Pyschoanalytic Theroy

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorCollege, Undergraduate April 2001

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According to Freud our personality operates and develops at three different levels of awareness consisting of the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. He also believed that each person has certain amount of psychological energy. This psychological energy formed the three basic structures of personality "" the id, the ego, the superego. The unconscious part is referred to as the id, the most primitive part of personality, which is completely immune to logic, values, morality, danger, and the satisfaction of the instinctual needs, and is ruled by the pleasure principle. For example- a teenager jumping of the top of the building because his parents refused to get him new toys, shows the death instinct, which is a part of id's reservoir of energy. The ego is the essential part of inner self that experiences and maintains a conscious contact with reality and consequences of certain acts. The ego also promotes rational thinking, organization, and planning dimensions of personality.

It operates on reality principle, which is the capacity to postpone certain desires of the id until the appropriate circumstances exist in the external world. For example: no matter how hungry I am, I would never eat any non-vegetarian food In between the conscious and unconscious is the preconscious, which is referred to as the superego, which is partly conscious, self-evaluative, moralistic component of the personality. The superego consists of the internalized social values and rules.

The ego defense mechanisms are the ways in which the ego deals with the demands of the id and the superego and tries to find a compromise that satisfies both id and superego or by giving into one side or the other. If a realistic solution is not possible, the ego may temporarily reduce anxiety by blocking the impulses or distorting them into a...