5.9:FREUDIAN  STAGE THREE  CONTEXTS IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SAIVA SIDDHANTHAM:

FREUDIAN PHALLIC PHASE:

Around the age of 3 the child enters the phallic phase. The phallic stage of psychosexual development heralds the arrival of the oedipal level of development, in which relationships become more complicated than they were in the past[i]. The emphasis is on triangular or three person relationships, instead of dyadic or two person relationships. The phallic stage is also characterized by greater tolerance of ambivalence and the ability to maintain an internal representation of the absent object.

Another major contrast between pregenital stages of development and phallic stage is the nature of the child’s libidinal activity. In the oral and anal stages, such activity , for the most part, is autoerotic in that the child’s sexual impulses are derived from one’s own body. Pleasure is still derived one’s own body in the phallic phase, but that period of development is also characterized by the fundamental task of finding a love object that will establish later patterns of object choice in adult life.

Oedipus complex:
The period of life between the ages of 3 and 5 is known as the oedipal stage of psychosexual development because the culmination of infantile sexuality –oedipal complex- occurs at that time[ii].

 The oedipal stage of development is of central importance in pathogenesis of neuroses and many anxiety disorders. Oedipal issues are also important in the psychodynamics of character neuroses and high level personality disorders, such as histrionic personality. The Oedipus complex presents a developmental challenge for the child, and the resolution of the child differs according to the child’s gender.

Resolution for boys:
first love object of the male child is his mother. Unlike the little girl, the little boy does not have to shift his affection to another parent at the beginning of oedipal phase. The male child essentially falls in love with mother. He wishes to be the center of her world. It becomes apparent that such are interfered with by the relationship of his father and mother. As a result, he  begins to view his father as a rival. 

Freud repeatedly noted that the chief source of the boy’s anxiety is that father will retaliate by removing the child’s external genitalia. The male child’s investments in keeping his genitals  supersedes his desire for mother and renounces them. This phenomenon is termed as castration complex.

Resolution for girls: Freud was frank throughout his writings about his difficulty in understanding psychological development of girls. In attempting to explain the resolution of the oedipal complex in little girls(called the Electra complex), Freud noted that the discovery of their genital state leads to feelings of inferiority and narcisstic injury and –to penis envy.

Contemporary psycho-analysts  however regard penis envy, only as one aspect of the feminine identity, not the origin of it.

Thus the phallic stage development is discussed next we shall move to their analoy in saiva siddhantham particularly from the arrangement of chapters in thirumandhiram by thirumoolar.

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[i] In the Phallic stage of psychosexual development, a boy’s decisive experience is the Oedipus complex describing his son–father competition for sexual possession of mother. This psychological complex indirectly derives from the Greek mythologic character Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father and sexually possessed his mother. Initially, Dr. Freud applied the Oedipus complex to the development of boys and girls alike; he then developed the female aspect of phallic-stage psychosexual development as the feminine Oedipus attitude and the negative Oedipus complex; but his student–collaborator Carl Jung proposed the “Electra complex”, derived from Greek mythologic character Electra, who plotted matricidal revenge against her mother for the murder of her father, to describe a girl’s psychosexual competition with her mother for possession of her father. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalysis

[ii] Oedipus — Despite mother being the parent who primarily gratifies the child’s desires, the child begins forming a discrete sexual identity — “boy”, “girl” — that alters the dynamics of the parent and child relationship; the parents become the focus of infantile libidinal energy. The boy focuses his libido (sexual desire) upon mother, and focuses jealousy and emotional rivalry against father — because it is he who sleeps with mother. To facilitate uniting him with mother, the boy’s id wants to kill father (as did Oedipus), but the ego, pragmatically based upon the reality principle, knows that father is the stronger of the two males competing to psychosexually possess the one female. Nonetheless, the fearful boy remains ambivalent about father’s place in the family, which is manifested as fear of castration by the physically greater father; the fear is an irrational, subconscious manifestation of the infantile Id. Electra — In developing a discrete psychosexual identity, boys develop castration anxiety and girls develop penis envy towards all males. The girl’s envy is rooted in the biologic fact that, without a penis, she cannot sexually possess mother, as the infantile id demands, resultantly, the girl redirects her desire for sexual union upon father. She thus psychosexually progresses to heterosexual femininity (which culminates in bearing a child) derived from earlier, infantile desires; her child replaces the absent penis. Moreover, after the phallic stage, the girl’s psychosexual development includes transferring her primary erogenous zone from the infantile clitoris to the adult vagina. Freud thus considered a girl’s Oedipal conflict to be more emotionally intense than that of a boy, resulting, potentially, in a woman of submissive, less confident personality. In both sexes, defense mechanisms provide transitory resolutions of the conflict between the drives of the Id and the drives of the Ego. The first defense mechanism is repression, the blocking of memories, emotional impulses, and ideas from the conscious mind; yet it does not resolve the Id–Ego conflict. The second defense mechanism is identification, by which the child incorporates, to his or her ego, the personality characteristics of the same-sex parent; in so adapting, the boy diminishes his castration anxiety, because likeness to father protects him from father’s wrath as a rival for mother; by so adapting, the girl facilitates identifying with mother, who understands that, in being females, neither of them possesses a penis, and thus are not antagonists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalysis