Psychology: Psycho-Analytic Theory

Name:        ANKIT AMLAN                                                                Roll No. M2015HRM 069

Date:         11 / 09 / 2015                                                                Learning Log No. FCHR 2 - 3

1. What key concepts/ideas did you learn in the classroom session(s) leading to this log? Mention the concept(s) along with a brief description and the corresponding references of the relevant readings.

Personality refers to long-lasting and important characteristics within individual, ones that continue to exert a strong influence on behaviour. Aspects of personality may be observable or unobservable, and conscious or unconscious (Ewen, 2003).

Psycho-analytic Theory:

This Theory proposed by eminent psychologist, Sigmund Freud, states that our experiences and unconscious desires influence our behaviours. Our personalities have urges, drives and instincts that we are not always aware of and so that is what makes up our unconscious. The major driving forces behind Freud’s psychoanalytic theory are – sexual drive and aggression. These forces actually control all the mechanisms of what we do. He states that our psychic energies are generally fixated in different stages of our lives using fixations, during our psycho-sexual development.

• Oral fixation: During the first 1 to 2 years of life, the infant’s sexual desires moves around the oral region. Sucking at the breast or bottle provides not only nourishment, but erotic pleasure as well. No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life (Freud, 1905).
• Anal fixation:  At about age 2 to 4 years, the infant gains some control over its anal cavities. The infant then tries to recollect erotic feelings from the bodily sensations emerging out of excretion. In addition to this, the child tries to play with his/her faeces at this stage.
• Phallic Fixation: During 4 to 6 years of age, a child first finds pleasure out of stimulating his sexual organs.

 In a word, his early awakened masculinity seeks to take his father’s place with her (mother); his father has hitherto in any case been an envied model to the boy, owing to the physical strength he perceives in him and the authority with which he finds him clothed. His father now becomes a rival who stands in his way and whom he would like to get rid of (Freud, 1905).

The boy has Oedipus Complex out of his growing affection for his mother and a sense of envy for his father. Also, a sense of masculinity grows in him along with a sense of pride in having possessed the body and sexual organs. This equally qualifies for a sense of inferiority complex in girls known as penis envy.

• Latency period: After 6 years of psychological development, a person gets all his/her traits and personalities build up already. From this phase till he/she attains puberty, erotic senses are deeply emphasised in their minds in due course along with their pubic growth. There is a mark of subsiding of Oedipus complex and a feeling of spurning the opposite sex.

Social behaviour as vis-à-vis psychosexual fixations

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Source: An introduction to the theories of personality, Robert B. Ewen

The personality of a person is based upon the concept of Id, Ego and Superego which gets developed during his initial growth years only. According to this model of the psyche, the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends; the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego (Snowden, 2006). The super-ego stops one from doing, what the Id wants to do. A newborn child is completely driven by Id only.

Id consists of the basic instinctual drives of a person. It is entirely unconscious in nature and captures all the innate instincts of a person.

 It is driven entirely by the pleasure principle and hence lacks logic and rationality. It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle. (Freud, 1933).

Ego develops in the child as he/she grows from 6-8 months to about a year. Here, the child gets a sense of reality in clash with the desires. It turns out to be a clash between the body of the child with respect to the outside world.