Phallic stage

In Freudian psychoanalysis, the phallic stage is the third stage of psychosexual development, spanning the ages of three to six years, wherein the infant’s libido (desire) centers upon his or her genitalia as the erogenous zone. When children become aware of their bodies, the bodies of other children, and the bodies of their parents, they gratify physical curiosity by undressing and exploring each other and their genitals, the center of the phallic stage, in course of which they learn the physical differences between “male” and “female”, and the gender differences between “boy” and “girl”, experiences which alter the psychologic dynamics of the parent and child relationship. The phallic stage is the third of five Freudian psychosexual development stages: (i) the oral, (ii) the anal, (iii) the phallic, (iv) the latent, and (v) the genital.

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.

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