Personal Theory: Sigmund Freud's Theory Of Personality

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SECTION ONE: #1 What is personality? Are humans born with a personality or does it develop over time through personal experience? Each person has unique characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that stay consistent over time and across situations. Over the years, psychologists have approached the study of personality in many ways. Some psychologists set out to understand how personality develops, while others set out to understand why there are differences in personality. Humans are complex beings, changing in different situations and with different people, which makes personality too complex to easily be described. However, psychologists focus on studying the internal and external aspects of a person’s character that influence …show more content…

The different viewpoints psychologists have of personality led us to the multiple personality theories we know today. The psychoanalytic perspective is one psychological theory that revolves around the unconscious mind. This perspective emphasizes that personality development is largely unconscious, hidden, and unknown. Sigmund Freud, the most influential figure of the psychoanalytic theory, emphasized that personality develops through unconscious forces, biologically based drives of aggression and sex, and unavoidable conflicts in early childhood. The psychoanalytic theory of personality dictates that behavior stems from the experiences that are left in the unconscious mind. Freud created the …show more content…

Theorists such as Carl Jung and Karen Horney, adapted and built on Freud’s ideas and formed new theories of personality. Carl Jung viewed the unconscious as the ego’s source of strength and energy. Karen Horney believed that both conscious and unconscious factors influence personality and that anxiety was a powerful force on personality outcomes. Like Freud, Jung and Horney’s theories support and provide reasoning for mental disorders and specific behavior. Overall, the psychoanalytic approach digs into a person’s past and life experiences to provide reasons for current behavior and allows them to overcome their issues. They argued that understanding and confrontation conflicts of one’s past would positively influence their

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