A three year old boy watches his father get ready for work everyday and pretends to shave, brush teeth, and gargle. According to Freud, what stage is he in?
Identification is the act of internally adopting the values, attitudes or behaviors of another person. Freudians believe that during the Phallic Stage of Psychosexual Development (3-5years old) boys will develop an Oedipus Complex where the boys develops sexual desire for his mother and fears that his father would find out. Freud believes that how little boys work to resolve this conflict is that they learn to identify with their fathers by joining or imitating their masculine behavior as an attempt to identify with them.
