Freud's Core Concepts: Defense Mechanisms and Psychosexual Stages

Freudian Ego Defense Mechanisms

Ego defense mechanisms are strategies used to manage anxiety and resolve conflicts that arise when the ego must reconcile the demands of the id, the superego, and reality.

• Repression: Isolates, removes, or keeps away sexual desires or painful and unacceptable thoughts.
• Regression: Returning to previous, often obsolete stages of development.
• Isolation: Separating the emotional affect from a traumatic memory, isolating what remains united in reality.
• Projection: Attributing to others what one desires or feels but finds unacceptable to the superego.
• Sublimation: Channels a desire that is otherwise unacceptable into a socially accepted activity.

Psychosexual Stages of Personality Development

Psychosexual development refers to the sequence of stages lived from infancy, where the libido focuses on different regions of the body (erogenous zones: mouth, anus, and genitals) over time.

The Stages of Psychosexual Development

• Oral Stage (First Year)

  Libido focuses on oral pleasure: eating, sucking, and taking things to the mouth. Fixation in this stage translates to adult behaviors such as nail-biting, chewing gum, smoking, drinking, or overeating.

• Anal Stage (2–3 Years)

  Focus shifts to controlling the sphincter, which leads to the child's independence. Pleasures are often blocked by social norms. Fixation manifests as a tendency toward orderliness, stubbornness, masochism, and sadism.

• Phallic Stage (4–6 Years)

  Libido focuses on the sexual organs.

  • Oedipus Complex: When the erotic fantasy of a boy is directed toward his mother, seeing his father as a rival and fantasizing about surpassing or killing him. The boy eventually identifies with the father and tries to be like him.
  • Electra Complex: When girls blame their mother for not having a penis (penis envy) and their love temporarily shifts to their father. The rivalry between the mother and the daughter's love for the father fades over time, similar to the resolution of the Oedipus complex.

• Latency Stage (Around 5 Years)

  Occurs at the end of the phallic stage. Personality is essentially shaped here. Fixation in this stage was theorized to lead to issues such as homosexuality and violence.

• Genital Stage (Adolescence and Adulthood)

  Sexual instincts resurface. This stage covers adolescence and adulthood and requires the integration and overcoming of all previous stages. The goal is to achieve independence, form a family, etc.

Criticisms of Psychoanalytic Theory

Psychoanalysis has been criticized for its incomplete hypotheses and lack of scientific basis.

• Behaviorist Criticism (Skinner): Skinner criticized psychoanalysts for speculating about internal processes involved in human behavior without empirical evidence.
• Feminist Criticism: Feminist movements criticized the theory for implying that women suffer from “penis envy” and that this perceived lack makes them weaker.
• Sexual Minority Criticism: Critics from sexual minority groups argued that the theory considered non-heterosexual orientations a deviation from normal sexuality, implying that those individuals were mentally ill, leading to clinical treatment and institutionalization.