before the project began. What, then, was the real scientific value of Freud’s self-analysis? Self-analysis finally allowed him to confirm from his own experience just how remarkably widespread the opportunities were in every normal childhood for both traumatic and spontaneous sexual activity. At the same time, self-analysis enabled Freud to extend significantly his understanding of the various psychological correlates of such early sexual experiences. He was able to recall feelings of jealousy and hatred at the birth of a younger male sibling, one year his junior (and who died after only eight months of life). He also recognized love for the mother and jealousy of the father in the early years of his childhood and therefore concluded that such feelings must be a universal concomitant of this period of life. . . . He even recalled that “libido towards matrem was aroused” when, at the age of two, he had seen his mother in the nude. (Sulloway, 1979, p. 209) Thus, by analyzing his own dreams, Freud confirmed his belief that young males tend to desire their mothers and be jealous of their fathers. He called this tendency the Oedipus complex after the Greek play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, in which Oedipus killed his father and married his mother. Because male children have a close physical relationship with their mothers (the mother bathes, comforts, nurses, and hugs them), Freud thought that it was natural for them to have a desire for their mothers. It is very important to note, however, that Freud purposefully used sexual terms, even when a less polarizing notion like “pleasurable” could readily have served. That is, for Freud, anything pleasurable was roughly what he intended by his sexual language. Heidbreder (1933) summarized the Freudian use of the word sex: Freud used the word “sex” in a very general sense. He includes in it not only the specifically sexual interests and activities, but the whole love life—it might almost be said, the whole pleasure life—of human beings. The list of activities that he and his followers have seen as having a sexual significance is almost inexhaustible; but its range and variety may be indicated by the fact that it includes such simple practices as walking, smoking, and bathing, and such complex activities as artistic creation, religious ceremonial, social and political institutions, and even the development of civilization itself. (p. 389) It is often assumed that Freud’s extensive use of sexual language, for example, even in his psychosexual stages— oral, anal, phallic, etc.—ran purposefully contrary to the Victorian morality of the time. Perhaps, but views of sexuality very similar to those proposed by Freud had already been offered by individuals such as Krafft-Ebing, Albert Moll (1862–1939), and Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), so sexology was very much in vogue when Freud was developing his theory (Foucault, 1976). In the case of the Oedipus complex, the mother is the source of all the young child’s pleasures—being held, being fed, being comforted, and so on, but the father clearly has priority for her attentions. According to Freud, He wishes to possess her physically in such ways as he has divined from his observations and intuitions about sexual life. . . . His father now becomes a rival who stands in his way and whom he would like to get rid of. (1940/1969, p. 46) So the male child is in competition with the father who also desires the mother, but the reality of the situation (that the father is much more powerful than the child) causes the child to repress his desires for the mother and his hostility toward the father. According to Freud, however, repressed ideas do not go away; they continue to manifest themselves in dreams, symptoms, or unusual behavior. For example, it became clear to Freud that his overreaction to his father’s death had been at least partially motivated by the guilt he felt from wishing his father would die. Freud believed that the Oedipus conflict is universal among male children and that its remnants in adult life explain much normal and abnormal behavior. At this point, Freud had the vehicle he needed for explaining the seduction fantasies he had presumably observed in so many of his patients. He now saw such fantasies as representing repressed desires to possess the parent of the opposite sex and to eliminate the same-sex parent. Such desires, Freud concluded, are as natural and universal as the need to repress them, and so infantile sexuality became an important ingredient in his general theory of unconscious motivation. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life Freud’s next major work following The Interpretation of Dreams was Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901/1960b) in which he discussed parapraxes (singular, parapraxis). Parapraxes are relatively minor errors in everyday living, such as slips of the tongue (Freudian slips), forgetting things, losing things, small accidents, and mistakes in writing. According to Freud, all behavior is motivated; so for him, it was legitimate to seek the causes of all behavior, “normal” or “abnormal.” Furthermore, he believed that because the causes of behavior are usually unconscious, people seldom know why they act as they do. As Heidbreder observed: Freud is never at a loss to find evidence for his theories in the commonplace incidents we dismiss as insignificant or attribute to chance. Slips of the tongue and slips of the pen, forgotten names and forgotten appointments, lost gifts and mislaid possessions, all point to the role of wish and motive. Such happenings, Freud insists, are by no means accidental. The woman who loses her wedding ring wishes that she had never had it. The physician who forgets the name of his rival wishes that name blotted out of existence. The newspaper that prints “Clown Prince” for “Crown Prince” and corrects its error by announcing that of course it meant “Crown Prince,” really means what it says. Even untutored common sense had a shrewd suspicion that forgetting is significant; one rarely