Rubber Ducky, You’re the One: What Freud Would Say

Isaac &  his rubber ducky: exhibiting Erikson’s oral-incorporative substage of psychosexual development

Some people are just baby people.  They can find any baby within a 400-yard radius, run up, immediately bond with it, and start talking this secret cooing baby language.  They think every baby is precious and entertaining.  I, however, am not one of those people.


 

When my sister-in-law, Olivia, was pregnant, she and my brother were excited to share ultrasound pictures with the family.  I told them it looked like a sea monkey.  Since they didn’t want to know the baby’s sex until he was born, I decided sea monkey (later, the nickname was shortened to monkey) would be a great alternative to “it.”  After Isaac (aka Monkey) was born, everyone in the family was enamored with him.  I’ll admit that I liked him a lot more than the average baby, but I still had trouble connecting.  Why did he drool so much?  And why did he have to put everything in his mouth?  Sorry kid, those are my fingers, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t chew on them.  This obsession with putting everything in one’s mouth is not limited to my nephew; it seems that all babies do it.  But why?  In an effort to better understand my nephew, I turned to one of my textbooks on psychological anthropology.  I vaguely remembered Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson writing about psychosexual development and oral fixation.  In case your memory is a little foggy, let me explain.

Sigmund Freud devised the notion that all children developed psychologically, physically, and sexually simultaneously along a ladder of progression that he termed psychosexual developmental stages.  He thought “These stages are universal and rooted in human biology” (Bock 1999: 28).  There are five stages or zones: oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital; other scholars have since elaborated, adapted, and renamed these stages.  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  We need to first understand the basics of Freud’s stages.

The oral stage is associated with newborn babies that are nursing, while the anal stage is associated with infants and/or toddlers.  Bock explains, “for a time the anal zone becomes the center of pleasure; it also becomes a center of conflict during toilet training, when cultural constraints are imposed on the natural rhythm of the child’s bowels” (Bock 1999: 28).  The third stage is the phallic stage; sometimes this is also called the genital stage, but I will use “phallic stage” to avoid confusion with the fifth stage.  The phallic stage occurs around toddlers and lasts to age five, “long before sexual maturity for reproductive purposes is achieved” (Bock 1999: 28).   The fourth stage is the latent period, when children continue to develop but sexual pleasure is repressed.  This stage lasts from approximately age five to twelve, when boys and girls think the opposite sex is gross or has “cooties.”  Freud emphasized that these feelings have not disappeared, but are simply prevented from conscious thought via repression.  The final phase is the genital stage, when individuals recognize their sexual pleasure zones and generally coincides with the first experience of sexual intercourse (Bock 1999: 28).  According to Freud, psychosexual development explains how a person’s sexuality develops in infancy, rather than at the time of first sexual intercourse (Simon and Gagnon 1969: 9).

In the 1950s, Erik Erikson elaborated on Freud’s psychosexual stages of development in Childhood and Society (Bock 1999: 145).  He added to the concepts, while condensing them into three phases: “The oral-anal-genital sequence is retained, but these are labeled zones, and each zone is associated with characteristic modes of behavior (incorporative, retentive, intrusive, and so forth)” (Bock 1999: 145).  Erikson thought that children naturally progress from one zone to another, as they incorporate new skills and knowledge.  However, if the child’s needs are not properly met, they may become fixated on that zone, which can last into adulthood (Bock 1999: 146).  For example, someone who has an oral fixation may often chew gum, hard candy, or pens because he has not psychologically progressed past the teething and biting stage.  Someone who is anal-retentive has a need to hold on to people, property, or simply control (Bock 1999: 148).  Erikson’s zones are similar to the Freud’s stages, but Erikson incorporated key concepts to help explain his notions of fixation and retention.

Once again, these stages are associated with physical developmental periods.  The oral zone begins with newborn babies; Erikson explained that if the “oral-receptive needs” are fulfilled, or if the baby is fed and nourished, then she will enter the “‘oral-incorporative’ substage, in which biting is the characteristic activity” (Bock 1999: 146).  Essentially, the oral-incorporative substage deals with teething.  The anal zone comes into play when the toddler must be toilet trained; for Erikson, this training represented a great deal more than learning to control one's bowels: “Erikson associates the anal zone with retentive and eliminative modes – hanging on and letting go – and he includes in these stages the child’s development of muscular control that makes possible a sense of autonomy” (Bock 1999: 146).  Erikson’s description of the genital zone accounted for the last three of Freud’s stages.  The genital zone involves understanding pleasure can be associated with the genital areas, repressing these feelings for years, and rediscovering the sexual pleasure zones during adolescence. 

Erikson’s main contribution to Freud’s psychosexual development is the ways in which childhood affects a person’s sexuality (Simon and Gagnon 1969: 9).  Depending on how children’s needs are met, their relationship styles will vary as adults.  Thus, the child who had an oral fixation may become an adult who is obsessed with kissing and biting as ways to express love.  However, Simon and Gagnon argue that both Freud and Erikson place all the emphasis on childhood development and do not account for experiences during adolescence and adulthood that could affect sexuality (1969: 9).  I am more inclined to agree with Simon and Gagnon, though I think it is important to understand the influence of Freud and Erikson.  Simon and Gagnon’s work is more recent than Freud’s and Erikson’s and shows how scholarly work on psychosexual development has changed over the years.  I had difficulty finding any scholarly work on psychosexual development that is more current than the 1980s, which implies that this is no longer an issue considered to be relevant.

So what do Freud and Erikson have to do with my nephew?  They both describe how young children make sense of their world through various tactile explorations.  For me, they explain why Isaac went through a year of putting everything he could reach into his mouth.  How he understands the world when he is only a few months or years old has the potential to influence how he will experience and express love and relationships when he is older.

 

Bibliography:

Bock, Philip K.

1999    Rethinking Psychological Anthropology: Continuity and Change in the Study of Human Action. 2^nd Edition. Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc.

Simon, William, and John Gagnon
1969   Psychosexual Development. Society 6(5): 9–17.