Freud
In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud distinguished 'fixations of preliminary sexual aims...as in the case of voyeurs from the 'after-effects of infantile object-choice...an incestuous fixation of his libido'.
Sigmund Freud theorized that some humans may develop psychological fixation due to:
- A lack of proper gratification during one of the psychosexual stages of development, or
- Receiving a strong impression from one of these stages, in which case the person's personality would reflect that stage throughout adult life. He also assumed that 'these early impressions of sexual life are characterized by an increased pertinacity or susceptibilty to fixation in persons who are later to become neurotics or perverts'.
- 'An excessively strong manifestation of these instincts at a very early age leads to a kind of partial fixation, which then constitutes a weak point in the structure of the sexual function'.
Whether a particularly obsessive attachment is a fixation or a defensible expression of love is at times debatable. Fixation to intangibles (i.e., ideas, ideologies, etc.) can also occur. The obsessive factor is also found in symptoms pertaining to obsessive compulsive disorder, which psychoanalysts linked to 'pregenital fixations' whether caused by 'an alternation of unusual gratifications and unusual frustrations... a concurrence of instinctual gratifications with security gratifications'.
As Freud's thought developed, so too did 'the notion of a succession of possible "fixation points"' during development, and of 'the relation between this succession of fixation points and the choice of neurosis'. However he continued to view fixation as 'the manifestation of very early linkages – linkages which it is hard to resolve – between instincts and impressions and the objects involved in those impressions'.
Fixation has been compared to the way 'if you walk in front of a little chick at a certain time in the chick's life he'll follow you...there's a particular time when he gets "set"'. Such 'filial imprinting...at a particular stage early in life...a "sensitive period" in development' might seem a ready explanation for the human phenomenon of fixation. Freud, however, 'wanted to loosen, not tighten, the link between libido and its objects', and always looked for more specific causes for any given (perverse or neurotic) fixation.
Read more about this topic: Fixation (psychology)
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