Freud's Theory on personality and individual development
Freud's Theory on personality and individual development
Any discussion about personality would be amiss if it did not include the world renowned psychoanalyst Dr. Sigmund Freud. Freud's theory broke down into the existence of three distinct sides to one's personality: the id, ego and superego. He believed that a person displayed certain characteristics depending on the manner in which these three forces interacted with each other and to what degree the individual relied on each of them. A basic understanding of his theory is necessary to discuss its significance in the study of personality and furthermore in our look at the advertising world. Therefore, here is a look at his view of the three sides of the personality as well as how they interact with each other.
Id
The id is the unconscious part of us. It is our libido or primordial drive on which we fall back on when all reason is abandoned. Our ancestors who lived in caves probably diverted most of their energy to fulfilling the basic needs of survival dictated by the Id, needs such as: food, sex, sleep etc. The id is in no way in touch with reality and if left up to itself, would have no idea what to do if the individual were hungry or tired. It would sense that the body was hungry and form a mental image of food, but would have no idea how to make the person go out into the world and make that picture a reality. The id would know that the body was tired, but would not understand that if the individual would lie down and take a nap it would satisfy that subjective need. Once a person starts to be able to understand the cause and effect aspect of life in a world based in reality the ego comes into play (Jacob, 382).
Ego
The ego is sometimes referred to as the executive branch of the personality as it makes decisions based upon what the id wants and what the realities of life dictate that the ego can do to fulfill them. The ego's primary job is to act on the impulses of the id. It hears the id complaining that the individual is hungry and goes out to kill a deer, cook it and eat it to satisfy that need. When the id realizes that the body is tired, the ego decides to lie down and take a nap to rest the body. At first glance one would think that these two sides of the personality would be all a person would need, but morality has not been addressed yet. As far as the id and ego are concerned it would be perfectly acceptable to go out and cook the neighbor's cat for food, or sleep naked in the subway if that happened to be where the body got tired. It has no guidelines built into its programming to live peacefully in society. Thus, we develop a superego (Jacob, 383).
Superego
The superego is the moral compass so to speak and is developed in an individual by her interaction with society. It is our "conscience." Primary influences that develop one's superego are parents that teach the child between right and wrong. Other influences include religion and social circles of friends and decision makers the individual associates with. Through this day to day interaction the individual begins to develop an understanding of basic rights and wrongs. The superego acts as a kind of referee keeping the ego from blindly fulfilling the desires of the id without considering the implications of its actions. When the ego goes to cook the neighbor's cat, the superego suggests that the individual instead go to the grocery store and buy some food. While either solution would satisfy the id just fine, the latter is certainly more acceptable in society. One can begin to see the reason why different people have different personalities as the superego does not appear to be an inborn aspect of our personalities. According to Alexander Jacob,
The Freudian superego is not . . . a natural and inherited part of the psyche's structure; it is rather the consciously acquired stock of traditional customs, the 'moral code' as incorporated, for instance, in the Ten Commandments. The superego is a patriarchal legacy which as such is a conscious acquisition and an equally conscious possession. If it appears to be an almost unconscious factor in Freud's writings, this is due to his practical experience, which taught him that, in a surprising number of cases, the act of conscience takes place unconsciously. (Jacob, 386)
The superego also ...
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The Freudian superego is not . . . a natural and inherited part of the psyche's structure; it is rather the consciously acquired stock of traditional customs, the 'moral code' as incorporated, for instance, in the Ten Commandments. The superego is a patriarchal legacy which as such is a conscious acquisition and an equally conscious possession. If it appears to be an almost unconscious factor in Freud's writings, this is due to his practical experience, which taught him that, in a surprising number of cases, the act of conscience takes place unconsciously. (Jacob, 386)
The superego also seeks perfection and attempts to direct the individual toward this cause. This causes some conflict between the id and superego as they are both vying for the attention of the ego whose job it is to ultimately make the decisions. This is why one sometimes has a problem deciding between what one wants to do and what is right to do.
Repression
While not completely germane to our discussion it would be wrong to omit one of the principle ways in which Freud believes the personality interacts with itself: repression. The ego must find a way to deal with the conflicting confines of reality described by the superego and primitive desires thrust upon it by the id. It does this by using defense mechanisms such as identification, displacement and projecting which all, according to Freud, have their basis in repression. These unconscious methods the ego uses to distort reality help keep the individual from feeling anxiety. Repression works to push unacceptable id impulses out of awareness and back into the unconscious mind so that the individual no longer feels the tension of pleasing both the id and superego. While a certain amount of this repression is healthy too much of it can lead to a diluted self-image (Jacob 390).
