Have you ever experienced a period in your life when you always want something inside your mouth? Or that desire to keep your mouth always occupied with something? If you do, have you ever been worried that you would no longer be able to stop that desire? Did you have that thought to visit your doctors to know what was happening to you? In each thing that people do, there is always that certain explanation that tells why people do it. As for the case mentioned above, psychologists call it as oral fixation.
What is Oral Fixation?
It is defined as an oral condition that involves a person having that unconscious obsession with his mouth. Along with that, the person also feels that need to suck or chew on something all the time. It is an oral condition that has a chance of leading to nail biting and other related habits along with excessive cock-gobbling. Considering children, most of them are undergoing the oral fixation stage, which occurs from ages four to eight months.
Thus, if you are experiencing the same desire and obsession, you already know what it is called. This oral condition can involve a wide range of things including gum, straw, toothpick, cigarette and anything that would make the mouth occupied.
Oral Fixation Psychology: The Simple Explanation
The habit was not about being or feeling hungry. They just feel much comfortable whenever they are watching something while nibbling or chewing on something. In the end, the desire to put something on the mouth becomes an outlet for something like nervous energy.
Oral Fixation Psychology: Based on the Freudian Theory
The oral fixation psychology is explained by Sigmund Freud as something related to a person’s childhood experience. He also believed that it has something to do with breastfeeding. According to him, the condition is developed because of the traumatic experience a person had during childhood.
As for its connection to breastfeeding, Freud theorized that how a person sees the world once grown up has something do with how they are or are not breastfed. In his psychosexual development stages, the oral stage lasts for about one year and half. It is this time when kids are preoccupied with sucking, nursing and also accepting anything placed in one’s mouth. The oral character can either be satisfied, overindulged or frustrated. As an overindulged child, nursing urges are typically always met. Thus, it leaves them with personality traits that are unpleasant like being dependent on others, helplessness and sense of entitlement. As for the babies who are orally frustrated, their nursing period was either cut short or they were not nursed at all. Hence, these babies become envious, suspicious, pessimistic and the one exhibiting the symptoms of oral fixation.
That theory has now provided several evidence and statements coming from other doctors. Thus, as a simple fact about the oral fixation psychology, it is linked to being deprived during the oral stage. This condition may involve almost anything being placed in the mouth. Thus, whatever that thing is, when the usage gets out of control, it will lead to harming one’s health.