Notes: Freud’s Theory of Personality

MAIN IDEAS:

  • Importance of the unconscious mind in determining our behavior. Freud would say we don’t really know ourselves - evidence: Dreams and Freudian slips.
  • Our childhood experiences are forgotten or repressed, but have a powerful effect on our adult personalities.
    Ex. Demanding parent’s behavior causes child to have low self esteem which leads to unhappiness as an adult.
  • Freud viewed the human personality as an energy system. The energy came from:
    1) Life instincts (erotic/pleasurable desires)
    2) Death instincts (destructiveness, aggression)

Personality Structure

  • Id: (Want to do) Inborn, instinctual, biological urges. Pleasure Principle.
  • Ego: (Can do) Forms in 2nd or third year.
    Reality Principle.
  • Superego: (Should do) Your conscience, source of guilt. Moral Principle.
/ Freud’s Idea of the Mind’s Structure

FREUD’S THEORY OF PSYCHOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT

• Freud believed all children are born with powerful, but unconscious sexual and aggressive urges that must be tamed. In order to become “civilized” children must acquire a sense of right and wrong.

Stage of Development / Characteristics / Age/Sex
ORAL STAGE
Weaning: period of frustration / Erotic pleasures obtained through the mouth. Sucking, breast feeding. / 0-2
M + F
ANAL STAGE
Learning social control / Child enjoys holding in (anal retentive) or pushing out (anal expulsive) feces.
Toilet training experienced as a restraint on freedom. / 2-3
M + F
PHALLIC STAGE
Child becomes a rival for the affections of the parent of the opposite sex. / Children discover the pleasure they can get from their genitals. They become aware of the differences between the sexes. / 3-5
M + F

BOYS: OEDIPAL CONFLICT

• Boy has an unconscious desire to marry his mother and kill his father. The father is powerful, so the boy fears punishment (castration). To prevent this he tries to be “good” by making himself just like the father - called Identification. (If you can’t beat him, join him.)

GIRLS: ELECTRA COMPLEX
(Proposed by other Freudians, but Freud himself didn’t think females went through this.)

• Unconsciously wants to marry the father and kill the mother. To escape punishment she “vicariously” possesses the father by identifying with her mother. She feels her mother’s triumphs and failures as her own. Adopts mother’s moral code.

• Penis Envy: Girls suspect (possibly on a conscious level) their mother has removed the penis they once had as punishment for desiring the father. To make up for this “deficiency” she tries to marry a man like her father and develops the desire to have babies. (Freud did believe this)

BOYS AND GIRLS

Latency Stage: Around age 5, sexual desires are pushed into the background. Children learn new skills and explore.

Sublimation: Process of redirecting sexual impulses into learning tasks.

Genital Stage: At adolescence, sexual drives reappear. Depending on how well you resolved your Oedipal or Electra complex your adult relationships will be more or less “normal” or adaptive.

• Freud thought personality was complete at adolescence.