page_title: Phallic stage
section_title: Oedipus
hierarchical_section_title: Phallic stage / Complexes: Oedipus and Electra / Oedipus
caption_attribution_description: Painting; Paintings
context_page_description: 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 centers upon their 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: the oral, the anal, the phallic, the latent, and the genital.
context_section_description: 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 his mother, and focuses jealousy and emotional rivalry against his father — because it is he who sleeps with the mother. To facilitate uniting him with the mother, the boy's id wants to kill his father (as did Oedipus), but the ego, pragmatically based upon the reality principle, knows that his father is the stronger of the two males competing to psychosexually possess the one female. Nonetheless, the fearful boy remains ambivalent about his 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.
caption: Oedipus complex: Oedipus and the Sphinx, by Gustave Moreau, 1864.
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