Psychosexual Development

Have you ever thought about where your adult fantasies and entire sexual behaviours might be coming from? This article will give you some explanations.

Freud believed that early experiences play a critical role in determining what a person’s adult personality is like. To understand the difficulties of adulthood, one must know the difficulties of childhood. Freud thought that personality is largely determined by age five. During later life personality stabilizes further and its expression becomes more symbolic and less literal.
Freud viewed personality development as movement through a series of stages. Each stage reflects a body area through which libido, or sexual energy, is discharged during that period. For this reason they are called psychosexual stages. The view is that the child confronts conflicts at three stages. If the conflict isn’t well resolved, too much libido gets permanently invested in that stage, a process termed fixation. This means less energy is then available to handle conflicts in later stages. As a result, it is harder to successfully resolve the conflicts in the later stages. In this sense, each stage builds on the previous ones.
Fixation can occur for two reasons. A person who is overindulged in a stage may be reluctant to leave it and move on. Or, a person whose needs are deeply frustrated can’t move on until the needs are met. In either case, personality becomes partly stuck at this stage, as a portion of libido becomes invested in that cathexis. The stronger the fixation, the greater the amount of libido invested in it. In a very strong fixation one is so unconsciously preoccupied that one has little energy left for anything else.

The Oral Stage
Extends from birth to roughly eighteen months. During this time much of the infant’s interaction with the world occurs through the mouth and lips, and gratification focuses in that area. The mouth is the source of tension reduction (eating) and pleasurable sensations (tasting, sucking, licking). At the same time, infants are completely dependent on others for their security and survival. The basic conflict of this stage concerns its ending; the process of weaning – literal and figurative. Children become under increasing pressure to let go of their mother and become less reliant on her. The oral stage has two substages. During the first phase, which lasts roughly six months, the baby is totally helpless and dependent, and limited to taking things in. Freud thought that the traits that develop during this incorporative phase include general sense of optimism versus pessimism, trust versus mistrust, dependency on others and gullibility.
The second stage begins with teething. Sexual pleasure comes from biting and chewing, and even inflicting pain, thus this stage is called the sadistic phase. During this time the infant is weaned from the bottle or breast and begins to bite and chew food. Traits arising from this stage can be traced to this new ability. This phase is thought to determine who is verbally aggressive later in life and who tends to use “biting” sarcasm in conversation.
In general terms, oral characters should relate to the world orally. They should be more preoccupied than others with food and drink. When stressed, they should be more likely than others to reduce tension through activities involving the mouth, such as smoking, drinking or nail biting. When angry, they should engage in verbal aggression. Oral characters should be concerned with receiving support from others, and should ease interactions with people rather than alienate them. Also, people who display oral imagery seem to be highly motivated to gain closeness and support from others and are more sensitive to how others react to them. They have a higher physiological reactivity to social isolation and to subtle cues of rejection. They also use more physical contact during social interactions and are more self-disclosing than others.
However, it is worthy pointing out that you don’t have to be an extremely oral character to seek oral gratification. Lots of people chew gum. Nor is the expression of sexual energy through oral contact limited to early childhood. After all, what is serious kissing but an oral expression of sexuality? Nor is that the only way sexuality is expressed among adults. In sum, it remains true that the mouth is an important part of the body through which the human sexual nature is expressed and pleasure obtained.

