Pyschoanalysis

Psychoanalysis, sex and sexuality: From its inception, psychoanalysis was and continues to be concerned with questions of sex, sexuality and gender; attributing a very great importance to sexuality in the development and mental life of the individual. The existence of an infantile sexuality, considered by Freud to operate from the start of life, is arguably responsible for the widening of the field which psychoanalysis looks upon as the sexual domain, assuming a transformation of the ways sexuality is conceptualized; linking the development of sexuality to developmental lines operating from the pre-verbal to adulthood. This discovery of the sexuality of children and the attendant theorist have implications that remain unpopular. For example, despite Freud's work, the temptation is still to see sexuality as interpersonal sexual relationships, and sexual phantasies or auto-eroticism as perverse. Furthermore, although Freud posits the idea of innate bisexuality through the identification of an infant as polymorphous perverse, acceptance of the implications of this for adult behavior are still controversial and remain so within the psychoanalytic community and, from the 1970s, have been increasingly challenged by disciplines lying outside it. However, even within his own lifetime, Freud's particular ideas in the area of female sexuality were contested

Through one particularly graphic study, Freud contends that one must go back to birth, which is the manifestation of an individual's sexuality. The oral phase is where life begins and that is why babies explore everything with their mouth, the center of all sensations. The following phase is the anal or sadistic-anal phase where excretory functions are the center of everything. Pleasures are experienced in the anus during bowel movements. Finally these erotically tinged pleasures are experienced when the sexual organ is manipulated. Thus psychosexual development progresses from the oral through the anal to the