Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory: Structure and Development
Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalytic theory in the early 1900s. According to his theory, conscious experience is only a small part of our psychological makeup and experience. He argued that much of our behavior is motivated by the unconscious, a part of the personality that contains the memories, knowledge, beliefs, and instincts of which the individual is not aware. The contents of the unconscious far surpass in quantity the information in our conscious awareness. For Freud, much of our personality is determined by our unconscious.
Some of the unconscious is made up of the preconscious. But deeper in the unconscious are instinctual drives, desires, and needs that are hidden from conscious awareness because of the conflicts and pain they would cause if they were part of our everyday lives.
Structuring Personality
Freud developed a comprehensive theory. Personality consists of three separate components:
- Id: The raw, unorganized, inborn part of personality whose sole purpose is to reduce tension created by primitive drives related to hunger, sex, aggression, and irrational impulses.
- Ego: The part of the personality that provides a buffer between the id and the outside world. The ego operates according to the reality principle and helps integrate the person into society. It makes decisions, controls actions, and allows thinking.
- Superego: The final personality structure to develop; it represents the rights and wrongs of society as handed down by a person’s parents. It makes us able to feel guilty if we do something wrong.
Developing Personality
Freud also provided us with a view of how personality develops through a series of five psychosexual stages. Failure to resolve the conflicts at a particular stage can result in fixation, conflicts, or concerns that persist beyond the developmental period in which they first occur.
- Oral Stage: A stage from birth to 12-18 months, in which an infant’s center of pleasure is the mouth.
- Anal Stage: From 12-18 months to 3 years, in which a child’s pleasure is centered on the anus.
- Phallic Stage: A period beginning around age 3 during which a child’s pleasure focuses on the genitals.
- Oedipal Conflict: A child’s sexual interest in their opposite-sex parent, typically resolved through identification with the same-sex parent.
- Identification: The process of wanting to be like another person as much as possible, imitating that person’s behavior and adopting similar beliefs and values.
- Latency Period: The period between the phallic stage and puberty during which children’s sexual concerns are temporarily put aside.
- Genital Stage: The period from puberty until death, marked by mature sexual behavior.
Defense Mechanisms
Anxiety is a danger signal to the ego. Because it is unpleasant, Freud believed that people develop a range of defense mechanisms to deal with it.
Defense mechanisms are unconscious strategies that people use to reduce anxiety by concealing the source of the anxiety from themselves and others. Repression is the primary defense mechanism in which unacceptable or unpleasant id impulses are pushed back into the unconscious.
Evaluating Freud’s Legacy
The most important issue is the lack of compelling scientific data to support it. We lack conclusive evidence showing that the personality is structured and operates along the lines Freud laid out. Freud’s conception of personality is built on unobservable abstract concepts. He derived his theory from a limited population, entirely of upper-class individuals. In short, a cross-cultural perspective raises questions about the universality of Freud’s view of personality and development. His method of treating psychological disturbances is psychoanalysis. Unconscious processes help us think about and evaluate our world and set goals.