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.