admits without embarrassment that he failed to keep an appointment because he forgot it. Events of this sort are always determined. They are even overdetermined. . . . A young business man, for example, striving to be generous to a rival, and intending to say “Yes, he is very efficient,” actually said, “Yes, he is very officious.” Obviously he was slipping into an easy confusion of words, but he was also expressing his real opinion. (1933, pp. 391–392) In the preceding quotation, Heidbreder used the term overdetermined in regard to acts of forgetting and errors in speech. The concept of overdetermination is very important in Freudian theory. In general, it means that behavioral and psychological acts often have more than one cause. A dream, for example, may partially satisfy several needs at the same time, as may a physical symptom. Humor. Freud (1905/1960a) indicated that people often use jokes to express unacceptable sexual and aggressive tendencies. Like dreams, jokes exemplify wish fulfillments; so, according to Freud, jokes offer a socially approved vehicle for being obscene, aggressive, hostile, critical, or blasphemous. Viewed in this way, jokes offer a way of venting repressed, anxiety-provoking thoughts. Freud said that we laugh most at those things that cause us the most anxiety. however, to be effective, jokes, like dreams, must disguise the true sexual or aggressive motives behind them, or they would cause too much anxiety. Freud believed that a joke often fails because the motive it expresses is too blatant, in the same way that a nightmare is a failed dream from which one awakes because the motive expressed is too powerful for dream work to disguise. Thus, in his search for the contents of the unconscious mind, Freud made use of free association, dream analysis, slips of the tongue, memory lapses, “accidents,” gestures and mannerisms, what the person finds humorous, and literally everything else the person does or says. Religion. Several of Freud’s works can be viewed as “social psychology,” and among the topics he visited most frequently was religion. Freud’s interest even reached back into antiquity, as he was fascinated by what archaeological finds might suggest about the evolution of human nature (for example, Totem and Taboo, 1913/1990). Freud showed his general pessimism about our human nature in The Future of an Illusion (1927/1961a), which was his major statement on religion. In this book, Freud contended that the basis of religion is the human feeling of helplessness and insecurity. To overcome these feelings, we create a powerful father figure who will supposedly protect us, a father figure symbolized in the concept of God. The problem with this practice, according to Freud, is that it keeps humans operating at a childlike, irrational level. The dogmatic teachings of religion inhibit a more rational, realistic approach to life. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930/1961b), he said, The whole thing [religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. (p. 22) For Freud, our only hope is to come to grips with the repressed forces that motivate us; only then can we live rational lives. Just as Freud refused to take pain-killing drugs during his 16-year bout with cancer, he believed that humans could and should confront reality without religious or any other type of intoxicating illusions. It was Freud’s hope that religious illusions would eventually be replaced by scientific principles as guides for living. Scientific principles are not always flattering or comforting, but they are rational: No belittlement of science can in any way alter the fact that it is attempting to take account of our dependence on the real external world, while religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses. (Freud, 1933/1966b, pp. 638–639) Elsewhere Freud said, “Our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere” (1927/1961a, p. 71). Freud’s Trip to the United States As Freud’s fame grew, he started to attract disciples. In 1902, Freud began meeting on Wednesday evenings with a small group of followers in the waiting room outside his office. This group, called the Wednesday Psychological Society, became the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1908. By Freud’s own account, psychoanalysis remained rather obscure until he and two of his disciples, Carl Jung and Sandor Ferenczi, were invited to Clark university in 1909 by G. Stanley Hall (Rosenzweig, 1992). Aboard ship, Freud saw a cabin steward reading Psychopathology of Everyday Life and thought for the first time that he might be famous (E. Jones, 1955). Freud was 53 years old at the time. After a few days of sightseeing, Freud began his series of five lectures. Each lecture was prepared only a half-hour before it was given, and preparation consisted of a walk and discussion with Ferenczi. Freud delivered the lectures in German without any notes. Although his lectures were met with some criticism, reactions were generally favorable. Supposedly, none other than William James said to Ernest Jones, Freud’s friend, colleague, and later, his biographer, “The future of psychology belongs to your work” (E. Jones, 1955, p. 57). Freud was deeply grateful that his visit to Clark university had given psychoanalysis international recognition, but still he returned to Germany with a negative impression of the United States. He said to Ernest Jones, “America is a mistake; a gigantic mistake it is true, but none the less a mistake” (E. Jones, 1955, p. 66). Hale (1971) summarized what Freud liked and did not like about the United States: At the time, the trip aroused Freud’s hope that there might be a future for psychoanalysis in the United States. He made lasting friendships with a few Americans. Yet he was puzzled and somewhat distrustful, amused but not pleased, by what he had seen—Worcester, the Adirondacks, Coney Island, his first movie, full of wild chasing. He admired Niagara Falls—it was grander and larger than he had expected. He was charmed by a porcupine and by the Greek antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum. Yet