CHAPTER EIGHT

Far from Freud:

Psychosexual Development

Janetius, S.T., Alemayehu Tibebe & Mini TC, (2015). Abyssinia in the
New Millennium (Revised Edition), 2016. Amazon CS Publication,
ISBN: 9781522757719
Page 79-88

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The definitions of health and disease, normal and abnormal are
determined by the prevailing social norms and they are culturally
determined. Culture refers to a group or community with whom common
experiences are shared, that shape the way people interact and
understand the outside world. It includes community in which we are
born, gender, race, or national origin, religion etc.; also the groups
and communities we join or become part of. Our culture influences how
we grow, develop, think and behave, interact and participate in groups
and communities.

In the field of psychology, culture is understood to pose a barrier

to culture-specific understanding of human development. The Western
theories of human behavior, development and personality modules that
are popularized all over the world do not fit to the needs of people
from another culture and do not explain fully. Therefore, an effective
psychologist should work in harmony with background influences of
human conditions specifically the tradition, life world,
environmental and geographic condition of the specific people.

Psychologists are more and more becoming aware of the problems of

cultural relativism and focus increasingly on cultural
contextualization or culture-specific approach in understanding and
answering human behavior and mental health issues. As a psychologist
and counselor, my main difficulty in understanding human behavior in
either Asia or Africa is that, almost all the theoretical frameworks
used in understanding human behavior, personality, human development
and counseling process are of Western origin that reflects their
culture, thinking and lifeworld. In addition, many of the basic
assumptions of psychology such as: the scientific and rational
approach, the striving for self-actualization and the preference for
active adjustment over passive acceptance reflect the socio-economic,
political and philosophical context of the Western Euro-American
cultures.

In fact, just like any reflecting psychologist in the East, we have

reservations to the applicability of many western theories of
psychology in Asia and Africa. The difficulties deepened more in the
recent years as I started my work in Ethiopia. Practicing as a
counseling psychologist at the University of Gondar made me realize

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that the psychosexual development theory of Freud is not culture-
sensitive and needs a lot of modifications and revisions in order to
apply in Ethiopia or African cultures. However, thinking about Freud
in African culture, specifically in Ethiopian culture, force me to
make a war cry for culture-specific theories of human development and
personality.

Psychosexual development: According to Freud a person has two basic

instincts - sex (life instinct) and aggression (death instinct) 1.The
libido is the available energy of sex. Sexual excitation arises from
erogenous zones in the human body. The change in the site of
excitation underlies the moment from stage to stage development. and
the task is to achieve sex drive equilibrium. The other instinct is
aggression (death instinct). He believed that a person has desire to
come back to the original inorganic state; further, a person who tries
or commits suicide satisfies his or her death instinct. The mind
displays three topographic regions: the unconscious, preconscious and
conscious. The unconscious is largely unknown territory, refers to
thoughts and feelings that are repressed. The preconscious and,
especially, the conscious have familiar terrain. The preconscious
becomes conscious by forming mental images or linking up with
language.

Sigmund Freud's psychosexual development can be defined as a

harmonious interplay of the individual’s psychological and sexual
capacities within an ordered and ethical value system. A person’s
psychological growth is conditioned by the libido or the inner energy
that is reflected in sexual growth. Also, our personality develops
as we move through a series of psychosexual stages. Freud's most basic
hypothesis was that each child is born with basic instincts, a source
of basic energy called libido (vaguely translated as sexual pleasure).
Further, each child's libido becomes successively focused on various
parts of the body (in addition to people and objects) in the course
of development. Freud was influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of
evolution. Therefore, emphasizes the biological basis of human
development a lot. Freud talks about four/five stages of development
(latency period is not considered a stage of development by many
authors). Each stage is characterized by different demands for libido
gratification and ways of achieving; if any trouble arises in normal
development process, fixations arise to hinder the personality all
through our life. During the first postnatal year, libido (sexual
pleasure) is initially focused on the mouth and its activities;

1
Neo-Freudians use the term Eros & Thanatos

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nursing enables the infant to derive gratification through a
pleasurable reduction of tension in the oral region. Infants seek
gratification through mouth, mainly sucking the breast, feeding,
crying, and other oral explorations. Freud called this the oral stage
of development. Fixation at this stage will affect the growth of the
child, especially the personality, leading to disturbed adult
behaviors like being passive, overly dependent, verbal aggression,
impatience, greediness, and a preoccupation with giving and taking.
Adult habits like smoking, overeating, thumb sucking, objects chewing
are expressions of fixations and poor oral development. During the
second year, the source of excitation is said to shift to the anal
area, and the start of toilet training leads the child to invest
libido in the anal functions. Freud called this period of development
the anal stage. Too little gratification in this stage results
fixation often reflected as orderliness, neatness, rigidity,
obstinate, stingy, and possessive and other compulsive behaviors.

