Oral stage

In Freudian psychoanalysis, the term oral stage denotes the first psychosexual development stage where in the mouth of the infant is his or her primary erogenous zone. Spanning the life period from birth to the age of 21 months, the oral stage is the first of the five Freudian psychosexual development stages: (i) the Oral, (ii) the Anal, (iii) the Phallic, (iv) the Latent, and (v) the Genital. Moreover, because it is the infant’s first human relationship — biological (nutritive) and psychological (emotional) — its duration depends upon the child-rearing mores of the mother’s society. Sociologically, the duration of infantile nursing is determined normatively, because the oral stage is especially important in societies that consider the stomach to be the seat of the emotions, as among some African and south-west Pacific Ocean societies that perceive the oral stage as medicinal.

Oral-stage fixation

Psychologically, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) proposed that if the nursing child’s appetite were thwarted during any libidinal development stage, the anxiety would persist into adulthood as a neurosis (functional mental disorder). Therefore, an infantile oral fixation (oral craving) would be manifest as an obsession with oral stimulation; yet, if weaned either too early or too late, the infant might fail to resolve the emotional conflicts of the oral, first stage of psychosexual development and he or she might develop a maladaptive oral fixation.