from their childhood through adulthood in an attempt to figure out their complicated psyche. Freud’s research was conducted on strictly middle-class whites during the early twentieth century. We are a society that has always had clear delineation between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. It is in the stage of childhood in which Freud believes that female development is distinguished from that of the males. The breakdown of development into various stages is unique to our specific culture. In most other cultures, there is only one transition that takes place in life and that is the one from childhood to adulthood. This "graduation" of sorts occurs immediately after the child hits puberty. According to Freudian theory, the significant turning point in psychosexual development for gender identity occurs at about the age of three. For the first three years of life, pleasure is centered on oral gratification such as sucking a bottle or breast for milk. The person who provides this to the child is the main object of the baby’s love and affection. The child develops a sense of trust as a result of this relationship. This is the called the oral stage because there is a fixation that the child has to always have something in its mouth. The next stage is the anal stage. Struggles around issues such as toilet training, and a sense of self-control and control of the environment characterize it. The three-year-olds shift of focus to the sexual organs as the source of pleasure is labeled the phallic stage of psychosexual development. It is at this stage that girls notice that men and boys have penises, and they don’t. We, according to Freud, recognize that without this organ, we cannot "possess" the mother (our original love object) the way a man can, especially our fathers. This recognition leads girls to develop a sense of inferiority and the desire for a penis, which Freud called Penis Envy. At the same time, boys notice th...
