So, what motivates the expression of personality that we see in the way people behave?
The first theory I would like to talk about is Psychoanalytic Theory.
This is a pretty well-known theory, originally put forward by Sigmund Freud.
This theory has been very popular in the media.
Often, when people think about Psychology, they think about Sigmund Freud––even though
he wasn't a Psychologist.
He was a neurologist from Austria and the founder of psychoanalysis.
He had three core principles underlying his psychoanalytic theory.
The first one was psychic determinism.
In other words, all psychological events have a cause.
This is the idea that we're not free to choose our own actions because we're at the mercy
of powerful forces that lie outside our conscious level of awareness.
Most of our behaviour is driven by unconscious processes and not by our own conscious choices.
Freud thought things like dreams, erotic symptoms, and what we call Freudian slips of the tongue,
are all reflections of deep psychological conflicts that occasionally bubble to the
surface.
Dream analysis is driven, partly, by psychoanalysts thinking that's what gives you a window into
people’s underlying psyche.
The second principle is symbolic meaning.
This refers to the ideas that no action, however trivial, is meaningless and that we can come
up with an explanation or we can find meaning in most behaviours.
For Freud, most behaviours had some kind of sexual meaning.
Although it may not be a true story, there's an anecdote that he admitted that symbolic
meaning could be taken too far, because someone was joking around and asked him why he enjoyed
smoking cigars so much, and he said, "Look, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
It's not a phallic symbol," so yes, it can be taken too literally.
The third principle is unconscious motivation.
Unconscious motivation refers to the idea that we rarely understand what we do, even
if we seem to be able to explain it after the fact.
To understand Freud’s principles of unconscious motivation, you can think about the mind as
being like an iceberg, and that we can only really see the tip of it.
The conscious mind is that bit of the psyche that's above the water.
That's where our thoughts and perceptions reside that we've got access to.
The pre-conscious level is just below the water.
That's where our memories are stored and knowledge resides, and with some effort we can bring
those into conscious awareness.
But, the vast majority of it is outside of our level of awareness, deeper under the water.
The conscious mind is the thing that we're aware of, but we're not aware of everything
else that's happening down there in the deep water.
Freud suggested that the unconscious mind was the most important in terms of explaining
personality, more so than the conscious mind.
At the unconscious level, you've got your fears, your violent motives, your moral urges,
your selfish needs, and so on.
According to Freud, our urges for food, power, water, and sex reside in our id, at the unconscious
level.
Freud thought the id was the most primitive, instinctive component operating on the pleasure
principle.
It would seek immediate gratification for all those immoral urges that are going through
our minds.
So, the id is one component of our psyche, which is at the unconscious level.
The ego is generally something we're aware of at the conscious level.
The ego is supposed to be the boss of the personality.
This is really the decision-making component.
Because it has to deal with reality, it's restrained by the reality principle, and will
seek delayed gratification.
So, it's trying to find ways to hold the id off until there are more appropriate ways
to express those base level of desires.
The superego which is at all levels of awareness.
The superego, which develops at around age three to five represents society's moral standards.
It's the moral component.
It can operate at all those different levels of conscious awareness.
And it really represents what's right or wrong.