Psychoanalysis: Freud's Theory of the Mind and Personality
Psychology and Its Research Methods
Psychology studies the mind and behavior, and it seeks to understand and predict human actions. Researchers use different methods to gather data, including the experimental method that allows them to test hypotheses and issue conclusions about cause and effect.
Studies are generally divided into two types:
- Longitudinal studies: the characteristics of the subjects are analyzed over a long period of their lives.
- Transversal studies: data is collected at a single point in time, providing a snapshot of the subject at one stage of life.
Psychology serves to study and understand behavior, helping people to correct harmful or abnormal patterns and bring them back to normal functioning. There are three main reasons for applying psychology: clinical (correcting maladaptive behaviors), educational (preventing school failure) and business (optimizing employee competencies).
Psychoanalytic Theory
Psychoanalytic theory is based on the internal aspects of personality. Using introspection and free association, it explores the behavioral manifestations that occur within the person. Preferentially, the focus is on the conduct that occurs internally, because it is important to shape and modify behavior, avoiding everything that interferes with what occurs inside the person.
Conscious, Preconscious and Unconscious
The conscious contains the perceptions formed through the senses, thoughts and memories from which we can extract information easily. The preconscious contains thoughts, memories and learnings that are not currently formed in consciousness but can be brought up to awareness with effort.
The unconscious holds all the drives, innate impulses and repressed desires that escape consciousness, whose life runs parallel to that of consciousness and is expressed in dreams.
The Structure of the Personality
- Id (ello): the archaic part of the personality, present at birth, which seeks pleasure. It is governed by the pleasure principle.
- Ego (yo): the rational part, which is objective and acts according to the demands of reality.
- Superego (superyó): the moral part, which encourages moral behavior and self-esteem.
When an individual successfully represses the unconscious contents that conflict with the superego, internal conflicts will not arise with the person. The defense mechanisms available to an individual include slips (fallos) or frequently forgetting insignificant appointments and events without importance in daily life, and dreams.
Freud and the Interpretation of Dreams
Freud argued that dreams reveal unconscious realizations and repressed impulses. Dreams are not always what they appear to be, so their interpretation is necessary. What matters is decoding the latent content behind the manifest signs. The first technique is free association, which consists of relating the elements of the patient's dream to other associations.
Psychosexual Stages of Development
According to psychoanalysis, personality is forged during the first years of life and is characterized by stages through which the individual passes before becoming an adult:
- Oral (0-18 months): pleasure centered on the mouth; conflict: dependency.
- Anal (18 months-3 years): obsessive behaviors.
- Phallic (3-6 years): "I want what you don't have."
- Latency (6 years until puberty): sexuality is dormant.
- Genital (puberty onward): sexuality concentrated in the genitals.
Freud's Defense Mechanisms
Freud proposed that the ego protects itself when anxiety arises from tension between the id, ego and superego, through defense mechanisms that reduce it:
- Repression: sends the painful, unconscious experiences to the unconscious.
- Projection: attributes to other people something that belongs to oneself.
- Rationalization: invents arguments to convince ourselves of something.
- Displacement: redirects energy from its original target toward a substitute in a natural way.