only the real but also the ideal. Its focus is on how one should behave. The superego develops as the child internalizes the morals and values of parents and culture, thereby providing both a sense of right, wrong and a set of ideals. It strives for perfection and judges our actions, producing positive feelings of pride or negative feelings of guilt. Someone with an exceptionally strong superego may be continually upright and socially correct yet ironically harbor guilt-, another with a weak superego may be wantonly self-indulgent and remorseless. Because the superego's demands often oppose the id's, the ego struggles to reconcile the two. The chaste student who is sexually attracted to someone and joins a volunteer organization to work alongside the desired person, satisfies both id and superego.Analysis of his patients' histories convinced Freud that personality forms during a person's first few years. Again and again his patients' symptoms seemed rooted in unresolved conflicts from early childhood. He concluded that children pass through a series of psychosexual stages during which the id's pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct pleasure-sensitive areas of the body he called "erogenous zones." During the "oral stage," usually the first 18 months, an infant's sensual pleasure focuses on sucking, biting, and chewing.During the "anal stage," from about 18 months to 3 years, the sphincter muscles become sensitive and controllable, and bowel and bladder retention and elimination become a source of gratification.During the phallic stage, from roughly ages 3 to 6 years, the pleasure zones shift to the genitals. Freud believed that during this stage boys seek genital stimulation and develop unconscious sexual desires for their mothers along with jealousy and hatred for their father, whom they consider a rival. Boys feel unrecognized guilt for their rivalry and a fear that their father will punish them, such as by castration. This coll...
