Latency

Latency

Latency is the fourth stage in Freud’s Psychosexual theory of development, and it occurs from about age 5 or 6 to puberty. During the latency stage, a child’s sexual impulses are repressed. The reason for this is that during the stage before latency (phallic stage) the child resolves the Oedipus or Electra Complex which are such traumatic events that the child then repress all of his or her sexual impulses. Interestingly, because this stage contains little or no psychosexual development, Freud was fairly uninterested in it.