Custom Search

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Freud’s Dynamic Theory of Personality

Freud’s Dynamic Theory of Personality

1. Freud saw personality and behavior as resulting from a constant interplay between conflicting psychological forces that operate at three different levels of awareness.
A. Conscious : thoughts and feelings you are aware of at this moment.
B. Preconscious : thoughts you can easily bring into awareness.
C. Unconscious: thoughts you are not directly aware of.

2. Often the feelings, wishes and desires contained in the unconscious seep through to the conscious level in disguised or symbolic forms.
A. Dreams
1. manifest content are the dream images we remember
2. latent content is the true, hidden, unconscious meaning of the dream

B. Unintentional revelations
1. Slip-of-the-tongue (Freudian slips)
2. Dirty jokes
3. accidents, mistakes, forgetting, etc
.
C. Freud used Free Association to reveal contents of the unconscious.

3. The Structure of Personality
A. Id:
the most primitive part of personality
1. Eros: the life instinct: hunger, thirst, physical comfort, sexual motive (libido)
2. Thanatos: the death instinct: aggression, recklessness, and self-destructive actions
3. Pleasure Principle is the drive for immediate satisfaction of instinctual needs.


B. Ego: the organized, rational, and planning part of personality.
1. The Ego is the mediator between the demands of the Id and the restrictions of the real world.
2. The Reality Principle is what postpones instant gratification of the Id until the appropriate time in the real world.
3. If the Ego cannot compromise or satisfy the demands of the Id, it may repress the impulse or remove it from conscious awareness.

C. Superego : The internal voice representing parental and societal values
1. Emerges about age five or six.
2. The guilty conscience of the individual.
3. The superego evaluates behavior as acceptable or unacceptable and then either praises or criticizes.

No comments: