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Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytic Perspective On Personality

Decent Essays

The basic idea of Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytic perspective of an individual’s personality focuses on the role our unconscious thoughts, feelings and our early childhood experiences and how it determines an individual’s behavior. Freud argues the largest part of the human mind is hidden or unconscious, which are things that people can’t easily bring to awareness. These either originate in the unconscious mind as drives or instincts and they can become "hidden" at some point in life; especially after a traumatic experience. In Freud's theory, there are three levels of awareness: the id corresponds to the unconscious, the ego to the conscious, and the superego to the "preconscious."
Freud believes that the goal of all behavior is a way of reducing tension through the release of energy, which produces pleasure. In the id, these drives require instant gratification or release, but the endless discovery of pleasure obviously conflicts with in society because the immediate gratification of pleasure is not accepted. Freud argues that humans are primarily driven by sexual and aggressive instincts and believes that people are naturally destructive, with an unconscious thoughts or activities that are considered crimes in contemporary society. Freud believes that this is a result of tensions is most likely caused by holding back our unconscious drives, which is to be aggressive towards other people. He essentially sees human nature in a pessimistic way and is very structural about it. He argued that humans are born evil and want to act aggressively. Although, Freud would agree that people are able to be good, have morals and help other people because of their superego.
On the other hand, humanist psychologist Carl Rogers disagrees with the psychoanalytic theory and thought it was a ‘dehumanizing nature’. The main idea of the humanistic perspective is that people are all born with drives that encourage them to engage in things that will increase their personal satisfaction and their contributions to society. This idea is commonly known as the self-actualizing tendency. This tendency is within all individuals and is a motivation that occurs in each person to develop their potentials to the best of their ability.

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