Originally Posted by
Mr. Carnelian
I will be mentioning sex here. But, I'm not being dirty: this is science (apologies for any inaccuracies, A level Psychology was quite a while ago).
Have you every heard of the Psychosexual stages? It's an idea which was first popularised by Freud.
The theory is that whilst your body and mind are developing, you pass through different stages of sexual development.
Each stage - oral, anal, phallic, latent and genital (we used the mnemonic Old Age Pensioners Like Goats in A level Psychology) - is characterised by the part of the body which is the main focus of the sex drive.
At each stage of development, there is the possibility that you will become "fixated": although you will likely still pass through the later stages of development, you will on some level remain "fixed" in that particular stage.
Freud would argue that a strong desire to chew objects or put them in your mouth shows that you are "fixated" on the oral stage.
These ideas still have quite a strong influence on psychoanalytic thinking, although many of the details have been dismissed or discredited.