Psychosexual Fixations and Personality

Understanding how personality develops - how we become who we end up as - is one of the ‘holy grails’ of modern Psychology. Since psychologists can’t even agree a definition of ‘personality’, however, that’s no easy task

As the aim of Integrated SocioPsychology is to align and integrate the behavioural sciences, exploring common ground in theories of personality, to arrive both at a definition of it and an understanding of the forces (both internal and external which shape the development of personality is a key consideration. One of the most important theories to consider is that of the great Sigmund Freud.

‘Oral aggressive’ people are often perceived as greedy and acquisitive, envious, pessimistic, cynical, sarcastic, scornful and contemptuous.
Orally-fixated people often seek gratification through smoking, thumb-sucking, nail-biting and chewing objects like pens and pencils. A predilection for oral sex is also seen as an indication of an oral personality.


Anal expulsive types ‘performing’ for others - eg: giving presents, donating to charity, etc - could be seen as sublimations of the wish to ‘perform on the potty’ for parents. Sculptors, potters and gardeners can all be said to be sublimating the desire to smear.
Through the defence mechanism of reaction formation, anal retentive types may feel compelled to give things away or lose them through gambling or playing on the stock market.


In his Psychoanalytic Theory Freud argued that fixations can occur in the first 3 psychosexual stages the child develops through. If the child is either frustrated (needs not met) or overindulged (needs met too much - ie: too easily), some libido (life force) will get locked in that stage, resulting in fixation. (The libido needs to be spent in a stage for that stage to be resolved completely. The consequent adult personality will want to gain some satisfaction from that stage. People can be fixated at any or all of the the stages and fixated to a degree - ie: either from very slightly to very much.

What is undoubtedly disturbing to the ‘Freud-bashers’ is how much evidence has accumulated over the years to say that, in broad terms at least, if not always in detail, Freud’s observations pretty much stand up so many years later.

The text below will present brief descriptions of the fixations and some of the evidence supporting them conceptually. It will also look at how these Freudian concepts can be interpreted in terms of Integrated SocioPsychology.

From a sociopsychological perspective, there needs to be some caution in talking about stages as though they are rigid; it is better to talk about motivational systems in people (vMEMES) which emerge and dominate the selfplex in such a way as to give the impression of stages - though the length of stages and just how one stage is transitioned to another varies from individual to individual and from culture to culture. For more of an Integrated SocioPsychology perspective on Freud’s psychosexual stages, see Psychosocial Development.

Oral Fixations

‘Oral receptive’ is brought on by too much nursing whereas ‘oral aggressive is brought on by not enough nursing and/or by early weaning. Oral receptive people are often cheerful, unrealistically optimistic and very self-centred yet can’t bear the disapproval of others. Through the defence mechanism of sublimation, they may show an interest in languages, be a compulsive talker and be good at ventriloquism. The language used to describe overly-dependent people may reflect their orality - eg: ‘leech’. Very gullible people may be called ‘suckers’.

needs met - primarily food from the mother/caregiver. Failure of the mother to meet needs consistently can lead to the development of an oral aggressive type - ie:RED has emerged in a unhealthy form in the selfplex to compensate for PURPLE’s needs not being met. Having needs met with the baby having to make little or no effort to get its mother’s attention equates to the BEIGE-PURPLE harmonic having its needs met too easily - potentially producing the oral receptive type. Temperament of both the mother/caregiver and the child will have an effect here - see Caregiver Sensitivity Hypothesis vs Temperament Hypothesis.

The impact of temperament is perhaps better reflected in Paul Kline &  R Storey’s 1977 slant on the oral personality, in which they proposed 2 oral types: ‘oral optimistic’ ( a variation on oral receptive) and ‘oral pessimistic’ (a variation on oral aggressive). Oral optimistic was characterised as having dependency, liking, fluency, sociability, liking of  novelty and relaxation were clustered together as traits. Oral pessimistic was characterised as having independence, verbal aggression, envy,  coldness and hostility, malice, ambition and impatience clustered together as traits. Kline & Storey took their lead from the 1948 work of Freida Goldman-Eisler, on which they based their 2 oral types. However, Goldman-Eisler only provided evidence at face validity. Aaron Lazare, Gerald Klerman & David Armor (1966), though, found similar results in a questionnaire using Goldman-Eisler's items - as  did Kline & Storey in their own investigations. Storey (1980) found a relationship between these oral characters and smoking, food  preferences and nail biting.

While there do indeed seem to be ‘oral personalities’ who either over-trust and are, therefore, overly dependent, or under-trust and are, therefore, aggressive in over-compensating for lack of trust, relationships between such types and oral activities such as smoking, nail-biting, thumb-sucking and engaging in oral sex are correlations only. There is nothing like enough substantive evidence to postulate cause-and-effect.

Anal Fixations

According to Freud, the ‘anal expulsive’ child gets pleasure from defecating whereas the ‘anal retentive’ gains satisfaction from being able to hold it in until it is acceptable to defecate. Anal retentive types are often described as ‘tight’. Interestingly, many swear words reference anal-urinary activities - eg: ‘crap’, ‘shit’, ‘piss’, etc.

Freud saw the trials and tribulations of the Anal Stage and the stress of potty training in particular as leading to the development of the Ego with its brief of restraining the actvities of the Id to avoid unpleasant consequences - eg: parents chastising the infant when there is an ‘accident’ which stains the carpet. This drive to conform to external expectations to avoid unpleasant consequences and the loss of acceptance also characterises much of the PURPLE vMEME’s activities.

In his version of this stage, Erikson points to the building up of self-esteem through gaining control of the sphincter and other major muscle groups - thus, feeding the RED vMEME’s need for esteem.

