Personality development

According to Freud, the infant is a demanding being, with energy it cannot control because of its essential helplessness. A baby has to learn that its needs or desires cannot always be satisfied immediately – a painful process. In Freud’s view, infants have needs not just for food and drink, but for erotic satisfaction. Freud did not mean that infants have sexual desires n the same way as older children or adults do. The ‘erotic’ refers to a general need for close and pleasurable bodily contact with others. (The idea is not so distant from what emerges from Harlow’s experiments and the literature on child attachments. Infants do indeed have a need for close contact with others, including cuddling and caressing).

As Freud describes it, human psychological development is a process involving major tensions. The infant learns progressively to control his or her drives, but these remain as powerful motives in the unconscious. Freud distinguishes several typical stages in the development of the abilities of the infant and young child. He gives particular attention to the phase – at around age four to five – at which most children are able to relinquish the constant company of their parents and enter a wider social world. Freud calls this phase the Oedipal stage. The early attachments which infants and young children form to their parents have a defined erotic element, in the sense noted above. If such attachments were allowed to continue and develop further, as a child matured physically she or he would become sexually involved with the parent of the opposite sex. This does not happen because children learn to repress erotic desires towards their parents.

Little boys learn that they cannot continue to be ‘tied to their mother’s apron strings’. According to Freud, the young boy experiences intense antagonism towards his father, because the father has sexual possession of the mother. This is the basis if the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex is overcome when the child represses both his erotic attachments to his mother and his antagonism towards his father (most of this happens on the unconscious level). This marks a major stage in the development of an autonomous self, because the child has detached himself from his early dependence on his parents, particularly his mother. Freud’s portrayal of female development is much less well worked out. He believes that something of a reverse process occurs to that found in boys. The little girl represses her erotic desires for the father and overcomes her unconscious rejection of her mother by striving to become like her – to become ‘feminine’. In Freud’s view, how children cope with the Oedipus complex strongly influences later relationships, especially sexual relationships, entered into by the individual.

Criticisms

Freud’s theories have been widely criticised, and have often met with very hostile responses. Some have rejected the idea that infants have erotic wishes, as well as the thesis that what happens in infancy and early childhood establishes unconscious modes of coping with anxiety that endure throughout life. Feminist critics have seen Freud’s theory as directed too much towards male experience, giving too little attention to female psychology. Yet Freud’s ideas continue to exert a powerful influence. Even if we do not accept them in their entirety, some of them are probably valid. There almost certainly are unconscious aspects to human behaviour, resting upon modes of coping with anxiety established first of all in infancy.