Exploring Another Way of Reading Freud
Freud’s psychosexual stages can sound strange when reduced to notes about sucking, toilet training, masturbation and forbidden desire. Perhaps part of the difficulty lies in what he meant by sexuality. He was not always describing sexuality as adults experience it. He was trying to connect bodily pleasure with attachment, frustration, independence and identity.
Freud may have noticed something important about the emotional intensity of childhood while interpreting that intensity through the sexual framework he had developed. What might happen if we viewed his theory through a different lens?
What if some of what Freud understood as sexual desire could also be explored as attachment, separation and the gradual movement from safety into risk?
The oral stage: can I trust the world?
During infancy, much of a baby’s experience centres on the mouth. Babies suck, taste, bite and chew. Through the mouth, they receive nourishment, comfort and contact while also beginning to explore what exists beyond themselves.
Freud wondered whether experiences during this period could influence later habits such as smoking, nail-biting, chewing pencils, kissing or overeating. These associations remain speculative and should not be treated as straightforward explanations of adult behaviour.
Yet the oral stage may still offer an interesting question:
Will the world respond when I need something?
A baby depends on others for food, warmth and reassurance. The person who repeatedly responds may become the baby’s earliest experience of safety. This is often the mother, though it could be any consistent primary caregiver.
Perhaps the importance of the mouth is not only that it provides pleasure. It is also where trust and dependence first meet the outside world.
The anal stage: what may I control?
During toddlerhood, children become increasingly aware of bodily functions. Toilet training introduces ideas of holding, releasing, timing, privacy and approval. Something that once happened automatically becomes an area in which the child may exercise control.
Freud connected experiences during this stage with later tendencies towards rigidity, withholding, disorder or carelessness. His proposed connections are difficult to establish, but the symbolism may be more useful than the personality categories.
Could this stage be partly about discovering what belongs to the self?
The toddler is also learning to say no, mine and I’ll do it. Retaining and releasing might form one small part of a much larger movement towards autonomy.
The questions raised during this period may continue in different forms:
What belongs to me? What can I control? When is it safe to let go?
Perhaps the struggle is not really about cleanliness or bodily waste. It may be one of the first negotiations between a child’s emerging will and the expectations of other people.
The phallic stage: why the phallus?
Between approximately three and six, children often become curious about bodies, anatomical differences, reproduction and the taboo language surrounding bodily functions. They may touch themselves, ask direct questions or display jealousy when a parent gives attention to someone else.
Freud called this the phallic stage. The term immediately places the male body at the centre of development, which raises questions of its own. Why should agency, movement or power be represented by the phallus? Does that reflect something universal about childhood, or something about the culture and period in which Freud developed his theory?
If we temporarily treat the phallus as a symbol rather than an anatomical organ, could it represent outward movement, agency or the courage to venture beyond the familiar?
And if the mother—or another primary caregiver—has become associated with safety, could the child be negotiating between the desire to remain protected and the impulse to explore?
This does not mean that mothers necessarily provide safety while fathers provide risk. A father may be the child’s safest person. A mother may encourage independence and adventure. One parent may perform several functions, and these experiences can also come through grandparents, siblings, teachers and the child’s own curiosity.
Still, the symbolic contrast raises an interesting possibility. Could development involve learning to move away from safety without believing that love will be withdrawn?
Another reading of the Oedipus conflict
Freud believed that the young boy unconsciously desired his mother and experienced his father as a rival. Fear of the father supposedly led the boy to identify with him, contributing to the development of the superego and a male identity.
A related idea, later called the Electra complex by Carl Jung, described the girl as desiring her father and competing with her mother. Freud’s understanding of girls and women was strongly shaped by the assumptions of his time, and many aspects of the theory are no longer persuasive.
Young children may say:
“I’m going to marry Mummy.”
“Daddy belongs to me.”
“Don’t kiss her. Kiss me.”