During the period from three through six years, the child's attention
is attracted to sensations from the genitals, and Freud called this
stage the phallic stage. This stage is one of the important periods
of psychological development. Oedipus complex occurs in male children
and penis envy in females. Oedipal conflict according to Freud takes
place when most male children realize the sex difference in their
organs, and the male child identifies with the father and desires his
mother. Castration anxiety makes the male child afraid of the father
(a strange feeling according to Freud that the child fears that he
may lose his sex organ for such thoughts). In the female, it is
labeled as Electra complex (by the latter psychologists) where the
female child desires her father and hates the mother thinking that
it is the mother who created her without penis. Conflicts and
fixations at this stage, according to Freud lead to homosexuality,
authority problems, and rejection of appropriate gender roles.

Latency stage is the years before puberty and no significant

developments take place; libido is dormant at this stage. Repressed
drives at this period may lead to formation of friendships, or
hobbies. Finally, the genital stage of development arrives in which
mature gratification is sought in a heterosexual love relationship
with another person. Freud believed that adult emotional problems
result from either deprivation or excessive gratification during the
oral, anal, or phallic stages.

In Ethiopia, there is a longer period of breast-feeding compared to

the Western and other cultures. For example, in my research, almost
all the students surveyed categorically state that they breastfeed up

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to 3½ to 4 years. The only exception is poverty or famine, in such
case the mother has no milk and the child is deprived of longer breast
feeding. Another cultural issue that hinders the application is the
second stage of Freud’s theory - the toilet training period.
Practically there is no toilet training as such given to children in
this part of the world, except few urban cities. In all other places,
children go for toilet anywhere and everywhere without discretion and
without parental guidance. Although there are many projects by western
countries and WHO funding for public health that shows that almost
majority of the population has toilet facilities, in my observation
research projects of public health are only in papers not seen in the
ground. If we apply the theory of Freud in this context, we have to
classify all the people of Ethiopia having fixations that lead to
poor adult development, which would be farce. How can one say that
the whole country is suffering from neurosis because of a western
theory of human development? The major problem to the application of
this theory in the Ethiopian context arises in the age brackets given
by Freud in table below.

Freudian Ethiopian Stage Pleasure Conflict/Difference

Age Age Source

Mouth:
sucking, Weaning away from
0-2 0-3.5/4 Oral
biting, mother’s breast
swallowing

Anus: Toilet training

defecating
or Ethiopia has no
2-4 4-6 Anal retaining strict toilet
feces training by parents

4-5 7-8 Phallic Genitals Oedipus & Electra

6-
8-9 Latency
puberty

Physical
sexual
changes
Reawakening
of
Puberty Puberty
Genital repressed
onwards onwards
needs Social rules
Direct
sexual
feeling
towards
others

Throughout the world, indigenous peoples have maintained their unique

philosophy, worldviews and associated knowledge systems for centuries
to explain realities, which are often ignored or undermined by Western

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civilization and society. The indigenous peoples of Asia and Africa
and their unique lifestyles are often unnoticed or under-appreciated.
Realizing the value of indigenous wisdom or knowledge, uniqueness of
different cultures of different continents, many scholars today try
to create psychology for specific culture and population integrating
the core values and beliefs, customs of different societies. The
social, geographical, cultural factors play a vital role in the
understanding of human growth, development, personality, maturity
etc… It is evident that Western-made psychology and theories do not
provide enough knowledge about people and their behavior in other
parts of the world. Therefore, we need culture-specific theories of
human behavior, human development and personality.

The theory of Freud clearly reflects the human development in the

society he lived and similar societies around the world. Therefore,
it is applicable in such societies. However, when we try to understand
the human development applying the psychosexual development theory in
Ethiopian context, due to cultural, environmental and social
conditions of the people; it is not at all applicable to the majority
of the population. So, Ethiopian psychosexual development is far from
Freud.

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