It is possible to interpet the anal expulsive type as resulting from RED rebelling against the stress of toilet training while the anal retentive type could be the result of a premature awakening of BLUE to compensate for the failure to PURPLE to please. We’re a long way from understanding why difficulties at the Anal Stage could result in one person becoming expulsive and another retentive - but key factors could include the memes our parents throw at us - ie: just how important they make it that the child gets it right. Temperament could also play a part: a more Melancholic type would seem to have a natural potential to be retentive while a more Choleric type would be prone to the rebelliousness that characterises the expulsive type.

While annecdotal evidence for apparent anal types abounds - especially retentive, scientific evidence for the existence of ‘anality’ mainly consists of correlations of ‘anal traits’ that seem to cluster together. Fisher & Greenberg found the strongest anal trait pairing was between orderliness and meanness. They also correlated obstinacy with orderliness and meanness - as did Paul Kline (1972) and Jerrold Pollak (1979) - though not quite as strongly, A knock to Freudian theory is that Fisher & Greenberg could not find a relationship between anal traits and the stress of toilet training. This could mean that temperament, rather than experience, plays a greater role in the development of anal personality traits. However, Richard O'Neill, Roger Greenberg & Seymour Fisher (1992) found that 'toilet humour' correlated with stubbornness, stinginess, orderliness. (40 women for were assessed for 3 anal characteristics and  enjoyment of toilet humour, using a standard questionnaire.) This, the researchers  claimed, supported the notion of 'anality'.

Rather interestingly, J Maltby & J Price (1999) assessed anality and political  conservatism in 285 students and found a strong tendency for highly anal students to be  politically conservative. Perhaps more disturbingly, Fisher (1978) found that racial prejudice based on skin colour could be related to participants' attitudes towards cleanliness and thrift. Fisher thought this implied that racial prejudice is the consequence of an unconscious connection between skin colour and faeces. A better explanation might be that, since PURPLE and prematurely-emerged BLUE, working together, may produce characteristics of the anal retentive type, then it should be no surprise that anal retentive can be linked to racial prejudice since PURPLE not-of-our-tribe discrimination and BLUE’s search for absolute certainties also fuelracism.

The Phallic Fixation

Fixation at the Phallic Stage is often associated with being unable to identify with an adult - particularly the same sex parent. Fixation at this stage, according toPsychoanalytic Theory, can result in homosexuality, exhibitionism, impulsiveness, extreme vanity, authority problems and rejection of appropriate gender roles. People who appear overly-confident sexually are sometimes referred to as ‘cocky’.

The link with homosexuality centres around the boy having too close a relationship with the mother, identifying with her rather than his father and, thus, adopting female behaviours and thinking patterns. However, research has largely failed to support this. More than 1 in 10 male children in the UK are raised by lone mothers without any research correlating homosexuality to lack of a male role model. Indeed, research over the 15-20 years has tended to indicate homosexuality has a strong genetic and/or biological component - see: Homosexuality: Nature or Nurture?. Interestingly, though, current thinking does tend to reflect Freud’s contention that we are all potentially bisexual!

As to other aspects of the phallic fixation, there is a certain logic to Freud’s idea that you become vain, impulsive and exhibitionistic because, when you masturbate as a child, you don’t get told enough that you can’t do that so you grow up feeling you can do anything. Certainly those high on the temperamental dimension ofPsychoticism would express themselves unrestrainedly if not taught through Operant Conditioning that certain things were not acceptable. However, such an explanation would only apply to males and to those females with exceptionally high amounts of testosterone in their systems and it would apply to all impulsive and compulsive behaviours. The psychoticist explanation cannot be applied to females generally as they don’t have enough testosterone in their system for such impulsiveness and compulsiveness to be biologically-based. Social Learning Theory could be implicated here in that we model the impulsive and compulsive behaviour of others - particularly if the RED vMEME saw that kind of behaviour as a short-cut to getting what it wants.

While we all know people who would seem to some of the traits said by Freud to be indicators of a phallic fixation, there is almost no evidence directly linking such traits to a ‘Phallic Stage’ of development.

Latent Fixations

There are not usually fixations associated with the Latent Stage - probably because there isn't much going on in terms of psychosexual development. However, there have been suggestions from some commentators that problems at this stage can result in difficulty in feeling comfortable with members of the opposite sex, resulting in avoidance of the opposite sex or conducting sexual activities in an emotionally-detached or even aggressive way.

As Freud noted, it is very common for boys and girls to separate themselves from each other in this stage - a tendency noted by Phil Erwin (1998) as first starting around 3-4 years of age. However, there is little evidence to relate this separateness to later problems with the opposite sex and sexual relations.

There can be very serious problems in the Latent stage which can shape the entire direction of a person’s life, as Erickson notes. However, these are associated with psychosocial issue rather than psychosexual ones.

Genital Fixation

According to Freud, this is the fixation we all should be aiming for: to be in a state where we are able to love and be loved - to enjoy and sustain warm and loving sexual relationships. This, in Integrated SocioPsychology terms, of course, is primarily about the health of the PURPLE and its capacity for adult attachments.

How well we enter the Genital Stage will be influence by how well we journeyed through the earlier stages. Unresolved issues at earlier stages can hinder people shifting focus from their own immediate needs to sharing relationships with others in the Genital Stage.

Conclusion...

Summing up, we can say that Freud’s great powers of observation have given us some powerful descriptors of character traits. Quite how these traits develop is still not fully understood. Integrated SocioPsychology can go a long way in complementing Freud’s explanations for oral and anal characteristics. Freud’s explanation for phallic types does not really hold up and we are obliged to look for alternative explanations.