Q. Can anyone explain Oedipal Crisis ?

Admin wrote:

Let's first discuss the basics of Psychosexual Stage Theory given by Freud.
(a) The Oral Stage:
- lasts from birth to about 18 months.
- The focus of pleasure is, of course, the mouth.
- Sucking and biting are favorite activities.

(b) The anal stage:
- lasts from about 18 months to 3-4 years old.
- The focus of pleasure is the anus.
- Holding it in and letting it go are greatly enjoyed.

(c) The Phallic stage:
- lasts from 3-4 to 5-7 years old.
- The focus of pleasure is the genitalia.
- Masturbation is common.

(d) The latent stage:
- lasts from 5-7 to puberty (around 12 years old).
- During this stage, Freud believed that the sexual impulse was suppressed in the service of learning.

(e) The genital stage
- begins at puberty, and represents the resurgence of the sex drive in adolescence, and the more specific focusing of pleasure in sexual intercourse.
- Freud felt that masturbation, oral sex, homosexuality, and many other things we find acceptable in adulthood today, were immature.

This is a true stage theory, meaning that Freudians believe that we all go through these stages, in this order, and pretty close to these ages.

Now let's discuss oedipal crisis:
The Oedipal crisis

Each stage has certain difficult tasks associated with it where problems are more likely to arise:-
* For the oral stage, this is weaning.
* For the anal stage, it's potty training.
* For the phallic stage, it is the Oedipal crisis, named after the ancient Greek story of king Oedipus, who inadvertently killed his father and married his mother.

Here's how the Oedipal crisis works:
The first love-object for all of us is our mother. We want her attention, we want her affection, we want her caresses, we want her, in a broadly sexual way. The young boy, however, has a rival for his mother's charms: his father! His father is bigger, stronger, smarter, and he gets to sleep with mother, while junior pines away in his lonely little bed. Dad is the enemy.

About the time the little boy recognizes this archetypal situation, he has become aware of some of the more subtle differences between boys and girls, the ones other than hair length and clothing styles. From his naive perspective, the difference is that he has a penis, and girls do not. At this point in life, it seems to the child that having something is infinitely better than not having something, and so he is pleased with this state of affairs.

But the question arises: where is the girl's penis? Perhaps she has lost it somehow. Perhaps it was cut off. Perhaps this could happen to him! This is the beginning of castration anxiety, a slight misnomer for the fear of losing one's penis.

To return to the story, the boy, recognizing his father's superiority and fearing for his penis, engages some of his ego defenses: He displaces his sexual impulses from his mother to girls and, later, women; And he identifies with the aggressor, dad, and attempts to become more and more like him, that is to say, a man. After a few years of latency, he enters adolescence and the world of mature heterosexuality.

The girl also begins her life in love with her mother, so we have the problem of getting her to switch her affections to her father before the Oedipal process can take place. Freud accomplishes this with the idea of penis envy: The young girl, too, has noticed the difference between boys and girls and feels that she, somehow, doesn't measure up. She would like to have one, too, and all the power associated with it. At very least, she would like a penis substitute, such as a baby. As every child knows, you need a father as well as a mother to have a baby, so the young girl sets her sights on dad.

Dad, of course, is already taken. The young girl displaces from him to boys and men, and identifies with mom, the woman who got the man she really wanted. Note that one thing is missing here: The girl does not suffer from the powerful motivation of castration anxiety, since she cannot lose what she doesn't have. Freud felt that the lack of this great fear accounts for the fact (as he saw it) that women were both less firmly heterosexual than men and somewhat less morally-inclined.

Admin wrote:

This article might answer this question:
The death of a parent: Its impact on middle-aged sons and daughters. Pastoral Psychology Volume 28, Number 3 (1980), 151-167

Link: http://www.springerlink.com/content/h1047502101r76v1/

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