PSYC 2400 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Penis Envy, Genital Stage, Weaning

• School: University of Virginia
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2400
• Professor: Mc Farland Francis

Document Summary

According to freud the basic purpose for personality development was to help prepare the individual to cope with the psychic conflicts and crises of life. Individuals resolve a series of conflicts associated with a sequence of five psychosexual stages. Heavy emphasis on young childhood for this theory. The way individuals learn to resolve conflicts associated with each of the psychosexual stages in childhood determines, to some extent, the way they will cope with conflict as adults. Failing to pass one of these could mean trouble for them to satisfy instinctual desires and needs as adults. Failure to satisfactorily resolve the conflicts at any of the psychosexual stages will results in the barriers to successful personality development. Fixation an individual invests a considerable amount of psychic energy trying to resolve a particular psychosexual conflict. Freud viewed personality as a closed system, so the more energy invested into a psychosexual stage, the less available there would be for later on (other stages)