Week Two Post One

While reading the chapter my interest struck it’s highest during the comparison of Freud’s psychosexual and Erikson’s psychosocial steps. Sigmund Freud was a physician who treated patients with mental illness in Australia. He listened to the patient’s dreams, fantasies and uncensored streams of thought and constructed the Psychoanalytic theory. Erik Erikson studied Harvard students, Boston children, and Sioux Indians, where he would stress cultural diversity, social change and psychological cries throughout the life span. Erikson created eight developmental stages, each characterized by a particular challenge, and Freud created five stages. The first of the five stages Freud created is the oral stage, which applies to babies from birth to one year old. During this stage the lips, tongue and gums are the focus of pleasurable sensation in the baby’s body. The Anal stage applies to children one to three years of age and is the focus of pleasurable in a baby’s body because toilet training is the most important activity. The Phallic stage applies to children three to six years old and believes the penis to be the most important body part because pleasure is derived from genital stimulation. The Latency stage applies to children six to eleven years of age, it is an interlude during which sexual needs are quiet and children put psychic energy into sports and schoolwork. The genital stage is the final stage that applies to adolescences and focuses on the pleasurable sensations and the young person seeks sexual stimulation. All of Freud’s stages pertain to sexual attributes people contain. Erikson on the other hand believed that the resolution of each crisis depended on the interaction between the individual and the social environment. Freud and Erikson’s first five stages are very similar because both believed that problems of adult life echo unresolved conflicts of childhood. But just because both believed in the same general idea doesn’t mean they have the same set of stages. In fact the main difference between the two sets of stages is the fact that Erikson’s stages emphasize each person relationships to family and culture, not sexual urges.