The Anal Stage
Begins at about eighteen months and continues into the third year of life. During this period the anus is the focal erogenous zone, and sexual pleasure comes from the stimulation that occurs when defecating. The major event of this period is the start of toilet training. For many children, toilet training is the first time that external constraints are systematically imposed on satisfaction of internal urges. When toilet training starts, children can’t relieve themselves whenever and wherever they want, but must learn that there’s an appropriate time and place for everything.
The personality characteristics said to arise from fixations during this period depend on how toilet training is approached by parents and caretakers. Two orientations are typical. One involves urging the child to eliminate at a desired time and place and praising the child lavishly for success. This approach places a lot of attention on the elimination process and reward for the child. The child is therefore convinced by the value of producing “things” at the “right” time and place by whatever means possible. To Freud, this experience provides a basis for adult productivity and creativity.
The second approach to toilet training is harsher. Rather than praise for a job well done, emphasis is on punishment, ridicule and shame for failures. These practices yield two patterns of characteristics, depending on how the child reacts. If the child adopts an active pattern of rebellion, eliminating forcefully when the parents least want it, a set of anal expulsive traits develop. These are tendencies to be messy, cruel, destructive and overly hostile.
If the child attempts to get even by withholding feces and urine, a set of anal retentive traits develops. This personality has a rigid, obsessive style of interacting with the world. The characteristics that make up this pattern are stinginess, obstinacy and orderliness or cleanliness. Stinginess stems from the desire to retain feces. Obstinacy stems from the struggle of wills over toilet training. Orderliness is a reaction against the messiness of defecating

The Phallic Stage
Begins during the third year and continues through the fifth year of life. The focus of libidinal excitation shifts to the genital organs. This is also the period when most children begin to masturbate, as they become aware of the sensory pleasure that arises from genital manipulation.
At first the awakening sexual desires are completely autoerotic in nature. That is, sexual pleasure is totally derived from, and satisfied by self-simulation. Gradually, however, libido begins to shift toward the opposite-sex parent, as boys develop an interest in their mothers and girls in their fathers. Simultaneously, the child becomes hostile toward the same-sex parent because of perceived competition between them over the affection of the other parent. These possessive forces are similar in many ways, but are manifested differently in boys and girls. With this shift, the development pattern for boys and girls diverges.
For a boy, two changes occur. His initial love for his mother transforms into a strong sexual desire. His feelings for his father shift toward hostility and hatred, because his father is a rival for his mother’s affection. These feelings, however, may induce feelings of guilt. At the same time, the boy is threatened by fear that his father will retaliate against him for his desire toward his mother. In traditional psychoanalytic theory, the boy’s fear is that his father will castrate him to eliminate the source of his lust.
Ultimately, this castration anxiety causes the boy to push his sexual desire for his mother into the unconscious. Castration anxiety also causes the boy to identify with his father, that is, develop feelings of similarity and connectedness with him. This serves several functions. First, it gives the boy a kind of “protective coloration”. Being like his father makes it seem less likely that his father will harm him. Secondly, by identifying with desirable aspects of the father, the boy reduces his ambivalence toward him. The process of identification thus paves the way for the development of the superego. Finally, by identifying with his father, the boy gains vicarious outlet for his sexual urges toward his mother. That is, he gains symbolic access to his mother through his father. Presumably, the more he resembles his father, the more easily the boy can unconsciously fantasize himself in his father’s place.
For girls the conflict of the phallic stage is more complicated. Girls abandon their love for their mother for a new one for their father. This shift occurs when a girl realizes she has no penis. She withdraws her love for her mother because she blames her for her castrated condition (after discovering that her mother has no penis either). Simultaneously, her affection is drawn toward her father who does have a penis. Ultimately the girl comes to wish that her father would share his penis with her through sexual union or that he would provide her with the symbolic equivalent of a penis – a baby.
Freud referred to these feelings as penis envy, which are the female counterpart of castration anxiety in boys. As for boys, the conflict is resolved through identification. By becoming like her mother, the girl gains vicarious access to her father. She also increases the chances that she’ll marry someone just like him.
Fixations that develop during the phallic stage result in personalities that, in effect, continue to wrestle with these conflicts. Men may go to great lengths to demonstrate that they haven’t been castrated seducing as many women as they can, or fathering many children. The attempt to assert their masculinity may also be expressed symbolically by attaining great success in their career. Alternatively, they may fail in their sexual and occupational lives (purposely, but unconsciously so) because of the guilt they feel over competing with their father for their mother’s love.
Among women, the continuation of the conflict results in a way of relating to men that is excessively seductive and flirtatious, but with a denial of the underlying sexuality. This style of relating first develops toward the woman’s father. She was drawn to him first, but by this point has repressed the sexual desire that first drew her. The pattern is then carried over to her later social interactions. This is a woman who excites men with her seductive behaviours and is then surprised when men want sexual contact with her.
Freud felt that identifying these emotional conflicts was one of his most significant theoretical contributions. This brief spam involves significant emotional turmoil filled with love, hate, guilt, jealousy and fear. How children negotiate the conflicts of the phallic stage determines their fundamental attitudes to sexuality, interpersonal competitiveness, and personal adequacy.

