Freud's psychosexual stages: the five stages, and how the model was built

Freud's psychosexual stages describe how libido becomes organised around different body zones during childhood. Libido means a broad pleasure drive in Freud, not adult sexuality. The model has five stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital. The oral stage covers infancy, the anal stage about ages one to three, and the phallic stage with the Oedipus complex about ages three to six. Then latency lasts until puberty, and the genital stage starts at puberty.

The familiar list comes from textbooks. It does not come from a single text. Freud assembled the model piece by piece between 1905 and 1924, and he wrote himself that old and new parts did not always fit together.

• The first edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) named oral and anal zones but no sequence of stages.
• The anal stage entered in 1913, the oral stage as its own stage between 1913 and 1923, and the phallic stage in 1923.
• Freud based his claims about infantile sexuality, by his own account, mainly on analyses of adults.
• The ages are approximations. Freud gave no table with fixed limits.
• Freud rejected the term Electra complex. It comes from Carl Jung.

This article explains the five stages, shows how the model was built, and summarises what research makes of it today.

The five stages at a glance

Each stage has a body zone where pleasure centres and a theme that decides development. The ages in the table follow a freely available introductory psychology textbook. Why other sources give other limits is explained further below.

The last column is the part most pages leave out. It shows that the familiar order was complete only some twenty years after the first book.

What Freud meant by sexual

The word sexual misleads easily in this model. Freud did not mean adult sexuality. He meant any pleasure that starts from a body part. His model case was thumb-sucking, which he also called blissful sucking. He described it as rhythmic sucking contact with the mouth, with feeding excluded. The child sucks a lip, the tongue or another reachable skin spot. So the child sucks without drinking.

Freud went far. In Three Essays he wrote that any other skin or mucosa spot can serve as an erogenous zone. The kind of stimulus matters more than the body site.

The stage model is therefore a theory of which pleasure source leads at which age. It is no tool to judge or rate the behaviour of a child.

The stages in detail

Oral stage

In the oral stage the mouth is the main pleasure source. Freud called it the oral or, if we like, cannibalistic organization. Pleasure is not yet split from feeding, and its aim is the incorporation of the object. In this Freud saw the model of later identification, by which a person takes over traits of another.

Freud wrote about this stage with striking caution. He called it a fictitious stage, in full: this fictitious phase forced upon us by pathology. So he derived it from clinical pictures and did not observe it directly. The psychoanalyst Karl Abraham split the oral and the anal stage into two sub-stages each in 1924. That is why some pages list more than five stages.

Anal stage

The second stage was called sadistic-anal by Freud. Pleasure now starts from the bowel mucosa. An active drive joins it, which Freud called the instinct for mastery. He described the contrast of this stage not as male and female but as active and passive. Because opposite drives are about equally strong here, he borrowed Eugen Bleuler's term ambivalence for them.

Many pages tie the anal stage mainly to toilet training. In Freud the bowel content has a further meaning. For the child it is the first gift: by giving it the child shows compliance, by refusing it defiance.

Phallic stage and the Oedipus complex

Freud added the phallic stage only in 1923. In his account it knows only one kind of genital, the male one, hence the name. Into this stage he placed the Oedipus complex. In 1925 he described it thus: the boy keeps his mother as the first love object and feels the father as a disturbing rival.

The phallic stage does not grow on into final genital organization, Freud wrote. It sinks and is replaced by latency. With it the Oedipus complex perishes: it succumbs to repression, and latency follows. The child gives up wishes toward the parents and replaces them by identification. Freud wrote: the parental authority introjected into the ego forms there the nucleus of the superego. This is where the stage model meets Freud's structural model of id, ego and superego.

For girls Freud described another course, starting from penis envy. He opened these claims in the same 1925 text with a reservation. He called them a result that would be very important if it proved generally valid. In 1933 he added that both sexes go through the early libido stages in the same way.

Latency

After the Oedipus complex follows a pause, which Freud called latency. Sexual development does not fully rest in it. Freud spoke of a period of total or merely partial latency.

In this time mental dams against the sexual drive arise in Freud's account: disgust, shame, and moral and aesthetic ideals. The means he named were reaction formation and sublimation. Both terms count today among the reaction formation and sublimation described with the ego's defence mechanisms.

Here too Freud was cautious. Nothing certain is known about the rules and timing of this development. He called the full rerouting of infantile sexuality an ideal of education from which individuals mostly deviate at some point, often far.

Genital stage

With puberty the genital stage starts. The single partial drives now rank under the primacy of the genitals in the service of reproduction. Partner choice turns to people outside the family. Freud called it object choice and wrote that it must renounce the infantile objects.

Freud also described partner choice as two-staged. A first wave starts in the years between two and five, latency breaks it off, and a second wave sets in at puberty.

