Sigmund Freud – Personality Development

Freud’s Major Hypotheses about Personality:

Man’s psychic system is a complex energy system and obeys the scientific law that energy cannot be lost or destroyed, but it can be transferred from one part of a system to another part, and it can be transformed.

The Topography of the Mind
There are three levels or types of mental (psychic) activity:

1. Conscious
2. Preconscious
   
3. Unconscious

The Intrapsychic System
The personality structure consists of three subsystems:

The Psychosexual Stages of Development
There are five major stages of biological-physiological development through which every person must progress if he is to become psychologically mature. Freud called these levels of development Psychosexual Stages which include:

1. Oral Stage (Birth – 18 months)
2. Anal Stage (18 months – 3 years)
3. Phallic Stage (3 years – 5 years)
4. Latent Stage (6 years – Puberty)
5. Genital Stage (Puberty – )

Personality Development
Personality develops in response to four major sources of tension. A person is forced to learn methods of reducing tension and this learning constitutes personality development (new models of thought, feeling, and behavior):

1. Physiological growth processes (physical growth)
2. Frustration
   
3. Conflict
   
4. Threat
   

That the Ego develops methods for reducing tension and self protection:

1. Identification and displacement are used to resolve conflicts and frustrations.
2. Defense Mechanisms are methods that deny or distort reality and that may impede the positive (or mature) development of personality or psychological functioning.

That the Early years of infancy and childhood are decisive in laying down the basic character structure and personality of each individual.

Criticisms of Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory

1. Does not consider the influences of culture and society on the acquisition of modes of behavior and personality structure.
2. Too little emphasis on the significance of the process of learning.
3. Too much emphasis on the influence of Instincts, heredity, biology, and physical maturation on the development of personality.
4. His scientific or empirical procedure for validating his hypotheses had grave shortcomings in it.
5. Psychoanalytic theory is extremely difficult to test through controlled scientific research (it does not lend itself to testing by the experimental method).

Before Sigmund Freud introduced the “Iceberg Metaphor”, it was generally believed that the actions of people were primarily influenced by conscious thought and rational choices, made in relation to present situations.

Freud contended that the conscious thought and volitional behavior that the person is aware of constituted only a small portion of the person’s ongoing “day to day” experiences, and that the major influences on both conscious and thinking and observable behavior were unconscious, irrational, and historical, and derived from, multiple layers of the “Psychic Apparatus“, with each layer influencing those layers above it.

The following represents an illustration of the topographic model of the mind, the various levels of mental functioning, and the elements that comprise the components of mental functioning.