Importance of Childhood Years

Freud considered the childhood years particularly significant, not only because
during these years the ego and superego develop from energy captured from the id but also because during this time the sexual instincts manifest
themselves in a variety of forms. The sexual instincts become focused on
particular erogenous zones of the child’s body in a set order. This produces
a series of psychosexual stages, each characterized by instinctual urges, societal
response, conflict, and resolution. During the course of this process,
lasting personality traits and defenses develop. At first, the sexual energy is
focused on the mouth. In this, the oral stage, conflicts may surround feeding.
At approximately age two, the anal stage begins. The sexual instincts focus
on the anus, and conflicts may occur around toilet training. The phallic
stage, in which the child is attracted to the opposite-sex parent, follows. According
to Freud, for boys this Oedipal conflict can be severe, as they fear
castration from their father in retribution for their attraction to their
mother. For girls, the conflict is somewhat less severe; in Freudian psychology,
this less severe conflict means that in adulthood women will have less
mature personalities than men. At approximately age six, the sexual instincts
go into abeyance, and the child enters a period of latency. In adolescence,
the sexual instincts again come to the fore, in the genital stage, and
the adolescent has the task of integrating the impulses from all the erogenous
zones into mature genital sexuality.

Psychological problems occur when the psychosexual stages have left the
instinctual urges strongly overgratified or undergratified, when the instincts
are overly strong, when the superego is overly tyrannical, or when the ego
has dealt with childhood traumas by severe repression of its experiences
into the unconscious. Undergratification or overgratification of the instincts
during childhood can result in fixations, incomplete resolutions of
childhood conflicts. For example, a person who is severely toilet trained can
develop an “anal character,” becoming either excessively neat, miserly, or
otherwise “holding things inside.” If the id urges are too strong, they may
overwhelm the ego, resulting in psychosis. An overly strong superego can
lead to excessive guilt. If the ego represses childhood trauma, relegating it
to the unconscious, that trauma will persist, outside awareness, in affecting a
person’s thoughts and behaviors.

Freud believed that no one could escape the conflicts inherent in the
mind but that one could gain greater familiarity with one’s unconscious
and learn to direct instinctual energies in socially appropriate ways. This
was the task of psychoanalysis, a form of therapy in which a client’s unconscious
conflicts are explored to allow the individual to develop better ways
of coping.