Understanding Children -A Developmental

I want in this paper to discuss two topics: the first is the Freudian model of normal development; and the second is the use of this developmental model in facilitating our assessment of possible disturbances in childhood within the context of Anna Freud's Diagnostic Profile.

Normal development readily divides itself into phases—oral, anal, phallic, latency, and adolescence, and then -hopefully—sexual and emotional maturity. Phase development was first spelled out by Freud in 1905 in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in which he wrote of the sexual drives of children. Seventy five years later we are able, with the contributions made by more recent studies in ego psychology, to expand on and delineate what happens to the individual child in each developmental phase: we examine the appropriate expression of sexual and aggressive feelings, the level of relationships to the self and to others, cognitive attainments, the effectiveness or otherwise of the ego defences, the status of the superego within the personality structure, and so on.

Schematically, these developmental phases may be seen in sequence but there is invariably an overlap between each phase and we probably never entirely give up former modes of behaviour—there is some persistence of such modes in later development. For instance, even as adults, we are all familiar with the peremptory demands for need-satisfaction, a mode which originates during the first year of life; but of relevance is the predominance of such behaviour -does it hold sway over our mode of relating or is it simply a minor element within our adult personality structure? As Freud noted in 1933: “Whereas earlier we chiefly emphasised the way in which each of [the developmental phases] passed away before the next, our attention now is directed to the facts that show us how much of each earlier phase persists alongside and behind the later configurations and obtains a permanent representation in the libidinal economy and character of