Freud also claimed that during the first few years of our lives, our development follows a particular pattern. He called this ‘Psychosexual Development’. He said the first five years are the most important in determining our personality for the rest of our lives and separated the process into stages. The first stage he called the ‘Oral Stage’ and said that between birth and around 1 to 2 years old, infants gain satisfaction from putting things into their mouths. Freud called this ‘Oral Fixation’ and claimed that if weaned of milk, via the breast, too early we could become orally fixated as adults. i.e. People who are orally fixated are more likely to become cigarette smokers, or pipe smokers, or bite their nails etc. as they get continue to get satisfaction from inserting things into their mouths. The next stage he called the ‘Anal Stage’ and said that between one to two years to around three years the child becomes able to control his bowel movements. He said this is the child’s first confrontation with the adult and until this stage the child can get away with most things. Now the child receives pleasure from either retention or expulsion of faeces. He claimed that babies who were normally expulsive would become generous although untidy and less organised adults as opposed to retentive babies who would become very tidy and far more organised. Freud said that personality development started around this time of potty training. Then came a stage Freud called the ‘Phallic Stage’. He said between the ages of three to around five or six years the child became aware of its genitals and this is the area the child now receives pleasure from. During this stage Freud claimed that the child learns its sex role and becomes almost sexually attracted to the opposite sex parent while at the same time becoming more aggressive to the same sex parent. The child sees the same sex parent as a threat. Calling this the ‘Oedipus Complex’ Freud said a child would unknowingly be willing participant in incest cases, if the parent had an ill-constructed superego that didn’t prevent them from doing so. Following this period is a period of ‘latency’ where the child focuses on such tasks as going to school. The sexual energies are diverted and instead the energy from the ‘libido’ is used for cognitive and social development. Nothing much happens to the personality during this period, although the child is unconsciously preparing for the next stage, the ‘Genital Stage’. This is when the child reaches sexual maturity and is between the ages of 12 to 18 years. Most species on reaching sexual maturity start to mate, however, we as humans are forced to inhibit our natural, sexual instincts. During this stage, there may be a break down in parental authority as the child develops its own adult relationships. (Horle, 2002.)
In comparison to Freud’s theory, there have been many psychologists who have conducted their own experiments and developed alternate theories of personality development. One such experiment, conducted by the Russian psychologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849 – 1936) in 1911 was that of the ‘Conditioned Response Experiment’. In this experiment, Pavlov developed a procedure we now call ‘classical conditioning’. The experiment involved a dog that had previously undergone some simple surgery in order to enable Pavlov to measure the amount of response from the dog by collecting its saliva. Pavlov discovered that the dog could learn certain stimulus preceded food and that on presentation of these stimuli the dog would salivate even before being fed. (Horle, 2002.)
Around about the same time as Pavlov was carrying out his experiments, an American psychologist named Edward Lee Thorndike (1874 – 1949) carried out his own experiments and described what we now call ‘instrumental’ or ‘operant conditioning’. At the time, Thorndike called it ‘Law of Effect’ and claimed that some responses were learned not simply as a result of being associated with stimulus but because of pleasant consequences. A typical experiment for Thorndike would be to place a hungry cat into what he called a ‘puzzle box’. The cat would be able to see food and in order to get the food would have to escape from the box by lifting a latch, clawing down a rope or engaging in a series of different manipulations. He recorded the time taken by the cat to escape from the box and found that over trials, the cat needed less and less time to make the escape. Burrhus Frederic Skinner (born in 1904) furthered these experiments, in the 1930’s, with his interpretation of the puzzle box, which is now known as the ‘Skinner Box’. Adopting the same principle as Thorndike but inventing an apparatus that proved to be more sensitive and make the measurement of behaviour easier, Skinner conducted his own experiments in which he confirmed the findings of Thorndike. (Horle, 2002.)
John Broadus Watson (1878 – 1958) argued in 1913 that if something cannot be seen, how can it be measured? He said our behaviour is a product of our conditioning and that we are all biological machines who do not consciously act. Rather, we react to stimuli. He claimed that two investigators contemplating consciousness could never really agree on what was going on in ‘the mind’. However, behaviour can be viewed and measured and should be the only area of psychology that should be studied. Psychology had long been concerned with the mind but, although having studied the mind himself, Watson thought of this as pointless. He said psychology could only become a science like other sciences by dealing with the observable. He saw the process of conditioning as so powerful that he eventually promoted a belief that all behaviour is learned, and made many extreme statements, (Epstein, 1987). The most famous of these statements is:
Give me a dozen healthy infants… and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even a beggar man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors. (Taken from ‘The Oxford Companion to The Mind’, edited by Richard L. Gregory and published by Oxford University Press (U.S.A.) 1987, page 808.)
In evaluation of these theories, it would be safe to say that in Freud’s view, personality is intuitive and cannot be consciously controlled by either the individual, parental authority or by society. However, each of these can influence and have an effect on personality development. Whereas the behaviourists believe that personality is fabricated. They say that we are products of our environment and that our personality is learnt as according to what we see and hear.
Criticisms have been aimed at Freud because it has been claimed that his conclusions were often based on his own experiences and that because of his undoubted charisma, he was able to persuade his colleagues to reach the same conclusions as himself. He has also been criticised because his data was collected from his patients, most of whom were abnormal in some way and were all adult. Freud observed no children directly. It has, therefore, been doubted as to the validity of his making generalisations based on an abnormal popularity. (Radford and Govier.)
Criticisms have been aimed at the behaviourists on the grounds that as an account of development, conditioning is general rather than specific and the debate continues as to whether or not the two types of conditioning are really just different versions of the same process. Although there have been some experiments on children, most of the principles identified stem mainly from experiments on animals. However, recent studies on children have shown the importance of conditioning from an early age. A safe conclusion, therefore, would be that the conditioning process may have an effect on development. It seems likely however, that whatever the importance of conditioning, there are other factors involved. (Radford and Govier.))
Bibliography
Epstein, R. (1987). Watson, John Broadus. In Richard L. Gregory (Ed.) The Oxford Companion to the Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
Horle, Rob. (2002). Social Learning. Class Handouts. NPTC.
Horle, Rob. (2002). Social Learning. Class Notes. NPTC.
Padel, J.H. (1987). Freudianism: Later Developments. In Richard L. Gregory (Ed.) The Oxford Companion to the Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
Radford and Govier. (1991). A Textbook to Psychology. New York: Routledge.
Zangwill, O.L. (1987). Freud on Mental Structure. In Richard L. Gregory (Ed.) The Oxford Companion to the Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.