Fixations that develop during these first three stages of development presumably form much of the basis of adult personality.

The Latency Period
From about the age six to early teens, this is a period when aggressive and sexual drives become less active. The lessening of these urges results partly from changes in the body and partly form the emergence of ego and superego aspects of personality. During this stage children turn their attention to other pursuits, often intellectual or social in nature. Thus the latency period is a time when the child’s experiences broaden rather than a time when new conflicts are confronted and new traits emerge.
With the onset of puberty, toward the end of this period, libidinal and aggressive urges again intensify. In addition, conflicts of previous periods may be reencountered. This is a time when the coping skills of the ego are severely taxed. Although adolescents have adult sexual desires, the release of sexual energy through intercourse isn’t socially sanctioned. As a result, sexual gratification is sought in other ways – for instance, through masturbation.

The Genital Stage
In later adolescence and adulthood a person moves into the final stage of psychosexual development. If earlier stages have been negotiated well, the person enters this stage with libido still organized around the genitals, and it remains focused there throughout life. The sexual gratification differs, however, from that of the earlier stages. Specifically, earlier attachments were narcissistic; the child was interested only in his or hr own sexual pleasure. Others were of interest only insofar as they furthered the child’s own pleasure. In the genital stage, a desire develops to share sexual gratification with someone else. Thus the person becomes capable of loving others not only for selfish reasons, but also for altruistic ones.
Ideally, the person is able to achieve full and free orgasm on an equal basis. Indeed, this ability to share with others in a warm and caring way, and to be concerned with their welfare, is a hallmark of the genital stage. Persons in this stage also have more control of impulses, both sexual and aggressive, and are able to release them in smaller amounts (but more frequently) in sublimated, socially acceptable ways. In this manner, the person becomes transformed from a self-concerned, pleasure-seeking infant into a well-socialized, caring adult.
Freud believed that the genital stage isn’t entered automatically and that this transition is rarely achieved in its entirety. Most people have less control over their impulses than they should, and most have difficulty in gratifying sexual desires in a completely satisfying and acceptable way. In this sense the genital personality is an ideal to strive for, rather than an end point to be taken for granted. It is the perfect culmination of psychosexual development from the analytic point of view.

The Under-estimated Power of Massage

Over the years in the industry, I’ve observed that 90% of the Western male population still grossly underestimates the true magic and powers of massage. Although I fully understand that this may well be due to social conditioning and the impact of the euphemism for other, non-related activities that the word ‘massage’ has unfortunately become, I decided that it’s time for a turnover in this wasteful thinking.

Massage is one of the most powerful forms of physical contact whether in the context of intimacy or that of therapy. If done with essential oils, it is by far the most important application in aromatherapy, allying the therapeutic power of touch with the properties of the individual essential oils chosen for a particular person at a specific time.
Massage – with or without essential oils – can be described as a formalization of a very primitive instinct. If a child falls over, his mother will ‘rub better’ his bumped knee. If you or I trip over and bruise ourselves, our unthinking first reaction will be to rub the painful area. If we find a friend in a state of distress, we’ll offer a reassuring hug. All these are forms of healing, whether on a physical or an emotional level. The simple action of rubbing a painful part of the body encourages an increased flow of blood in the tiny capillaries just below the surface of the skin and this helps to ease the pain. A hug is a non-verbal way of communicating to a friend our sympathy and love that we may not be able to put into words in a crisis.

