Overview

Freud's theory of psychosexual development proposes that, following on from the initial polymorphous perversity of infantile sexuality, the sexual drives pass through the distinct developmental phases of the oral, the anal and the phallic. Though these phases then give way to a latency stage of reduced sexual interest and activity (from around the age of approximately five up until puberty), they leave, to a greater or lesser extent, a perverse and bisexual residue which persists during the formation of adult genital sexuality. Freud argued that neurosis or perversion could be explained in terms of fixation or regression to these phases whereas adult character and cultural creativity could achieve a sublimation of their perverse residue. After Freud's later development of the theory of the Oedipus Complex this normative developmental trajectory becomes formulated in terms of the child's renunciation of incestuous desires under the phantasised threat of (or phantasised fact of, in the case of the girl) castration. The dissolution of the Oedipus Complex is then achieved when the child's rivalrous identification with the parental figure is transformed into the pacifying identifications of the Ego ideal which assume both similarity and difference and acknowledge the separateness and autonomy of the other. Freud hoped to prove that his model was universally valid and turned to ancient mythology and contemporary ethnography for comparative material arguing that totemism reflected a ritualized enactment of a tribal Oedipal conflict.

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