How the model was built: 1905 to 1924

Freud published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905 and revised it several times after. He never rewrote the book. In 1923 he explained that he kept the original order and added new findings through insertions and alterations of the text. Then follows a sentence that holds for the whole model: the old and the newer may often have failed to fuse into a consistent whole. Freud wrote in German. Translations of his sentences in this article are our own.

A reference dictionary of psychoanalysis sums it up thus: the first edition mentioned only oral and anal zones. Freud brought in the oral, anal and phallic stages between 1913 and 1923. He grounded the anal stage in 1913 expressly on the point that his development scheme needs a new insertion.

Freud also described his database openly. For his claims about infantile sexuality he was in 1905 essentially authorised by the results of psychoanalytic investigation of adults. Direct observation of children could not be fully used at the time. He saw later child analyses as confirmation and named the case of Little Hans (1909). Yet the boy's father ran that treatment. Freud himself stepped in by his own account a single time in a talk with the boy and worked from the father's notes. Claims on some study sites that Freud built the model from watching his own children find no support in these texts.

Why the ages differ

Study sites and dictionaries give other limits for the same stage. The oral stage ends with one year, with 18 months or with two years, depending on the source. That is mostly Freud's own doing. He gave no table with age limits, only markers:

• The first wave of partner choice starts in the years between two and five.
• The sexual life of children shows itself mostly around the third or fourth year in observable form.
• Nothing certain is known about the rules of this course.

The psychoanalytic reference dictionary places latency between the fifth or sixth year and puberty. The textbook in the table above gives six years to puberty. Both readings are conventions, not measured values.

Freud later split the stages less strictly. In 1933 he wrote that he once stressed how one stage passes before the next. Now his attention belongs to how much of each earlier stage stays preserved beside and behind later forms.

For an exam that means: give the ages as rough ranges and add that Freud himself drew no fixed lines.

Fixation and the anal character: what Freud claimed

In the model fixation means that development stays partly hung at an early stage. The theory names too much or too little satisfaction at that stage as the cause. Textbooks tie typical adult traits to it. Oral fixation stands there for smoking and excess eating, anal fixation for great order or disorder, and phallic fixation for vanity and excess ambition. These are claims of the theory, not findings.

One case Freud himself worked out is the anal character. In 1908 Freud described people who are especially orderly, parsimonious and obstinate, and traced this link to early anal eroticism. The observations came from his practice, so from people seeking help through psychoanalytic effort. Freud conceded: the inner necessity of this link is naturally not transparent to me either.

Fixations are assumptions of the theory, not results. The stage model is therefore no tool to explain your own compulsions, eating problems or an addiction. Where such problems last or limit daily life, a doctor or a licensed psychotherapist is the right address.

The Electra complex: a term Freud rejected

Many pages pair the Oedipus complex for boys with an Electra complex for girls and credit both terms to Freud. Yet Carl Jung brought the Electra complex into play, and Freud rejected it.

In 1920 Freud wrote in a footnote: I see no progress or advantage in introducing the term Electra complex and do not wish to endorse it. In 1931 he gave the reason: his claims about the Oedipus complex fit in full strictness only the male child. And we are right to reject the name Electra complex, which seeks to stress the analogy in both sexes' behaviour.

In an exam this is a typical trap: the Electra complex is no term of Freud.

What research says today

The psychologist Robert Bornstein calls the stage model in a textbook chapter on the psychodynamic perspective probably the most controversial part of psychodynamic theory. His balance is mixed. The assumption that people express strong sexual feelings from a very early age has not stood up to empirical testing. The idea of dependent, control-oriented and competitive personality styles, which also stems from the model, does seem useful.

A freely available introductory textbook judges more generally: most of Freud's ideas have found no support in modern research. Freud treated his own memories and his readings of patients' experiences and dreams as sufficient proof.

Part of the problem already stands in Freud. In his account children normally pass the early stages smoothly, and only in pathological cases do they turn apparent even to cursory observation. A stage that leaves hardly a trace in healthy children can hardly be tested on healthy children.

The early bond between child and caregiver is studied today by attachment research after John Bowlby among others. Its answer stands in the article on attachment styles: it is about closeness under threat, not about food.

Still the model is not worthless for learners. By Bornstein's account Freud's models, the stage model included, shape psychology to this day. Terms like fixation, regression, latency and Oedipus complex meet you again and again in psychodynamic texts.

The terms for the exam

The stage model brings many terms that mix easily: oral, anal, phallic and genital, latency, fixation and regression, pregenital, Oedipus complex and Electra complex. They stick better when you learn them as a group and test them against each other. One common mnemonic runs old age pensioners love grapes, for oral, anal, phallic, latent and genital in order. How group learning works is shown by the guide to learn the terms as a set.

In Psychology World, the psychology dictionary for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Vision, you can look up terms and save them in your own list. Then you drill the list as flashcards, as multiple choice from four terms, or by typing the answer. What the app is and how it is built plus how the learning loop works and what each study mode does are set out on the home page.