the ego must prove how incorrect the notion is. How could a woman who
professes so much love for her mother really hate her deep inside?
Intellectualization
One way the ego handles threatening material is to remove the emotional content
from the thought before allowing it into awareness. Using intellectualization —
that is, by considering something in a strictly intellectual, unemotional
manner —we can bring previously difficult thoughts into consciousness
without anxiety. Under the guise of pondering the importance of wearingseat belts, a woman might imagine her husband in a gruesome automobileaccident. A Freudian therapist might guess that the woman holds some un-
conscious hostility toward her spouse.
Projection
Sometimes we attribute an unconscious impulse to other people instead of to
ourselves. This defense mechanism is called projection . By projecting the im-
pulse onto another person, we free ourselves from the perception that we arethe one who actually holds this thought. The woman who thinks everyone in
her neighborhood is committing adultery may be harboring sexual desires for
the married man living next door. The man who declares that the world is
full of distrustful and cheating people may unconsciously know that he is dis-trustful and a cheater.
Psychosexual Stages of Development
Among the most controversial aspects of Freud’ s theory is his description of
personality development. Freud argued that our adult personalities are heavily
influenced by what happens to us during the first 5 or 6 years of life. Each
child is said to progress through a series of developmental stages during these
years. Because the chief characteristic of each stage is the primary erogenous
zone, and because each stage has a specific influence on the adult personality,
they are referred to as the psychosexual stages of development .
Freud maintained that children face specific challenges as they pass
through each of the psychosexual stages and that small amounts of psychicenergy are used up resolving these challenges. If all goes as it should, most ofus still have an adequate amount of psychic energy left to operate a healthy
personality by the time we become adults. But sometimes things go awry.
Some children have a difficult time moving through a particular stage (or,for a few, find the stage excessively satisfying and wish to stay there). The
result is fixation , the tying up of psychic energy. Not only does this leave less
energy available for normal adult functioning, the adult is said to express
behaviors characteristic of the stage at which the energy is fixated.
The first stage in Freud ’s model is the oral stage . During this period,
which spans approximately the first 18 months of life, the mouth, lips, andtongue are the primary erogenous zones, i.e., the source of pleasure. You
need only watch a 6-month-old for a few minutes to realize that everything
must go into the mouth. Traumatic weaning or feeding problems during thisThe Freudian Theory of Personality 49