Background
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) observed that during the predictable stages of early childhood development, the child's behavior is oriented towards certain parts of his or her body, e.g. the mouth during breast-feeding, the anus during toilet-training. He proposed that adult neurosis (functional mental disorder) often is rooted in childhood sexuality, therefore, said neurotic adult behaviors were manifestations of childhood sexual fantasy and desire. That is because human beings are born "polymorphously perverse", infants can derive sexual pleasure from any part of their bodies, and that socialization directs the instinctual libidinal drives into adult heterosexuality. Given the predictable timeline of childhood behavior, he proposed "libido development" as a model of normal childhood sexual development, wherein the child progresses through five psychosexual stages — (i) the oral, (ii) the anal, (iii) the phallic, (iv) the latent, and (v) the genital — in which the source pleasure is in a different erogenous zone.
Read more about this topic: Psychosexual Development
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