Both of these kinds of healing enter into massage. The masseur learns a variety of strokes, which are designed to relieve pain, ease tense and tight muscles, increase circulation, or benefit the physical body in other ways. These strokes are applied to those muscles visible below the surface of the skin, but the effects also benefit the deeper layers of muscle, and possibly the underlying organs.
Some forms of massage aim only to benefit the physical body in this way, but even so, general feeling of wellbeing will usually result, and the most important effect is the degree of relaxation experienced after a massage. Often renewed energy and vigour will follow this deep relaxation. The benefit of massage is cumulative: although the recipient will almost always feel good for some hours after a massage, regular massage will prolong the feeling of wellbeing for ever-increasing periods after each treatment.
As well as releasing tight muscles during the treatment, massage can also act as a form of re-education, helping us to become aware of the fact that we are tensing certain muscles unnecessarily, and to feel the difference between a tight/contracted muscle and a relaxed one. Very often we do not recognize the fact that we are tightening certain groups of muscles until we experience those muscles in a relaxed state during and after a massage. Although it is a perfectly normal reaction to tense muscles when we feel mentally tense, it is important to be able to let go of this physical tension before the tight muscles themselves convey a sense of discomfort and unease to the mind, thus setting up a vicious circle of tension. This is one of the ways in which mental stress can lead to real physical symptoms, but massage can break this chain of events, especially when we work with essential oils that have a calming, soothing, or uplifting effect on the mind as well as on the body.
Some systems of massage, such as Eastern massage, and various kinds of intuitive massage that have been developed in the past 30 years or so, take this link between body and mind further and aim to work mainly on the connection between the mental and physical states of the recipient of the massage. The letting go of physical tensions often leads to a release of emotions. This can relate to the present situation of the person involved, or to something that has been ‘stored’ in the body for a very long time. Clearly, a relationship of great trust and sympathy between the masseur and the recipient must be built up before such a catharsis can take place, and this building lasts over a number of treatments. One of the ideas inherent in Eastern massage is that by gently working on the physical surface tensions, deeper tensions will be enabled to come to the surface and eventually be released.
The variety of techniques used in massage is enormous, but I believe that it doesn’t matter too much which technique is used, provided that the masseur uses it with a caring and nurturing attitude towards the recipient.

From the purely physical viewpoint, massage is vital to aromatherapy because it provides us with the most effective way of introducing essential oils to the body. The skin absorbs these oils very readily and when the whole body is massaged a useful amount of essential oil can be taken into the bloodstream in a fairly short time. The oils are diluted in carrier oils. If it isn’t possible to carry out a massage of the whole body, then a back massage offers the next best possibility of getting sufficient essential oil into the body to have a therapeutic effect, since the back presents the single largest expanse of skin of any area of the body.

The Types of Massage And their Principles

The types of massage are many and varied, but how do you know which one to choose for the best results? The facts are exposed here:


Swedish Massage was developed by the Swede Pir Henrik Ling. He used the knowledge of physiology to develop a system of treatment combining massage with physical exercise. This became known as Swedish massage. Its aim is, by a careful manipulation of muscles and joints, to restore to good health.

Manual Lymphatic Drainage [MLD] was developed by the Danish therapist, Dr. Emil Vodder and his wife Estrid in the 1930s. They discovered that gently palpating and moving the skin could stimulate the lymphatic system and improve congestive conditions. This led them to develop a system to treat the whole body. It has many implications, from self-help for minor swellings to professional treatment of chronic oedema.
The lymphatic system picks up debris and waste products from the body’s connective tissue. It consists of a series of lymph nodes connected by lymph vessels. The nodes occur in clusters, mainly around the neck, armpits and groin; they contain white blood cells that help to fight infection by filtering out bacteria, as the lymph, a watery fluid, passes through the nodes.
Healthy connective tissue nourishes every body cell, but when it is congested, cell nutrition and the flow of waste products to the bloodstream slow down.
When the lymph system is stimulated by MLD, the stagnation is reversed, the body functions more healthily, and the immune system is strengthened.


