Freud_And_Piaget

Freud And Piaget Introduction Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and Piaget’s cognitive development theory are two well known theories in explaining the development of personality. They both can explain where children are in their development of their personality. Although they aren’t thought of as useful and ‘true’ theories they are very interesting to see how they apply to children. These theories are outlined below and are shown how they apply to a family with three children. Freud’s Theory Freud’s psychoanalytic theory was an approach to describing and explaining the development of personality. In describing the development of personality Freud proposed that that it followed a sequence of five different ‘psychosexual stages’, with each stage having crucial emotional events, with the more important ones occurring during childhood. But the main idea in the ‘psychosexual stages’ is that the emotional events involved sexual urges. If a failure to complete a crucial event in a particular stage either by too little gratification or too much anxiety then a ‘fixation’ results. This fixation causes impairment in personality development causing ‘the individual to retain some of the characteristics of that stage in later life’ (Birch 1997). The ‘Oxford Psychology Study Dictionary’ describes Freud’s 5 psychosexual stages as follows: Oral Stage (0 – 2 years) The mouth is stage, theory, development, piaget’s, years, freud’s, thinking, personality, jimmy, evident, cognitive, stages, ross, sexual, training, toilet, through, susie, events, emotional, crucial, child, very, same, children, being, theories, sex, old, life, each, point, parent, out