Prior to to Sigmund Freud's five psychosexual stages of oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital there is birth and birth trauma. Life in the womb parallels the life of our ancestors in the ocean Sandor Ferenczi hypothesized and I've written on length about. The moment of birth is the parallel of the first vertebrates to transition to life on land away from the sea which had to be adapted to, much as newborns must learn to breathe on their own.
Freud's early psychosexual stages the oral and anal stages are rooted in mammalian and the transition from quadruped mammalian existence. Freud hypothesized that humans evolved from a quadruped mammalian ancestor which was more reliant on the sense of smell and matured sexually around age five, without a latency period.
The oral stage up to age 1 is of dependency on the mother after birth for sustenance, something all mammals share but is prolonged with humans who take longer to mature, to walk. The fundamental need for others others develops as well as the need to be independent due to external conditions leads to a lifelong conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle.
The anal stage age 1 to 3 in which potty training occurs has its phylogenetic parallel with the beginnings of a mastery of a bipedal stature away from the ground and away from the dominance of smell to the dominance of vision, something related to our primate existence as tree dwellers swinging from branches looking for ripe fruit in a three dimensional environment. The need to control defecation is really the ability to revert to a posture closer to the ground and its smells and then be able to get back up again.We learn to control the defecation of feces, hiding them, so we can get up and have them free from view.
Freud began this line of speculation about bipedalism in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess in 1897:
"the notion was linked to the changed part played by sensations of smell: upright walking, nose raised from the ground, at the same time a number of formerly interesting sensations attached to the earth becoming repulsive...The outcome, however, is not a release of libido but of an unpleasure, and eternal sensation analogous to disgust in the case of an object."
The oral and anal stages are followed by the phallic Oedipal stage of conflict and identification I described as paralleling the end of the alpha ape dominance hierarchy with greater male investment/cooperation due to hunting meat, which completed the transition from ape to human 5-2 million years ago as the climate began to cool down from the Pliocene to the Pleistocene:
"Our transition to hunting ape was perfected during the ice age, marking our transition from ape society. Colder temperatures began back in the Pliocene 5 to 2 millions of years ago when the trees began to disappear, forcing our ancestors to adapt to life on foot in the savanna. As the climate got colder and trees fewer, having a diet of some meat would have been adaptive. Rather than being dependent on nature, we could take the prerogative of finding our own food. Eating meat along with cooking it shaped our complex social organization, sharing food and greater parental investment in young, and enabled a big brain, providing lots of energy and decreasing our jaw size relative to the nut and fruit eating primates.
"This change to hunting precipitated a social change from primate society, away from a dominance hierarchy with an alpha male on top to one with more equality between males as well as more investment in offspring. The alpha male had primary access to females, probably taking a few mates for himself. Hunting to the contrary was most likely a cooperative venture of acquisition with primitive tools, against large animals. A system of either sexual promiscuity or serial monogamy guaranteeing individual sexual access would have been more advantageous to male loyalty, and so the alpha ape had to die. During this time, a forced egalitarianism in small groups would develop to ensure the sharing of meat. Attachment to multiple females, by confusing paternity, or a single partner, guaranteeing paternity, would guarantee such paternal investment."
The phallic stage of years 3 to 6 is when the child's own genitalia becomes the dominant erogenous zone. This is the time of the exploration of the body, which results in the realization of anatomical differences between males and females. Boys discovering woman's lack of a penis gives rise to castration anxiety, that the father who maintains sexual access to the mother has the power to remove the penis.
The Oedipus complex occurs when the mother is seen as an object of sexual desire and the father a competitor for the mother's affection. The phylogenetic parallel of the Oedipal conflict is the greater attachment adult males have towards women due to continual sexual receptivity as opposed to seasons of heat and rut, a change beginning with the dominance of sight ensuring regular arousal as opposed to pheromone smell activation. Since adult men stick around, they do compete with children for the mother's attention, and young children can't yet understand the sexual act which seems aggressive. Men are also less attached to offspring than the mother it is argued because of paternity uncertainty: it is certain for the mother to know the children she gave birth to are hers while it isn't as clear to the male. So the conflict with the father, the castration complex, may be a reaction against fears of male infanticide, which does occur in the animal kingdom.
Identification with the father as first an ego ideal and then a superego keeping the ego in line developed during the ice age to help men get over these anxieties and work together. Instead of having a Nietzschean superman of the alpha male keeping the frustrated men in line, the shared individual ideal of the father would with the growth of human consciousness and shared intentionality take over as lawgiver, anthropomorphized into animal or object worship due to the guilt of eliminating the alpha male.
"Darwin deduced from the habits of the higher apes that men, too, originally lived in comparatively small groups or hordes within which the jealousy of the oldest and strongest male prevented sexual promiscuity.
"One day, the brothers who had been driven out, came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end to the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually.
"Our transition to hunting ape was perfected during the ice age, marking our transition from ape society. Colder temperatures began back in the Pliocene 5 to 2 millions of years ago when the trees began to disappear, forcing our ancestors to adapt to life on foot in the savanna. As the climate got colder and trees fewer, having a diet of some meat would have been adaptive. Rather than being dependent on nature, we could take the prerogative of finding our own food. Eating meat along with cooking it shaped our complex social organization, sharing food and greater parental investment in young, and enabled a big brain, providing lots of energy and decreasing our jaw size relative to the nut and fruit eating primates.