Chinese Massage Traditional Eastern medicine is based on the belief that life energy flows along channels, or meridians, of the body.
In traditional Chinese medicine, this energy is known as qi and the aim of all treatments, including massage, is to create an unobstructed flow of qi in the body, thus promoting harmony and wellbeing.
There are 12 regular meridians, each one influencing a major organ and its associated functions. Another two meridians trace the midline of the front of the body, Ren (Conception vessel) and the back of the body, Du (Governing vessel). In a healthy person, qi is balanced between the opposite but complementary qualities, yin and yang. Yin signifies darkness, cold and passivity; yang signifies light, warmth and activity. Yin meridians run along the front of the body, the abdomen and the insides of the arms and legs, and yang meridians run mainly on the back and the outsides of the arms and legs. A massage will aim to balance the left and right sides, the top and bottom, and the front and back into a cohesive, energetic whole.

Indian Massage The major traditional healing systems in India are Ayurveda and Unani. Both consider massage a vital part of life; a means of preventing illness, improving circulation, and attaining physical and spiritual harmony. According to both systems, all living organisms are defined by fluctuating vital energies known as humours. Each humour is made up of a combination of five essential elements: ether, air, fire, water and earth. The purpose of all therapeutic treatments, including massage, is to bring these life forces into harmony.
If the humours are out of balance, the flow of prana, an invisible life energy that is believed to enter the body through the food and breath, is also believed to be disrupted.
Most Indian massage includes, amongst all movements, work on pressure points. There’re said to be 107 point on the body. Stimulating these points with various massage techniques is believed to affect the body’s internal organs and systems, a concept similar to that of Thai massage and of Shiatsu.

Thai Massage Good health is said to depend on a balanced flow of life energy, called prana, through an invisible network of channels in the body. These channels are called sen lines and can be likened to the Chinese concept of meridians in the body. Out of 72,000 sen lines in the body, there’re ten that are considered to be the most important in Thai massage.
A Thai masseur tries to achieve perfect energy balancing by stretching the sen lines, and by using the hands, feet and elbows to apply pressure to key points along them. The belief is that the physical body is the vehicle through which the emotional or psychic body can be reached. The masseur traditionally performs the massage in a meditative mood, beginning with a prayer and working with full awareness and ‘mindfulness’.

Eastern Head Massage is extremely popular throughout the East. In India, China, Singapore and Turkey, most barbers and hairdressers will automatically offer a scalp massage. In fact, the word ‘shampoo’ derives from the Hindi word capna, meaning “to press” or “rub”. This ten-minute massage is quite energetic and is done on dry, rather than wet hair, to avoid stretching the hair.

Shiatsu literally translated as “finger pressure”, evolved in Japan, and has its origins in traditional Chinese medicine. It is based on the Eastern principle that energy of life (ki in Japanese, qi in Chinese) flows through longitudinal meridians in the body. The aim is to apply pressure along these meridians to influence the flow of ki and maintain harmony and good health.

Reflexology is based on the theory that applying pressure to specific areas of the feet and, less commonly, of the hands and ears can affect internal organs and body systems and therefore promote good health. It evolved from the work of Dr. William H. Fitzgerald, a U.S. ear, nose and throat surgeon who was interested in the theory of energy lines, or meridians, and developed “zone therapy” in about 1913. A reflexology treatment tends to be extremely relaxing. Not only do most people enjoy having their feet massaged, but also stimulating the extensive nerve endings in the feet is beneficial in itself and can have profound effects throughout the body.

Sarawak Massage is a sequence of gentle kneading movements designed to send waves of relaxation through the body.

Moroccan Massage of full body can be performed in just 15 minutes and consists mainly of fast stroking. The vigour of the strokes forces the body and mind to let go and is useful for revitalizing rushed and hyperactive people.