Freud's theory of the unconscious, then, is highly deterministic, a fact which, given the nature of nineteenth century science, should not be surprising. Freud was arguably the first thinker to apply deterministic principles systematically to the sphere of the mental, and to hold that the broad spectrum of human behaviour is explicable only in terms of the (usually hidden) mental processes or states which determine it. Thus, instead of treating the behaviour of the neurotic as being causally inexplicable - which had been the prevailing approach for centuries - Freud insisted, on the contrary, on treating it as behaviour for which is meaningful to seek an explanation by searching for causes in terms of the mental states of the individual concerned. Hence the significance which he attributed to slips of the tongue or pen, obsessive behaviour, and dreams - all, he held, are determined by hidden causes in the person's mind, and so they reveal in covert form what would otherwise not be known at all. This suggests the view that freedom of the will is, if not completely an illusion, certainly more tightly circumscribed than is commonly believed, for it follows from this that whenever we make a choice we are governed by hidden mental processes of which we are unaware and over which we have no control.
The postulate that there are such things as unconscious mental states at all is a direct function of Freud's determinism, his reasoning here being simply that the principle of causality requires that such mental states should exist, for it is evident that there is frequently nothing in the conscious mind which can be said to cause neurotic or other behaviour. An 'unconscious' mental process or event, for Freud, is not one which merely happens to be out of consciousness at a given time, but is rather one which cannot, except through protracted psychoanalysis, be brought to the forefront of consciousness. The postulation of such unconscious mental states entails, of course, that the mind is not, and cannot be, identified with consciousness or that which can be an object of consciousness - to employ a much-used analogy, it is rather structurally akin to an iceberg, the bulk of it lying below the surface, exerting a dynamic and determining influence upon the part which is amenable to direct inspection, the conscious mind.
Deeply associated with this view of the mind is Freud's account of the instincts or drives. The instincts, for Freud, are the principal motivating forces in the mental realm, and as such they 'energise' the mind in all of its functions. There are, he held, an indefinitely large number of such instincts, but these can be reduced to a small number of basic ones, which he grouped into two broad generic categories, Eros (the life instinct), which covers all the self-preserving and erotic instincts, and Thanatos (the death instinct), which covers all the instincts towards aggression, self-destruction, and cruelty. Thus it is a mistake to interpret Freud as asserting that all human actions spring from motivations which are sexual in their origin, since those which derive from Thanatos are not sexually motivated - indeed, Thanatos is the irrational urge to destroy the source of all sexual energy in the annihilation of the self. Having said that, it is undeniably true that Freud gave sexual drives an importance and centrality in human life, human actions, and human behaviour which was new (and to many, shocking), arguing as he does both that the sexual drives exist and can be discerned in children from birth (the theory of infantile sexuality), and that sexual energy (libido) is the single most important motivating force in adult life. However, even here a crucial qualification has to be added - Freud effectively redefined the term 'sexuality' here to make it cover any form of pleasure which is or can be derived from the body. Thus his theory of the instincts or drives is essentially that the human being is energised or driven from birth by the desire to acquire and enhance bodily pleasure.
Freud's theory of infantile sexuality must be seen as an integral part of a broader developmental theory of human personality. This had its origins in, and was a generalisation of, Breuer's earlier discovery that traumatic childhood events could have devastating negative effects upon the adult individual, and took the form of the general thesis that early childhood sexual experiences were the crucial factors in the determination of the adult personality. From his account of the instincts or drives it followed that from the moment of birth the infant is driven in his actions by the desire for bodily/sexual pleasure, where this is seen by Freud in almost mechanical terms as the desire to release mental energy. Initially, infants gain such release, and derive such pleasure, through the act of sucking, and Freud accordingly terms this the 'oral' stage of development. This is followed by a stage in which the locus of pleasure or energy release is the anus, particularly in the act of defecation, and this is accordingly termed the 'anal' stage. Then the young child develops an interest in its sexual organs as a site of pleasure (the 'phallic' stage), and develops a deep sexual attraction for the parent of the opposite sex, and a hatred of the parent of the same sex (the 'Oedipus complex'). This, however, gives rise to (socially derived) feelings of guilt in the child, who recognises that it can never supplant the stronger parent. In the case of a male, it also puts the child at risk, which he perceives - if he persists in pursuing the sexual attraction for his mother, he may be harmed by the father; specifically, he comes to fear that he may be castrated. This is termed 'castration anxiety'. Both the attraction for the mother and the hatred are usually repressed, and the child usually resolves the conflict of the Oedipus complex by coming to identify with the parent of the same sex. This happens at the age of five, whereupon the child enters a 'latency' period, in which sexual motivations become much less pronounced. This lasts until puberty, when mature genital development begins, and the pleasure drive refocuses around the genital area.
