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The stages of psychosexual development constituted the basic theory of psychoanalysis, particularly the primary theory of development within psychoanalysis, for most of the early period of Freud’s thinking. It was not until the emergence of a structural theory in The Ego and the Id and the subsequent emergence of a more developed ego psychology at the hands of Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, David Rapaport, Erik Erikson, and others, that the basic developmental schema provided by the stages of psychosexual development came to be modified to any great extent. The stages of psychosexual development even today remain one of the best understood and most firmly established dimensions of psychoanalytic theory. Although the schema has been considerably modified since Freud’s early thinking about it, it nonetheless has remained a fundamental dimension in the psychoanalytic assessment of personality and the pathology of disturbed states of functioning.
In discussing the role of psychosexual development in disorders of sexuality, it is of particular importance to keep clearly in mind the distinction between developmental characteristics derived from the respective psychosexual stages, and the levels of regressive fixation that may characterize one or other form of psycho-pathological expression. Thus, many aspects of reasonably well-integrated and well-functioning individuals may originate in the respective psychosexual stages, but this does not mean nor can it be used to infer that the behavior in question is an expression of that level of psychological functioning and psychosexual integration, nor that it necessarily reflects a fixation at that particular developmental stage. It is quite a different matter to say that a given individual manifests oral characteristics in his behavior and to say that the organization of his personality reflects fixation at the oral stage of psycho-sexual development. There has often been a basic confusion in the use of such terms and a failure to distinguish between regressive fixations and developmental attainments.
With these cautions in mind we can turn at this point to a brief description of the psycho-sexual stages and to a brief specification of some aspects of their implications, both for pathological functioning and for personality development. The following description of the psychosexual stages is based on Freud’s early formulations but reflects the contributions of later psychoanalytic thought to the understanding of psychosexual development. Of particular importance in these later contributions are the deepening of the developmental implications of the pre-genital stages, the mutual interaction of psychosexual dynamics with object relations, and finally the interplay of psychosexual and psychosocial developmental processes.
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