How should we interpret such declarations? Do children mean desire in anything resembling its adult sense? Might they instead be expressing attachment, possessiveness or anxiety about losing a special position?
A young child may not yet understand marriage as an adult partnership. Marriage might simply mean permanent love: You will always belong with me.
What Freud described as rivalry could perhaps also be a response to discovering that the caregiver has relationships and desires beyond the child. The child is no longer the centre of that person’s entire world—if they ever were—and this may be difficult to accept.
The third person in the relationship, traditionally represented by the father, interrupts the imagined completeness of the mother-child bond. But could this interruption also open the child’s world?
If the caregiver exists separately from the child, then perhaps the child can gradually become separate too.
The question may not always be:
Which parent does the child desire?
It could sometimes be:
Can I become separate without losing the person who makes me feel safe?
Latency: practising life beyond the family
Freud proposed five psychosexual stages rather than four. Between the phallic and genital stages, he placed the latency period, roughly covering the school years until puberty.
He believed sexual energy became less visible during this period and was redirected into learning, friendship, play and competence. Another interpretation might be that the child is practising how to belong beyond the original family.
Friends become increasingly important. Teachers and other adults acquire influence. The child discovers skills, rules, hierarchies and social identities that do not come entirely from home.
Perhaps the question of this stage is:
Can I enter a larger world without losing myself?
Even this will vary enormously between children and cultures. Some children may experience school as expansion; others may experience it as conformity or separation imposed before they are ready.
The genital stage: intimacy after separation
Freud’s genital stage begins around puberty, when sexual interest develops in a more recognisably adult form. He believed that successful development would lead towards mutual heterosexual relationships.
His treatment of homosexuality as the result of unresolved development is outdated. Sexual orientation should not be understood as a failed resolution of childhood conflict.
There may nevertheless be something worth exploring in Freud’s interest in how early relationships affect later intimacy. Could adults sometimes look to partners for the safety, approval or completion once sought from parents? Might some conflicts arise when a partner is unconsciously expected to repair an old wound or provide unconditional parental reassurance?
Not every adult difficulty needs to be traced back to childhood, and human relationships are unlikely to fit one developmental explanation. Yet it may be useful to ask what we are hoping another person will provide.
Can we experience intimacy without possession? Can we depend on someone without asking them to become our entire source of security? Can love include both attachment and freedom?
Do we carry safety with us?
Perhaps the mother and father in psychoanalytic theory can sometimes be read as functions rather than fixed people.
The maternal function might represent being held, nourished and welcomed. The paternal or phallic function might represent separation, uncertainty and movement into a wider world. These descriptions are culturally loaded, however. They may reveal as much about traditional ideas of motherhood and fatherhood as they do about childhood itself.
Perhaps we do not need to preserve the gendered division in order to explore the underlying movement.
A child may need both secure attachment and opportunities to venture. Too little safety could make exploration frightening. Too little freedom could turn protection into confinement. But even this balance cannot be prescribed in the same way for every child.
Might healthy development involve leaving and returning repeatedly? A child wanders away, looks back and discovers that the trusted person is still there. Over time, perhaps some experience of safety becomes internal. The child may venture further because connection no longer depends entirely on physical closeness.
Adults may continue making similar movements. A new relationship, migration, parenthood, bereavement or a change of identity can return us to old questions:
Is it safe to leave?
Will I still belong if I change?
Can I enter the unknown without abandoning where I came from?
I do not know whether this interpretation explains Freud better or simply takes his theory somewhere else. Perhaps his sexual reading and this attachment-based reading illuminate different parts of the same emotional territory. Perhaps neither can fully contain the complexity of childhood.
But changing the central question may allow another conversation to begin.
Instead of asking only what or whom the child desires, we might ask:
How does a child leave safety without losing love?
And perhaps growing up is not a final departure from dependence. It may be the continuing practice of moving between safety and risk, attachment and freedom, home and the world beyond it.