Now we get into phallic stage. Phallic stage,
whoo. Now we're still talking three to six years old.
That's young to be bringing in words like phallus,
which again is equivalent to penis.
That is a very tough row to hoe for a lot of people and again this is Freud's
stuff, not my stuff,
but he's not talking about sexuality
in the adult sense of the word, he's talking about sexuality in the human sense of
the word that sex
is what we are. Without sex we don't exist
and we learned to engage one another in appropriate fashion and eventually we'll
mate
and create more of us. For him homosexuality
was a disorder simply because you failed to resolve
a stage that he thought was a standard, and and it became a disorder in the diagnostic
and statistical manual of mental disorders
until I think 1970 it was eliminated because we realized that that's just a fable, that's a myth,
held over from some old Freudian concept that
it's just society has discomfort with that, but there are other societies that existed
before that and no problem whatsoever with it,
and it's not a disorder. It may not be that people who are
homosexual are treated well and they can have all kinds of negative experiences
trying
to be themselves, but it's not a disorder but he thought it was because he thought
you just
failed to resolve the phallic stage correctly in his mind.
So the pleasure now centers on the genitals and kids are discovering
that they have genitals, and that's about the point at which adults start
making them wear clothes, right? So it's real cute when a 2-year-old is running around with no
clothes on,
it's ain't so cute when a six and seven-year-old is running around with no clothes on.
They're telling him,
"no no you better go put on some clothes." They're teaching them what society accepts and doesn't accept,
and showing your genitals is unacceptable at a certain age.
It was ok when you're a baby, not okay now.
So you're starting to learn, and they're starting to discover and from Freud's point
of view
males and females are starting to see that there's differences between males
and females.
The boy has the willie, and the girl doesn't have one and for him that's a
profound difference. We'll talk about Karen Horney who
who contradicts Freud in a very profound way, and I think a very
humorous way, and they might both be off entirely on the issue, but
but there's not only one way to see it from a Freudian point of view. The phallic stage then
we had this Oedipus complex, which you may have heard of, or
Electra complex. These come from old Greek myths and dramas. Oedipus Rex, I won't
go through the story, you can look it up on Wikipedia,
very interesting story, and it's
ultimately a male
who doesn't know that his mom is a Queen and he winds up having sex with her,
and when he finds out he gouges his eyes out and wanders the country side the rest of his life
because he's so tramatized
that he made it with his mom, and so
Freud's now looking at these young children's development of sex
roles, what it is to be male and female in society,
and the young kid is looking at the parent,
right, as a model for male and femaledom.
And of course remember back then, for him, it was all about traditional families. It
was dad and mom and kids, right, somehow you were with a dad figure and a mom figure,
and a kid figure,
or you were adopted into a family that had a mom figure, dad figure, et cetera. So now we find
out there's all kinds of non-traditional
parents and family structures that are just fine with kids who have great outcomes,
regardless and you don't need it,
but for him it was critical because that's all they had seen, and that's what was the prototype.
So you have in the Oedipus complex a
young boy
who now develops feelings, of a semi pseudo romantic nature,
for the mom. Not adult sexuality, but
falls in love so to speak with mom, and you'll see the little kids at this three to six year old age, you go
"well what are you going to do when you grow up?" And they're going to go," I'll marry mommy, I'm gonna marry daddy."
And they go ah isn't that so cute? Well that's cute because they're kids and they don't
really mean it, well... and that's what we're talking about here. Not that they
really
want their mother or that they really want their father in an adult sense,
but that they
are now over playing their desire for the affection
of the opposite sex parent, from Freud's point of view. So the boy
now is desirous of the mom's attention, but realizes
that he has a penis and that mom doesn't have a penis. Probably
figured this out in the bath, or in the shower, he's little and finding out
the difference between boys and girls,
thinks that mom got shortchanged or sister got shortchanged, right?
That's the basis of penis envy, the idea that women don't have one,
and wish that they did because it represents power and they feel
shortchanged, and that's penis envy,
which is a very debatable concept and we'll see that Karen Horney
defeats that with a different concept.
Having a penis and mom or sister not having one
realizes it could be removed and that causes castration
anxiety, which is a very far-fetched notion from my point of view, especial with children,
so he's afraid
that because he's making this overplay for the Mom's affections, the dad is going to
cut off his willie,
and then he'll be deformed and shortchanged like the girls, and so he
doesn't want that to happen. That causes anxiety. I don't want that to happen so
what he does is
he represses the desire for mom and over identifies with dad.
If he resolves the complex right, if he resolves the complex right, if he's resolves the complex then he's going to get
gender role identification because he's going to start doing what dad
does. So yeah, mom's cool, but if dad's a
construction worker and wears a tool belt... what do kids in this age like to do, boys?
I want to wear tool belt too like dad does, all right, what if dad is an office worker? Carries a briefcase,
well,
than that little kid wants, a boy, wants a briefcase, I'm like dad!
So what you see is kids playing and identifying with gender roles that society is
suggesting they should develop,
and to resolve it is to then forgo
the desire for the mother and then develop into the male
heterosexual prototype, who is then going to desire a female when they grow up,
but has gender identified as masculine.
The flip side of that is the Electra complex, where the girl
loves daddy. Daddy's girl right? Is all about the daddy, but now there's no penis to lose
so there's no castration anxiety, but mom's big and I'm little,
and there is still anxiety. There's a realization that you can't have dad's
attention all the time, and mom is the real player and that's the real
partner. So
they don't want to get the punishment experience of having the mom,
you know, throw negativity at them for their affections for dad. So they do the same
kind of thing. It's like put it away, dad's cool, but
what mom does is what I do, and back then what you're allowed to as a
female was very much restricted, very unjustly.
Of course, in a patriarchal society it was the way it was.
So you know, if mom's sowing, then that's what the kid wants to do, they want toys for sowing and
things of that nature.
If mom is a cooking mom then they want to do cooking too, they want to
play house and do things of that nature, which from Freud's point of view is what they
were supposed to be doing,
and as they grow up as an adult they will then
desire men but have a fully developed gender role as female.
Now,
if it's unresolved then you have complexes, you have fixations of a
different kind they call complexes.
Latency stage now, from six to eleven years old,
the sexuality thing, which is not again adult sexuality, but this kind of gender role
identification desire for affection,
gets sublimated. It gets pressed down and they start developing
other kinds of interests. So this is where kids develop hobbies, or they
develop
skills. If they are in an agrarian society, pre industrialization,
and they have to learn how to do their chores, and they have to learn how to
fulfill their functions and their roles, uh in today's society in affluent societies
they might engage in
activities like dance, or sports, or
painting, or, you know whatever you're into. So they're
sublimating this id libidinal
energy into emotionally and socially safe outlets. Ones that you won't get
punished for, but you'll get praised for.
So now the energy is always there, but now you're learning to direct your own
energy into what
the society wants. You don't have an erogenous zone per se,
I mean mouth, and anus, and genitals, are your erogenous zones,
and they remain so throughout life, but then the focus goes away from that and
the focus becomes,
becoming a fully developed adult, and then we move back into
puberty. Eleven...you know these stages,
they're soft stages. You can have overlap in these.
They're not hard wired. At eleven you go to this, at six you go to that,
just depends on the individual, but generally speaking somewhere in this
neighborhood,
puberty arises and you got the rediscovery of the sexuality of the erogenous zones,
being the genital.
Why it's name the genital stage? Because now you have true adult
sexual desires right? So the desire to mate,
or the desire to masturbate and reach orgasm
becomes now more appropriate to the age, but of course depending on the age, and
the society.
Back in agrarian societies it was very common for people to marry at
12, 13, 14, years old. Back in
old history, you know, if you lived to 30 to 40 years old, you're doing pretty good. So by the time
your were fifteen you might be middle-aged.
So things change, times change,
and now you know the idea of an 11-year-old sexually
interested in is kinda aversive to most people, but certainly
we know that hormones trigger desires, and those desires are then
tested in social waters and sometimes they're expressed, sometimes they're not expressed,
but what we have now is a seeking of contact with others but not always
sexual contact. Now we're looking at intimacy
but unresolved conflicts, both fixations and parental conflicts, of the Oedipus and
Elektra variety,
will impact how our adult relationships play out.
And so for Freud this sets the stage. This is your personality and it becomes
who you are
from that point forward, and for him he didn't hold out a whole lot of hope that you would
change radically from
what you were imprinted to be through the socialization process. He didn't
give credence to genetics and things like that he said it's
largely the environment you're born into in the process that we all go through
universally,
stamps upon you a personality that you can't shake
and you'll have elements of it for rest of your life.