the American cooking irritated his stomach; the free and easy informality irked his sense of dignity. He learned of a popular mania for religious mind cures, and he detected a distressing potential lay enthusiasm for his hard-won discoveries. (p. 4) After his trip to the United States, Freud’s fame and that of psychoanalysis grew rapidly. In 1910, the International Training Commission was organized to standardize the training of psychoanalysts. however, not everything went well for Freud. In 1911, Alfred Adler, an early disciple of Freud, broke away to develop his own theory; this was closely followed by the defection of Carl Jung. Freud worried that such defections would contaminate psychoanalytic doctrine; thus, in 1912, he established a committee of loyal adherents to ensure the purity of psychoanalytic theory. This inner circle consisted of Karl Abraham, Sandor Ferenczi, Ernest Jones, Wilhelm Stekel, Otto Rank, and Hans Sachs. In time, even members of this group would disagree with Freud. A Review of Freud’s Theory of Personality The components of Freud’s theory of personality are widely known, so we will simply review them here. The Id, Ego, and Superego Early in his theorizing, Freud differentiated among the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. Consciousness consists of those things of which we are aware at any given moment. The preconscious consists of the things of which we are not aware but of which we could easily become aware. The unconscious consists of those thoughts and feelings that are being actively repressed from consciousness and are, therefore, made conscious only with great effort. Later, Freud summarized and expanded these views with his concepts of the id, ego, and superego. The Id. The id (from the German das es, meaning “the it”) is the generative force of the personality. It contains all the instincts (although better translations of the word Freud used might be drives or forces) such as hunger, thirst, and sex. The id is entirely unconscious and is governed by the pleasure principle. When a need arises, the id wants immediate gratification of that need. The collective energy associated with the instincts is called libido (the Latin word for “lust”), and libidinal energy accounts for most human behavior. The id has only two means of satisfying a need. One is reflex action, which is automatically triggered when certain discomforts arise: Sneezing and recoiling from a painful stimulus are examples of reflex actions. The second means of satisfaction is wish fulfillment, in which the id conjures up a representation of an object that will satisfy the existing need. Because the activities in the id occur independently of personal experience and because they provide the foundation of the entire personality, Freud referred to them as primary processes. The primary processes are irrational because they are directly determined by a person’s need state, they tolerate no time lapse between the onset of a need and its satisfaction, and they exist entirely on the unconscious level. Furthermore, the primary processes can, at best, furnish only temporary satisfaction of a need; therefore, another aspect of the personality is necessary if the person is to survive. The Ego. The ego (meaning “I” in Latin, and from the German das ich, meaning “the I”) is aware of the needs of both the id and the physical world, and its major job is to coordinate the two. In other words, the ego’s job is to match the wishes of the id with their counterparts in the physical environment. For this reason, the ego is said to operate in service of the id. The ego is also said to be governed by the reality principle, because the objects it provides must result in real rather than imaginary satisfaction of a need. If the id and the ego were the only two components of the personality, humans could hardly be distinguished from other animals. There is, however, a third component of the personality that vastly complicates matters. The Superego. Although the newborn child is completely dominated by the id, the child must soon learn that need gratification usually cannot be immediate. More important, they must learn that some things are “right” and some things are “wrong.” Teaching these do’s and don’ts is usually what is meant by socializing the child. As the child internalizes these do’s and don’ts, they develop a superego (from the German das überich, meaning “the over I”), which is the moral arm of the personality. The fully developed superego has two divisions: the conscience and the ego-ideal—that is, the internalized experiences for which the child has been rewarded. Once the superego develops, internalized values govern the child’s behavior and thoughts, usually those of the parents. Life and Death Instincts. Perhaps inspired by the widespread carnage and destruction of World War I, Freud (1920/1955b) eventually differentiated between life and death instincts. Initially, Freud had equated libido with sexual energy, but because of increased evidence to the contrary and because of severe criticism from even his closest colleagues, he expanded the notion of libido to cover all energizing instincts including sex, hunger, and thirst. When all needs are satisfied, the person is in a state of minimal tension. One of life’s major goals is to seek this state of needlessness that corresponds to complete satisfaction. What happens if the above discussion is carried an additional step? Quoting Schopenhauer, Freud said that “the aim of all life is death” (1920/1955b, p. 38). Thus, besides the life instincts, there is a death instinct called thanatos (named after the Greek god of death). The life instincts seek to perpetuate life, and the death instinct seeks to terminate it. So, to all the other conflicts that occur among the id, ego, and superego, Freud added a life-and-death struggle. When directed toward one’s self, the death instinct manifests itself as suicide or masochism; when directed outwardly, it manifests itself as destruction and general aggression. For Freud, then, aggression is a natural