This, Freud believed, is the sequence or progression implicit in normal human development, and it is to be observed that at the infant level the instinctual attempts to satisfy the pleasure drive are frequently checked by parental control and social coercion. The developmental process, then, is for the child essentially a movement through a series of conflicts, the successful resolution of which is crucial to adult mental health. Many mental illnesses, particularly hysteria, Freud held, can be traced back to unresolved conflicts experienced at this stage, or to events which otherwise disrupt the normal pattern of infantile development. For example, homosexuality is seen by some Freudians as resulting from a failure to resolve the conflicts of the Oedipus complex, particularly a failure to identify with the parent of the same sex; the obsessive concern with washing and personal hygiene which characterises the behaviour of some neurotics is seen as resulting from unresolved conflicts/repressions occurring at the anal stage.
Freud's account of the unconscious, and the psychoanalytic therapy associated with it, is best illustrated by his famous tripartite model of the structure of the mind or personality (although, as we have seen, he did not formulate this until 1923), which has many points of similarity with the account of the mind offered by Plato over 2,000 years earlier. The theory is termed 'tripartite' simply because, again like Plato, Freud distinguished three structural elements within the mind, which he called id, ego, and super-ego. The id is that part of the mind in which are situated the instinctual sexual drives which require satisfaction; the super-ego is that part which contains the 'conscience', viz. socially-acquired control mechanisms (usually imparted in the first instance by the parents) which have been internalised; while the ego is the conscious self created by the dynamic tensions and interactions between the id and the super-ego, which has the task of reconciling their conflicting demands with the requirements of external reality. It is in this sense that the mind is to be understood as a dynamic energy-system. All objects of consciousness reside in the ego, the contents of the id belong permanently to the unconscious mind, while the super-ego is an unconscious screening-mechanism which seeks to limit the blind pleasure-seeking drives of the id by the imposition of restrictive rules. There is some debate as to how literally Freud intended this model to be taken (he appears to have taken it extremely literally himself), but it is important to note that what is being offered here is indeed a theoretical model, rather than a description of an observable object, which functions as a frame of reference to explain the link between early childhood experience and the mature adult (normal or dysfunctional) personality.
Freud also followed Plato in his account of the nature of mental health or psychological well-being, which he saw as the establishment of a harmonious relationship between the three elements which constitute the mind. If the external world offers no scope for the satisfaction of the id's pleasure drives, or, more commonly, if the satisfaction of some or all of these drives would indeed transgress the moral sanctions laid down by the super-ego, then an inner conflict occurs in the mind between its constituent parts or elements - failure to resolve this can lead to later neurosis. A key concept introduced here by Freud is that the mind possesses a number of 'defence mechanisms' to attempt to prevent conflicts from becoming too acute, such as repression (pushing conflicts back into the unconscious), sublimation (channelling the sexual drives into the achievement socially acceptable goals, in art, science, poetry, etc.), fixation (the failure to progress beyond one of the developmental stages), and regression (a return to the behaviour characteristic of one of the stages).
Of these, repression is the most important, and Freud's account of this is as follows: when a person experiences an instinctual impulse to behave in a manner which the super-ego deems to be reprehensible (e.g. a strong erotic impulse on the part of the child towards the parent of the opposite sex), then it is possible for the mind push it away, to repress it into the unconscious. Repression is thus one of the central defence mechanisms by which the ego seeks to avoid internal conflict and pain, and to reconcile reality with the demands of both id and super-ego. As such it is completely normal and an integral part of the developmental process through which every child must pass on the way to adulthood. However, the repressed instinctual drive, as an energy-form, is not and cannot be destroyed when it is repressed - it continues to exist intact in the unconscious, from where it exerts a determining force upon the conscious mind, and can give rise to the dysfunctional behaviour characteristic of neuroses. This is one reason why dreams and slips of the tongue possess such a strong symbolic significance for Freud, and why their analysis became such a key part of his treatment - they represent instances in which the vigilance of the super-ego is relaxed, and when the repressed drives are accordingly able to present themselves to the conscious mind in a transmuted form. The difference between 'normal' repression and the kind of repression which results in neurotic illness is one of degree, not of kind - the compulsive behaviour of the neurotic is itself a behavioural manifestation of an instinctual drive repressed in childhood. Such behavioural symptoms are highly irrational (and may even be perceived as such by the neurotic), but are completely beyond the control of the subject, because they are driven by the now unconscious repressed impulse. Freud positioned the key repressions, for both the normal individual and the neurotic, in the first five years of childhood, and, of course, held them to be essentially sexual in nature - as we have seen, repressions which disrupt the process of infantile sexual development in particular, he held, lead to a strong tendency to later neurosis in adult life. The task of psychoanalysis as a therapy is to find the repressions which are causing the neurotic symptoms by delving into the unconscious mind of the subject, and by bringing them to the forefront of consciousness, to allow the ego to confront them directly and thus to discharge them.
