psychosexual development, (in psychoanalysis) the emergence of the personality through a series of stages from infancy to adulthood. Each stage is relatively fixed in time and characterized by a dominant mode of achieving libidinal pleasure through the interaction of the person’s biological drives and the environmental restraints. The stages of psychosocial development, as developed by Sigmund Freud, are the oral stage, anal stage, phallic stage, latency stage, and genital stage.
