Personality Development in Psychology
Personality Development in Psychology
The first school of thought we studied this year was Freud’s. The identification of the id, ego, and superego personalities, the psychosexual stages that we grow through, and the defense mechanism all seem very logical. But from studying the theories more, Freud’s ideas become more of coincidences than truth for me. The id, ego, and superego types of personalities are something that I believe true of everyone. Every person has one of the characteristics that they can hold true to themselves depending on the situation. Someone could have a weakness for sweets and be constantly eating chocolate (id,) but that same person could be very thrifty and refuse to spend their money on something that they don’t need (superego,) and maybe everything else about them could fall in the middle (ego.) The psychosexual sexual stages also come off as obvious guesses to me. The thought that everyone goes through phases in their life I can attest to, and that certain ones come at certain times, but who didn’t know that? When children are real young they constantly put things in their mouth, so anyone, not only Freud, could call this an oral stage. The comparisons of the stages to fairy tales are far stretches. To think that famous authors had certain sexual thoughts in their heads when writing bedtime stories for kids is a little out there.
Freud’s defense mechanisms are the most accurate of his ideas. I’ve always been curious as to why people act to certain situations the way they do. The mechanisms were one part of his ideas that I had used in everyday life. Rationalization and denial are things I saw everyday, and when learning about them, compared to other things he discovered, I could relate and see better where there was truth. Freud basically believed in the unconscious, and that it’s what rules everything we do. I believe in the subconscious, that it effects some decisions that we make, but I don’t think that it runs our life. There is a reason we have a conscious, so that we can be aware of choices that we are making and what is going on around us.
Behaviorism is the opposite of Freud’s beliefs. Behaviorists believe that the unconscious is not at all involved in the decisions and choices people...