Sigmund Freud and the Sexual Life of Children

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The finding of an object is in fact a refinding
of it.
Why do people have sex? How does sexuality
develop?
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Psychology is still so much in the dark in
questions of pleasure and unpleasure that the
most cautious assumption is the one to be
recommendedp. 49
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Stages

• oral
• anal
• phallic
• latency
• genital

PREGENITAL
early childhood
childhood
GENITAL
puberty
adolescence
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• Traces the play of influences which govern the
  evolution of infantile sexuality till its outcome
  in either
• perversion
• neurosis
• normal sex life

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The Strange Absence

• Freud found it strange that the sexual instinct
  in childhood was thought to be absent until
  puberty
• He believed that was a grave error with
  consequences in ignorance of fundamental
  conditions of sexual life
• The roots of sexuality were to be found in
  childhood and without the study of childhood
  later sexual life could not be well understood

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• No chapter of sexual development in childhood
  development texts?
• More attention given to heredity than to
  childhood
• infantile amnesia of the first 6 years
• It is during these years that (3 - 5) sexual life
  begins

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Manifestations of Sexual Life

• Thumb sucking (or sensual sucking) as a form of
  auto-erotisism
• stimulation of erotogenic zones -- a part of the
  skin or mucous membrane in which stimuli of a
  certain sort evoke a feeling of pleasure
  possessing a particular quality
• masturbation

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Sexual Aim in Childhood

• Obtaining satisfaction
• autoerotic (finds its object in the infants own
  body)

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Penis Envy

• Little girls...are overcome by envy for the
  penis--an envy culminating in the wish, which is
  so important in its consequences, to be boys
  themselves. p. 61

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models of sexuality

• simple
• vs.
• complex

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satisfaction
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Transformations of Puberty
sexual tension
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Libido
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politics
sexuality
Attachment
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Your own models