Freudian Personality Theory
Sigmund Freuds Psychoanalytic Theory about Personality
Overview:
Sigmund Freud relied heavily on the unconscious mind to develop his theory on human personality. He believes that personality is not only developed from it, but also three different divisions on the mind, which will be discussed below. Theses divisions include the Id, Ego, and Superego.
Sigmund Freud:
Born in Příbor, Czech Republic, he is known as the father of psychoanalysis. He is famous for being the founder of Psychoanalysis and proposing the first complete theory of personality in the 1890's. His theory stated that a person's thoughts and behaviors emerge from tension generated by unconscious motives and unresolved childhood conflicts.
Defense mechanisms:
unconscious mental process employed by the ego to reduce anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.
Defense Mechanism #1: DENIAL
Lets an anxious person refuse to admit that something unpleasant is happening.
Defense Mechanism #2: Regression
Allows an anxious person to retreat to a more comfortable, infantile stage of life.
Defense Mechanism #3: Reaction Formation
Replacing an unacceptable wish with it's opposite.
Defense Mechanism #4: Projection
Reducing anxiety by attributing unacceptable impulses or problems about yourself to someone else.
Defense Mechanism #5: Rationalization
Displaces real, anxiety-provoking explanations with more comforting justifications for one's actions. Reasoning away anxiety-producing thoughts.
Defense Mechanism #6: Displacement
shifts of an unacceptable impulse toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person.
Defense Mechanism #7: Sublimation
A form of displacement in which sexual urges are channeled into nonsexual activities that are valued by society.
Defense Mechanism #8: Undoing
Unconsciously neutralizing an anxiety causing action by doing a second action that undoes then first.
PSYCHOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT:
In Freudian theory, the childhood stages of development during which the id's pleasure seeking energies are focused on different parts of the body. the stages include Oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital.