So the first personality theory that we're going to discuss is Psychoanalytic
Theory, which was created by Sigmund Freud. And Freud made, at least, four
major assumptions in explaining personality. The first assumption he made was
about the power of the unconscious. And that is, the unconscious mind is much
more important in shaping our personality than the conscious mind. And, in
fact, the metaphor that he used is of the iceberg. And, the tip of the iceberg
is consciousness, just a small little part of who we are. What' really
important is below the surface and that's the unconscious mind. So the second
major assumption that Sigmund Freud made was that the human mind has three
provinces. So the first province of mind is what, Sigmund Freud, called the Id.
And that's the seat of our impulses, our desires, pleasure oriented. It's all
about want. The second province of mind, was what he called the Ego. And the
ego is our sense of self. And it's realistic and finally we have the super ego
and that is a sense of control of our impulses, conscience, knowing right from
wrong. So what makes these three provinces so interesting is that there is a
conflict. Inherent conflict between the Id on one hand and the Super ego on the
other. Between the impulse wanting something and controlling that impulse, in
fact we often can depict this as a fight that we have ourselves between our
angel side and our devil side. The devil tells us to do it, we want it, the
angel says no. So the third assumption that Sigmund Freud made is that
personality is shaped by early childhood experiences. Now this may not seem so
radical to us, but understand that in the day, people did not make that
assumption. They assumed childhood experiences didn't really matter much. Freud
argued otherwise. So the last major assumption that Freud made, one of his big
contributions, was the idea of defense mechanisms. And defence mechanism, are
like our immune system but for our mind. They keep threatening ideas, thoughts
and motives out of consciousness. So to the better known, defence mechanism
that Freud talked about were repression, and reaction formation. And in
repression, we're keeping these threatening ideas and thoughts and feelings out
of consciousness. And the main thoughts and feelings and impulses that we
repress are sexual and aggressive impulses. So with reaction formation, we turn
a threatening impulse into it's exact opposite. So for instance, a parent who
might harbor unconscious feelings of hostility towards a child. But those
feelings are too threatening so they turn it into it's opposite and become
smothering with affection. Likewise, another example might be homophobia. When
someone is threatened by their own latent homosexual impulses and turns that
impulse into hostility towards those who express homosexual behavior.