component of human nature. No wonder the ego was referred to as the executive of the personality. Not only does it need to deal with real environmental problems, but it also needs to satisfy the needs of the id in ways that do not alienate the superego. Another of its jobs is to minimize the anxiety that arises when one does act contrary to one’s internalized values. To combat such anxiety, the ego could employ the defense mechanisms to which we turn next. Anxiety and the Ego Defense Mechanisms Anxiety is a warning of impending danger, and Freud distinguished three types. Objective anxiety arises when there is an actual threat to the person’s well-being. For example, being physically attacked by another person or an animal would cause objective anxiety. Neurotic anxiety arises when the ego feels that it is going to be overwhelmed by the id—in other words, when the needs of the id become so powerful that the ego feels that it will be unable to control them and that the irrationality of the id will manifest itself in the person’s thought and behavior. Moral anxiety arises when one is about to violate an internalized value. We experience moral anxiety as shame or guilt. It is the self-punishment we experience when we act contrary to the values internalized in the superego. Any form of anxiety is uncomfortable, and the individual experiencing it seeks its reduction or elimination just as one would seek to reduce hunger, thirst, or pain. It is the ego’s job to deal with anxiety. To reduce objective anxiety, the ego must deal effectively with the physical environment. To deal with neurotic and moral anxiety, the ego must use processes that Freud called the ego defense mechanisms. Freud believed that all ego defense mechanisms have two things in common: They distort reality, and they operate on the unconscious level—that is, a person is unaware of the fact that they are using one. The Ego Defense Mechanisms. Repression is the fundamental defense mechanism because it is involved in all others. Repressed ideas enter consciousness only when they are disguised enough that they do not cause anxiety. Modified repressed ideas show up in dreams, in humor, in physical symptoms, during free association, and in parapraxes. Displacement is another important defense mechanism. In general, displacement involves replacing an object or goal that provokes anxiety with one that does not. When displacement involves substituting a nonsexual goal for a sexual one, the process is called sublimation. Freud considered sublimation to be the basis of civilization. Because we often cannot express our sexual urges directly, we are forced to express them indirectly in the form of poetry, art, religion, sports, politics, education, and everything else that characterizes civilization. Thus, Freud viewed civilization as a compromise. For civilization to exist, humans must inhibit direct satisfaction of their basic urges. Freud believed that humans are animals frustrated by the very civilization they create to protect themselves from themselves. Freud said, “Sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life” (1930/1961b, p. 49). Another way to deal with an anxiety-provoking thought is to attribute it to someone or something other than one’s self. Such a process is called projection. One sees the causes of failure, undesirable urges, and secret desires as “out there” instead of in the self because seeing them as part of one’s self would cause anxiety. Also, when one feels frustrated and anxious because one has not lived up to some internalized value, one can symbolically borrow someone else’s success through the process of identification. Thus, if one dresses, behaves, or talks the way a person considered successful does, some of that person’s success becomes one’s own. Rationalization involves giving a rational and logical, but false, reason for a failure or shortcoming rather than the true reason for it. Sometimes, when people have a desire to do something but doing it would cause anxiety, they do the opposite of what they really want to do. This is called reaction formation. Thus, the caregiver who hates their child becomes overindulgent, the person with strong antiestablishment leanings becomes a superpatriot, or the person with strong sexual urges becomes a preacher concerned with pornography, promiscuity, and the sinfulness of today’s youth (Cramer, 2000). Psychosexual Stages of Development Although Freud considered the entire body to be a source of sexual pleasure, he believed that this pleasure was most concentrated on different parts of the body at different stages of development. At any stage, the area of the body with which sexual pleasure is associated is called an erogenous zone. The erogenous zones give the stages of development their respective names. According to Freud, the experiences a child has during each stage determine, to a large extent, their adult personality. For this reason, Freud believed that the foundations for one’s adult personality are formed by the time a child is about 5 years old. The Oral Stage. The oral stage lasts through about the first year of life, and the erogenous zone is the mouth. Pleasure comes mainly through the lips and tongue and involves such activities as sucking, chewing, and swallowing. If either overgratification or undergratification (frustration) of the oral needs causes a fixation to occur at this level of development, as an adult the child will have an oral character. Fixation during the early part of the oral stage results in an oral-incorporative character. Such a person tends to be a good listener and an excessive eater, drinker, kisser, or smoker; they also tend to be dependent and gullible. A fixation during the latter part of the oral stage, when teeth begin to appear, results in an oral-sadistic character. Such a person is sarcastic, cynical, and generally aggressive. The Anal Stage. The anal stage lasts through about the second year of life, and the erogenous zone is the anus-buttocks region of the body. Fixation during this stage results in an anal character. During the first