Freud, Erikson, and Pavlov - Thesis

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Freud's multi-tiered stages of development stresses the sexual nature of the evolution of human personality to the exclusion of all other drives.

The third key concept of Freud's theories centers on the importance of repression, and the long-term affects of the first five years of life. A fixation on the mother causes the young boy to develop an Oedipal complex, as he desires to kill his father and supplant his father's position. The girl develops resentment of her mother because she was not born with a penis, and as a result of penis envy, transfers her desire for a penis to a desire for her father. Eventually, the boy learns to identify with his father to 'have' his mother, just as the girl learns to emulate her mother to 'have' a penis in the form of a husband and son. Freud theorized that the repressive stage of sexual development, which occurs after age five, temporarily arrests this conflict and enables the child to become a fully socialized adolescent and adult later on, with appropriate, non-familial, transferred objects of affection.


Erickson: Freud's Adversary

Erik Erickson was a key critic of Freud's psychoanalytic theories. Erickson stressed the social component and influence upon human development, and advocated a multi-stage process of human development, in contrast to Freud's emphasis on infant sexuality (David & Clifton 2008). Eriksson's first key concept stressed that human conflict was never-ending, and suggested that rather than focusing on the conflict of personal identity. Erickson's second key concept is that each stage of development was marked by a more general conflict of, for example, "trust vs. mistrust" (David & Clifton 2008). The third concept is that not only the family was involved.....

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