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Sigmund Freud
 Main Point
 Id, Ego, Superego
 Personality Development
What is at stake in all these attacks?...The real object of attack—for which Freud is
only a stalking-horse—is the very idea that humans have unconscious
motivation. A battle may be fought over Freud, but the war is over our
culture’s image of the human soul. Are we to see humans as having depth—as
complex psychological organisms who generate layers of meaning which lie
beneath the surface of their own understanding? Or are we to take ourselves as
transparent to ourselves?
Jonathan Lear, Open Minded
The principal Freudian concept on which everything turns holds that mental illness
is a result of defense against anxiety.
Peter Madison
In one of his Introductory Lectures, Freud told the following story:
I was once a guest of a young married couple and heard the young woman laughingly
describe her latest experience. The day after her return from her honeymoon she
had gone shopping with her unmarried younger sister while her husband went to his
business. Suddenly she noticed a gentleman on the other side of the street, and
nudging her sister had cried: “Look, there goes Herr L.” She had forgotten that this
gentleman had been her husband for some weeks. I shuddered as I heard the story,
but I did not dare to draw the inference. The little incident only occurred to my mind
some years later when the marriage had come to a most unhappy end.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
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Father of Psychoanalytic Theory
Psychodynamic Theory focuses
on the inner person
Defined:
Much of behavior is motivated by inner forces,
memories, and conflicts of which a person
has little awareness or control.

They stem from one’s childhood
and influence behavior throughout
the lifespan.
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Unconscious forces act to determine both:
Personality
Behavior

Part of everyone’s personality.

We are unaware of it.
 Though it strongly influences our behavior.
Conscious
Preconscious
Unconscious
Genetic Dead End?
Thanatos
Libido
Death Drive
Sexual Instinct
Life Instinct
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Raw, unorganized, inborn part of personality
Primitive desires of hunger, sex, and aggression
Pleasure Principle
Satisfaction is the
ultimate goal

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Rational and reasonable
Reality Principle:
Instinctual energy (ID) is restrained
in order to maintain the safety of the
individual and keep him/her within
societies norms

Right and wrong

Develops at age 5 or 6

Learned from others

Moral Ideals and Conscience
 Guides us toward socially acceptable behavior through the use of guilt
and anxiety
The cost of advanced civilization is the sense of guilt.
–Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Child in grocery store check-out lane:
 “To take the candy or not to take the candy, that is the question!”

Key Features
 Consists of stages
 Focused on particular biological functions
 If children are unable to gratify themselves sufficiently during a
particular stage or receive too much of it:
▪ Fixation will occur
Oral:
Anal:
Phallic:
(Birth to 12-18 months) (12-18 m to 3 years)
Latency:
(3 to 5-6 years)
Genital:
(5-6 years to adolescence) (Adolescence to adulthood)
It is astonishing that the human race could have for so long clung to the belief
that children were asexual beings. –Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures