Sigmund Freud, perhaps the most controversial man of his time, identified unique characteristics of our personality with a series of theories. Psychic determinism was the observation that every psychological event has an underlying cause. Freudians believe we are “at mercy with of powerful inner forces that lie outside of our awareness. Freud also believed that every event ever committed had symbolic meaning. Nothing was just by mere chance. For example, if I bite my nails while I work on this blog, Freud would probably say I’m stressed—I may even be displacing my frustration. Then I might say, “yeah, I’m stressed, everyone endures different stressors daily” and he’d be all “No, Marco, I think you have some sexual desires that are going unresolved.” Then I’d say “Woah D-Freud, not so fast. This is a friendly blog here, man.” Anyways, there are a bunch of anxiety defense mechanisms that make situations like this bearable:
· Repression - the suppression of a memory that is too traumatic, that the witness cannot even remember the experience. This mechanism falls in line with
· Denial – Forgetting distressing experiences, something is too overbearing that one denies the event entirely.
· Regression – Psychologically returning to a previous age, sucking one’s thumb under pressure. Can’t say I’ve done this recently.
· Reaction-formation – Transforming an anxiety-producing experience into an opposite, a hypocrite notion. Our minds would disagree with our actions. Like in elementary school, the girls are always mean to the boys when they have crushes on them would be my example.
· Projection – Unconscious Attributions of negative qualities onto others. People with paranoia have this, because they think everyone is against them but it is they who will jump the line.
· Displacement – Taking out loose aggression on an accepted target. Screaming at and punching a pillow are much more appropriate targets for our aggression than on another person.
· Rationalization – Providing reasonable explanations for behaviors or failures. This one sounds a lot like denial. For example, I’ll rationalize that I didn’t even care about getting an A in psychology when I get a C because I can’t bear that it ever meant that much to me.
· Identification with the Aggressor – Adopting characteristics of an aggressor. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
· Sublimation – Transforming a socially unacceptable impulse into an admired goal. Oftentimes, the bad things we do as kids can, in the end, turn out to be what drives our success, because of adolescent interest to start.
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Now are you ready for Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory of Personality? Here goes.
Freud believed that there are 3 components of our human psyche, all serving a different purpose in aiding our decision making which forms the basis of our personality- by the choices we make consciously and unconsciously.
· First we have the id which determines our primal wants and necessities. It’s is the underlying, unconscious power that strives for the self.
· The ego, you could relate to the frontal lobes, decides everything in the “now” frame. The ego acknowledges the reality principle, the tendency to postpone gratification until an appropriate time, so I guess you could say the ego is our rational—the head, no pun intended, but the chief in decision making.
· Our morals are guided by the superego. Without the superego, our id would do all our thinking without the factor of morals playing into our decision making. Anytime you feel guilt, you can thank your superego. I feel like the superego is the beauty of being human, because if we did everything on instinct, we’d be nothing but animals. Yikes!
Oftentimes, we’ve been humored by the illustration of our good and bad internals, the angel and demon resting on our shoulder. The angel, the symbol of morality, plays the superego while the demon, with selfish intentions, has to be the id. The confused victim with the decision to make is the ego, the big man who chooses what road to take. Another example is the iceberg: The ego is the peak of the iceberg, the part floating above water, but as we realize that the true mass of the iceberg is below the water, split by the superego and id, the parts that aren’t viewable from the surface. Kind of makes me think that everyone has so much they won’t readily say or act upon.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg with Freud’s theories. I hope my peers have filled in the gaps on their pages.
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