While conducting therapy on patients, Freud established the idea that people begin their sexuality as infants and it developed until they begin adulthood. Freud came up with five stages of psychosexual development. He stated that as a part of life, every person would graduate from one stage to the next to form a foundation for his or her adult life. If a person experienced a traumatic event or for some reason or another did not successfully complete a certain stage, they would become “stuck” in that stage. As an adult, this person would have certain personality traits that reflected their broken foundation. The five stages Freud established are the oral stage, anal stage, phallic stage, latency stage, and the genital stage (Kaplan and Sadock, Synopsis of Psychiatry 220-1).
