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In this brief survey of Freud's earlier and later concepts of psychosexual development, a good deal has had to be omitted and some things have been oversimplified. The main endeavor was to compare Freud's early and his later conceptualizations of psychosexual development and to relate libidinal development to the unfolding of some adaptive functions. Freud (9) speaks of the principle of the exemplary function of sexuality, i.e., "the principle that sexuality lays down the pattern of behavior." To a certain extent, ego and superego functions and the forces of the id exert a mutual influence upon one another; yet drive developments prompt and dominate the unfolding of all the other functions. Anna Freud (7) expressed it clearly: "Analytic psychology … ascribes to the innate instincts the main role in shaping the personality. It is the claim of the instinctive urges on the mind which results in the development of new functions, the so-called ego-function."
Academic psychology tends to overrate the importance of adaptive functions (motor and cognitive development), to underrate emotional developments, and to ignore the instinctual drives. The result is a view of human development that is shallow and incomplete and thus misleading. If this is done, the child's development appears primarily as the result of the maturation of physiological equipment and of environmental pressures. Psychoanalysis relates the radical changes observable in early childhood above all to the drives, and thus reveals the range, the complexity, and the depth of the metamorphoses that a child undergoes during his formative years.