1. The Psychological Aspect of Human Sexuality a. It is not the influence of hormones that is decisive in heightening sexual activity in humans, but rather the more developed parts of the central nervous system.
b. Human sexuality is a psychic phenomenon.
c. Freud: Scope and History of Sexuality
i. Scope: Human sexuality is not just a genital impulse but also love, tenderness, etc.
ii. History: Human sexuality does not emerge suddenly at puberty but is a gradual process within the whole life history of the human being.
2. Stages in psychosexual development
a. Prenatal sexuality: The sexuality of pre-natal individuals are influenced by such factors as the expectation and outcome (or their opposites) on the part of the parents and other important persons in their environment. These factors continue to exert their influence at birth and in infancy and childhood and beyond.
b. Natal sexuality: The experience of birth, where the neonate experiences a rough expulsion from a closed, protected, and familiar environment to an unfamiliar and threatening one, requires effort from the neonate to survive. This experience of loss and change of environment affects the way the neonate manages this.
c. Infantile sexuality:
i. Narcissistic or autoerotic (does not have an exterior object, but rater finds satisfaction in the infant’s body). It is consecutively fixed on various erogenous zones of the body necessary for various physiologically necessary functions - feeding (oral), elimination (anal and genital).
ii. The child advances in psychosexual development when he/she establishes primacy of the genital zone over other erogenous zones of the body and by moving from narcissistic love to objective love.
iii. The child achieves a resolution of the Oedipus complex (for males) or the Electra complex (for females). The Oedipus/Elektra complex is a stage of psychosexual development where a child of either gender regards the parent of the same gender as an adversary, and competitor, for the exclusive love of the parent of the opposite gender. This complex is resolved when the child achieves acceptance of his or her own sexuality and his or her relationship with the external object of this sexuality. This happens through identification with the parent of the same sex.
d. Early Adolescent Sexuality:
i. Sexual organs gains normal functioning capacity and the secondary sexual characteristics develop rapidly, temporarily outstripping the individual’s psychic and social development
ii. Relationship with others deteriorates (especially with authority figures), capacity for dialogue decreases; rebellious.
iii. There arises passionate friendships with individuals of the same sex, of sentimental character and sometimes accompanied by transitory homosexual practices.
e. Late adolescence and young adulthood: characterized by a gradual transition toward the establishment of interpersonal relationships with an individual of the opposite sex..
f Mature sexuality: This is founded on the overall equilibrium of the total personality
i. This is manifested by sufficient openness to the whole of existence, great capacity for friendship, and the maintenance of an attitude of openness to other persons, while at the same time having the capacity to be alone without the feeling disturbed and being able to appropriately control sexual instincts.
ii. Mature sexuality can be lived in various forms: marriage, virginity or celibacy, singleness or widowhood.
iii. Such maturity requires an integration of the sexual instinct with the entire complex of sexuality and the general dynamics of the person.
iv. It requires conscious, deliberate, calm and secure living and experiencing of sexual impulse and of sexual behavior.
3. Significance of the Psychological Aspect of Human Sexuality
a. Human sexuality is a reality that a person struggle with to integrate with his or her total personality, so that he or she may mature as a person.
b. Human sexuality is a privileged expression of the human person.
c. Certain psychic defense mechanisms tend to depersonalize human sexuality:
i. Fixation: when a human being is captive through strong bonds to immature stages of psychosexual development in which he or she finds pleasure in the past.
ii. Regression: This occurs when a person, after achieving a higher stage of psychosexual development, returns to a stage previously surpassed and attaches himself or herself very strongly to this stage. This may involves unresolved psychosexual conflicts, especially in infancy or adolescence. The individual resorts to seeking pleasure s of past stages, for which he or she feels nostalgic.
iii. Slow and delayed maturation: Some subject’s psychosexual development proceeds with abnormal slowness or suffers temporary stoppage, as if they need much time to summon the energy to make the leap to the next stage.
iv. Repression: This is a psychological defense mechanism whereby the ego defends itself against a disagreeable reality (often an unfulfilled desire) by consigning this to forgetfulness. This reality, though forgotten will manifest itself in other ways. In the area of sexuality, the undue repression of the erotic impulse gives rise to the accumulation of psychosexual energy which is not properly liberated, This tension easily tends to be discharged through unwholesome aggression.
v. Substitution and compensation: A psychological mechanism by which the visions of an unreal and imaginary world substitute for the real fulfillment of a sexual impulse.
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