The Super-ego is fuelled on the morality principal and distinguished by our internalised morals and ideals set by our family and society. The Super-ego provides us with an inner conscience encouraging us to make correct judgements and behaviours.
According to Freud we each transition through five psycho-sexual stages of development, Oral, anal, Phallic, latent and genital, with each stage representing a fixation of the libido. The first five years of life were said to be crucial to the formation of adult personality.
Freud proposed that during the Phallic stage boys became sexually attracted to their mother and wished to replace their fathers. He named this The Oedipal Complex. It is during this time the boy also develops fear of castration from his father as punishment for his feelings and instead begins to identify with him and represses the sexual feelings for his mother.
During the Phallic stage, girls were said to become sexually attracted to their fathers, this has been termed The Electra Complex by contemporary psychoanalysts. However due to their lack of penis they do not fear castration but instead experience penis envy and never fully resolve The Electra Complex.
Some his contemporaries began to question the foundations of Freud’s theoretical framework, in particular his emphasis on sex.
They believed the aspects of conscious thought, gender, culture, and interpersonal relationships throughout the individuals entire life span, contributed greatly to the development of personality and should be demonstrated with pivotal significance.
Due to the under evaluation of these factors at the time, some of his peers began to diverge from Freudian thought and endeavoured to investigate these factors further, culminating in a fully appraised theory of personality development that boasted ecological validity.
According to the approach of Burrhus Frederic Skinner no stages of personality development are assumed. Instead he believed the continuum of environmental exposure in regards to actions and consequences is what ultimately shapes personality development, with positive reinforcement the determinant for correct behaviour. Therefor “The richer the person’s history of reinforcement, the more likely it is that he or she will have a well-developed, interesting personality”. (Nye, R.D (2000) P;135)
Carl Jung introduced his own influential school of thought known as analytical psychology after disagreeing with Freud on sex as primary motivation and the unconscious consisting of vortex of repressed negative thoughts and urges, he believed the unconscious was a place of creativity as well. His most famous theory is of the collective unconscious, “a shared memory of symbols, imagery and memories that he called archetypes. These harken back to the dawn of human consciousness and are common in all cultures and civilisations.” (Mannion, J [Accessed 29/10/12])
Jung believed that everyone tended to emphasise one of four types of thinking, rational thought, feeling, sensing or intuiting and that people were either introvert or extraverted personalities.
In further retaliation to Freud’s chauvinistic theory a quest of feminist perspective ensued. Feminists argue that “assumptions about the inherent inferiority of women were embedded in the very core of psychoanalytical theory”. (Lerman, H (1986) P;6.) and sought to remedy it.
Karen Horney poignantly gave voice to the female perspective largely neglected by Freud, whom he himself admitted to finding the female of the species a riddle unfathomed. Finding the notion of penis envy preposterous, Horney instead illustrated that it was actually the status and power bestowed upon men in a patriarchal society that women so desperately craved and envied, and furthermore proposed that men experienced womb envy due to their incapacity to bear a child.
Critiquing Freud on the basis of individuality.. (….)
“Freud’s psychoanalysis is not useful for women because it neglects significant areas of women’s lives, specifically menstruation, child birth and despite his sexual focus the female orgasm”. (Lerman, H. (1986) P;11.)
