22 August Today's term from psychology is Fixation.

This term has several different meanings in psychology. Fixation has a long history in Freudian and clinical psychology, and refers to when a person is "stuck" in one stage of psychosexual development.

Freud believed that life was built round tension and pleasure. All tension was due to the build-up of "libido" (sexual energy) and that all pleasure came from its discharge.
Keep in mind that Freud used the term "sexual" to mean all pleasurable actions and thoughts.

Freud proposed that psychological development in childhood takes place in a series of fixed psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. Each of these stages represents the FIXATION of libido on a different area of the body. As a person grows physically certain areas of their body become important as sources of potential frustration, pleasure or both.

For example, if a person does not get through the oral stage of development properly, then Freud would say that the person is fixated in the oral stage and will continue to seek oral pleasures, and will not be able to progress to the next stage of development until the oral issues are resolved.

The term subsequently came to denote object relationships with and attachments to people or things in general persisting from childhood into adult life.

Fixation also refers to an inability to adopt any different or new perspective on a problem.