A child experiences difficulties transitioning from the oral stage to…

A child experiences difficulties transitioning from the oral stage to the next stage. According to Freud’s theory of personality development, failure of the child to pass successfully through a stage leads to:

Answer & explanation

Correct answer: option 2

The correct answer is Option (2) → Fixation

Option (1) Aggression — Incorrect. Aggression is a way of acting out hostility towards others. It is not Freud’s term for what happens when a stage is not passed successfully.

Option (2) Fixation — Correct. Freud held that failure of a child to pass successfully through a stage leads to fixation to that stage: the child’s development gets arrested at an earlier stage. A child who has difficulty leaving the oral stage may remain fixated there.

Option (3) Sublimation — Incorrect. Sublimation is a defence mechanism in which unacceptable urges are channelled into socially acceptable activities. For example, a person with strong aggressive urges may take up boxing or wrestling, where the aggression finds an outlet that society accepts. It is a way of handling an urge, not the result of a stage left unfinished.

Option (4) Discrimination — Incorrect. Discrimination means telling apart two things or treating people unequally. It has no place among Freud’s stages of personality development.

Note 1: The concept in Option (3), ‘sublimation’, is not in NCERT (2025-26); explained here for the benefit of the students.

Note 2: A similar question was also asked in CUET (UG) 2025 on 20-05-2025 (Slot 1).

NCERT (2025-26): “Stages of Personality Development … Freud’s theory also postulates that as children proceed from one stage to another stage of development, they seem to adjust their view of the world. Failure of a child to pass successfully through a stage leads to fixation to that stage. In this situation, the child’s development gets arrested at an earlier stage. For example, a child who does not pass successfully through the phallic stage fails to resolve the Oedipal complex and may still feel hostile toward the parent of the same sex.…”