"This change to hunting precipitated a social change from primate society, away from a dominance hierarchy with an alpha male on top to one with more equality between males as well as more investment in offspring. The alpha male had primary access to females, probably taking a few mates for himself. Hunting to the contrary was most likely a cooperative venture of acquisition with primitive tools, against large animals. A system of either sexual promiscuity or serial monogamy guaranteeing individual sexual access would have been more advantageous to male loyalty, and so the alpha ape had to die. During this time, a forced egalitarianism in small groups would develop to ensure the sharing of meat. Attachment to multiple females, by confusing paternity, or a single partner, guaranteeing paternity, would guarantee such paternal investment."
The phallic stage of years 3 to 6 is when the child's own genitalia becomes the dominant erogenous zone. This is the time of the exploration of the body, which results in the realization of anatomical differences between males and females. Boys discovering woman's lack of a penis gives rise to castration anxiety, that the father who maintains sexual access to the mother has the power to remove the penis.
The Oedipus complex occurs when the mother is seen as an object of sexual desire and the father a competitor for the mother's affection. The phylogenetic parallel of the Oedipal conflict is the greater attachment adult males have towards women due to continual sexual receptivity as opposed to seasons of heat and rut, a change beginning with the dominance of sight ensuring regular arousal as opposed to pheromone smell activation. Since adult men stick around, they do compete with children for the mother's attention, and young children can't yet understand the sexual act which seems aggressive. Men are also less attached to offspring than the mother it is argued because of paternity uncertainty: it is certain for the mother to know the children she gave birth to are hers while it isn't as clear to the male. So the conflict with the father, the castration complex, may be a reaction against fears of male infanticide, which does occur in the animal kingdom.
Identification with the father as first an ego ideal and then a superego keeping the ego in line developed during the ice age to help men get over these anxieties and work together. Instead of having a Nietzschean superman of the alpha male keeping the frustrated men in line, the shared individual ideal of the father would with the growth of human consciousness and shared intentionality take over as lawgiver, anthropomorphized into animal or object worship due to the guilt of eliminating the alpha male.
"Darwin deduced from the habits of the higher apes that men, too, originally lived in comparatively small groups or hordes within which the jealousy of the oldest and strongest male prevented sexual promiscuity.
"One day, the brothers who had been driven out, came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end to the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually.
"What had up to then been prevented by his actual existence was thenceforward prohibited by the sons themselves"
-Freud Totem and Taboo 1913
This brings us to the latency stage. Latency is the period after age 5 or 6 and before puberty, around age 12-13. Sexual identification has already occurred during the previous genital stage. During this period sexual urges are held back and the child is able to make social relationships with fellow children of the same sex and through education take in the morals of adults, fully developing a superego. The sexual instinct is chilled during this cool off period so we can live together.
This brings us to the latency stage. Latency is the period after age 5 or 6 and before puberty, around age 12-13. Sexual identification has already occurred during the previous genital stage. During this period sexual urges are held back and the child is able to make social relationships with fellow children of the same sex and through education take in the morals of adults, fully developing a superego. The sexual instinct is chilled during this cool off period so we can live together.
The evolutionary historical parallel of the period of sexual latency is the ice age. Sandor Ferenczi the Hungarian psychoanalyst made a connection between Freud's psychosexual stage of latency and the last ice age.
"Having ventured so far beyond the knowable, we have no reason to shrink before the last analogy and from bringing the last great step into individual repression, the latency period, into connection with the last and greatest catastrophe that smote our primate ancestors...,i.e. with the misery of the glacial period, which we faithfully recapitulate in our individual life." Sandor Ferenczi, Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality 1913, found in Freud: Biologist of the Mind 1977
Freud himself mentioned the theory in The Ego and the Id 1923.
"According to one psychoanalytic hypothesis [by Ferenczi], the last mentioned phenomenon, which seems to be peculiar to man, is a heritage of the cultural development necessitated by the glacial epoch. We see, then, that the differentiation of the superego from the ego is no matter of chance"
The latency period makes psychosexual development "diphasic", that is separated into pre-genital and genital phases. Only an historical catastrophe would separate both. Since the preconditions for society developed during the ice age, the agent of social morality the superego also developed then.
When the climate changed and the Earth warmed, Homo Sapiens Sapiens emerged as the one successful hominid having resolved the Oedipal conflict through a new social consciousness to secure cooperation. The interglacial epoch could be a parallel for the genital stage after latency when the external world can be understood and become a source of happiness instead of difficulty. The genital stage is when sexual contact ventures outside the family, in reproductive terms towards the other sex, much as civilization transcends the social bonds of immediate kinship.
A new social consciousness the genital phase with the control of fire, which was a repression of the autoerotic and homoerotic sexual instinct, to augment same-sex social identification. When in the sight of natural fires, the men would put the fire out with a stream of urine, perhaps sharing in the act. This pleasure belongs to the men and is a source of genital pleasure not linked to women. One day a man renounced the autoerotic and homosexual pleasure of putting out fire with urine and took the fire back to the women and with this invention outcompeted the other men for the love of the women. The nature of fire gave benefit to the entire community and so was not overcome by resentment. So a few men would repress, that is sublimate, their sexual urges into the mastery of nature by labor and so would achieve a higher status than his fellow men among women, achieving a new form of social identity: economic. This sublimation of labor got us through the ice age.
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