ABSTRACT
Concepts about the stages of life and the developmental trajectory through the life span have intrigued students of behavior, and descriptions of potential life phases have strong roots in philosophy and literature. Studying stages of development has largely been the province of developmental psychology. Clinical studies of psychopathology or psychoanalysis focusing on development are quite rare. This has been particularly the case in the field of psychoanalysis, which has been influenced mainly by Sigmund Freud’s specification in 1937 of psychosexual stages in childhood (Freud, 1968) and Anna Freud’s (1936) extension of this work in her studies of a developmental sequence of psychosexual stages. However, their conceptualizations barely approached and extended no farther than adolescence.
