SUMMARY anxiety when it doesn’t get what it

SUMMARY anxiety when it doesn’t get what it

SUMMARY Personality is the enduring and unique cluster of characteristics that may change in response to different situations.

It can be asses via different approaches such as Self-report or objective inventories, projective techniques, clinical interviews, behavioural assessment procedures and thought and experience-sampling procedures. In the study of personality ideographic research and nomothetic research are used and the major methods that the clinical method, the experimental method and the correlational method.Psychoanalysis was the first formal theory of personality influenced by Sigmund Freud. Freud divided personality into three levels: the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious. He later revised this notion and introduced the id, the ego and the superego.

The id is the pleasure principle and has no awareness of reality. It is the aspect of personality allied with the instincts. The ego is the rational aspect of the personality which is responsible for directing and controlling the instincts according to the reality principle. The superego is the moral aspect of personality.

One’s personality experiences anxiety when it doesn’t get what it wants and Freud described this as a feeling of fear and dread without an obvious cause. He proposed three types of anxiety: Reality anxiety, Neurotic anxiety and Moral Anxiety. He also derived the defense mechanisms which are the strategies the ego uses to defend itself against the anxiety provoked by conflicts of everyday life. Due to Freud’s experiences he was a man of high sexual interests and he sense strong sexual conflicts in the infant and child that revolved around regions in the body.

He called this theory the theory of psychosexual stages of development. These stages are: 1. Oral – the mouth is the bodily region and pleasure is derived from sucking 2.

Anal – the anus is the bodily region and pleasure is derived from toilet training 3. Phallic – the genital is the bodily region and pleasure is derived from incestuous fantasies. 4. Latency – the sex instinct is dominant 5. Genital – development of the sex role identity In the phallic stage Freud derived his best known complex, the Oedipus complex in males and the Electra complex in females.

The Oedipus complex is when the boy is in love with his mother and fears castration if his father finds out about his fantasies. In the Electra complex the girl is in love with her father and desires to have a penis as a genital organ. Freud believed that dreams represent repressed desires, dears and conflicts. He distinguished two aspects of dreams: the manifest content (Actual event) and the latent content (symbolic meaning of the event). In Freud’s latent content all of the symbolic meanings had a sexual background.

He viewed dreams as revealing conflicts in a condensed and intensified form. Freud violated his rules by analyzing his daughter and this was kept a secret for many years and this was viewed as an Oedipal acting at both ends of the couch. CRITICAL REVIEW Sigmund Freud’s theory of personality and the stages of consciousness and its constant battle paint a very negative picture of human life. The ego constantly has to battle the id and its selfish demands and the superego flying in trying hard to aid the id in calming down and strengthening the ego.As such our mind is constantly in war, our ego constantly battling off the evil id and losing every battle. Freud’s theory was initially based on his own person and experiences and memories, hence, lacking experimental and scientific justification therefore being unreliable and invalid. Freud analysed his own dreams and developed an insight into the dynamics of his personality development.

He also explored the memories of his childhood and formulated the stages of psychosexual development which are limited because they are based only on his childhood.He recalled his own sexual feelings for his mother and the hostility towards his father which shows that he himself was not a balanced individual. He confirmed his experiences with further clinical observations and case histories of his patients of which who were mainly women of a certain class. In my opinion he was overly enthusiastic about sex and sexual relations and as such most of his theories won’t stand the test of time and real life situations.

RECOMMENDATIONSFreud’s theory should not be taken for what it poses itself to be. One can analyse Freud’s theory and use certain aspects of it however, not everything in Freud’s theory is real. In the case of the Oedipus and Electra complex, boys and girls generally cling to mother and father respectively.

If this relationship isn’t built at the childhood stage there may be conflict in one’s personality or even in future relationships due to the lack of a relationship built with mother or father for the boy and girl respectively.However, the aspect of the boy fearing castration by the father and the girl desiring to have a penis is not real. Another example is that of the dreams and the symbolic meaning.

Dreams do have symbolic meanings however it is crazy to think that when one dreams a smooth-fronted house it symbolizes a male body or playing with children symbolizes masturbation. Freud’s theory needs to be studied against real life situations and it must be observed in order to be aligned fully with each aspect of his theory.