Psychology for Dummies (31 page)
Read Psychology for Dummies Online
Authors: Adam Cash
Tags: #Psychology, #General, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Spirituality
What kind of personality would you have if someone erased all of your memories? Your first birthday? Your first day at school? Your wedding? Would you just be a blank blob of eating, sleeping, and wandering flesh? Freud felt that our memories and how they are arranged in our minds are vital parts of our personalities. He proposed that there are three basic divisions of memory that are differentiated by how aware or conscious each of us is of the material in those divisions: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. The unconscious is the most famous of the three.
My “active” awareness constitutes my conscious level of awareness. Here, I’m aware of those things that are current and in the moment, like the book on my lap, its yellow cover, the typeface in horizontal rows, and my stomach growling because I haven’t eaten in six hours. My
conscious
awareness is dominated by the things I am hearing, seeing, and feeling, and if I’ve got a headache, trying to ignore.
The
preconscious
is made up of ordinary memories, such as birthdays, anniver- saries, and how to ride a bike. We’re rarely actively aware of our memories in the preconscious, unless deliberately conjured up or activated. But, they still play a powerful role in shaping who we are.
The
unconscious
contains the memories and experiences that we’re not aware of. They’re deep inside our minds and difficult to access. So the next time you can’t answer a tough question, just simply tell the inquirer that the answer is locked away deep inside your unconscious. Thousands or even millions of things go on inside your mind that you’re not aware of, you’re unconscious or unaware of them.
Actually, Freud thought that your unconscious is filled with all your memories, thoughts, and ideas that are too troubling, disturbing, and horrible to keep in your conscious awareness. This is where you harbor your truest feelings, unfiltered and unedited by the niceties of everyday life. Your unconscious does not lie! So the next time someone asks you if you like her new hairstyle, tell her what your unconscious really thinks! Your unconscious is where your deepest and most basic desires and conflicts reside, it’s the realm of secrets so dark that you’re not even aware of them yourself.
The point is, depending on your memories and how aware you are of them, you may have a completely different personality than you do now. You may be the guy sitting next to you in the coffee shop, who knows? So relax, you’re not a faceless robot in a sea of anonymity. Your conscious, preconscious, and unconscious memories help make you unique, giving you that special little personality that everyone, well, your mother at least loves.
Freud would have been a great Hollywood screenwriter. His “story” of person-ality is one of desire, power, control, and freedom. The plot is complex and the characters compete. Our personalities represent a drama of sorts, acted out in our minds. “You” are a product of how competing mental forces and structures interact. The ancient Greeks thought that all people were actors in the drama of the gods above. For Freud, you and I are simply actors in the drama of our minds, pushed by desire, pulled by conscience. Underneath the surface, our personalities represent the power struggles going on deep within us. Three main players carry all of this drama out:
Id:
The seat of our impulses
Ego:
Negotiates with the id, pleases the superego
Superego:
Keeps us on the straight and narrow
Each of these characters has its own idea of what the outcome of the story should be. Their struggles are fueled by powerful motives, and each one is out for itself.
The initial structural component and first character in Freud’s drama of personality is the id. Has an urge, impulse, or desire so strong that it just had to be satisfied ever overpowered you? A new car, sexual desire, a dream job? The answer is probably a resounding “yes!” Where does such desire come from? According to Freud, desire comes from the part of your personality called the
id,
located in the expanses of our mind. So look around, and look deep within. Look at your coworkers, look at your boss. It’s in all of us, even the quiet old lady at the bus stop. Underneath that quiet, grandmotherly demeanor lurks a seething cauldron of desire.
The id contains all of our most basic animal and primitive impulses that demand satisfaction. It’s the Mr. Hyde emerging from the restrained Dr. Jekyl. It’s that little devil that sits on your shoulder, whispering temptations and spurring you on. Whenever I see a selfish, spoiled child in the grocery store demanding a toy and throwing a tantrum if he doesn’t get his way, I know that’s the id in action!
The id is a type of “container” that holds our desires. Relentlessly driven by a force Freud called the
libido,
the collective energy of life’s instincts and will to survive, the id must be satisfied! We’re all born with the id in full force. It’s unregulated and untouched by the constraints of the world outside of our minds. When a baby gets hungry, I mean really hungry, does she sit quietly and wait until someone remembers to feed her? Anyone who’s ever gotten out of bed in the middle of the night to feed a baby knows the answer to that.
But I don’t want to give the id a bad rap. Where would I be without desire? My desire pushes me through life; it leads me to seek the things I need to survive. Your id does the same thing for you. Without it we’d die, or at the very least, we’d be really boring! So keep in mind that a large part of your personality consists of your desires and your attempts to satisfy them.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get everything you wanted, whenever and however you wanted it? Unfortunately most of us know otherwise. We all know how frustrating it can be when a desire goes unmet or gets stifled. Well, you can blame your ego for that. The
ego
is the second mental apparatus of personality. The ego’s main function is to mediate between the id’s demands and the external world around us — reality in other words. Does the Rolling Stones’ song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” come to mind?
So far, it seems that, if it wasn’t for reality, you and I would be a lot more satisfied. Even though the ego finds itself in conflict with the id, satisfaction is not abandoned. The ego is like a sports agent for a really talented athlete. Even though the athlete may demand a multimillion-dollar contract, the agent reminds him that he could price himself out of a job. So the ego negotiates with the id in order to get it what it wants without costing it too much in the long run. The ego accomplishes this important task by converting, diverting, and transforming the powerful forces of the id into more useful and realistic modes of satisfaction. It attempts to harness the id’s power, regulating it in order to achieve satisfaction despite the limits of reality.
As if the ego’s job wasn’t hard enough, playing referee between the id and reality, its performance is under constant scrutiny by a relentless judge, the superego. While the ego negotiates with the id, trying to prevent another tantrum, the superego judges the performance.
Superego
is another name for your conscience. It expects your ego to be strong and effective in its struggles against the libido’s force.
Usually, our conscience comes from our parents or a parental figure. As we grow, we internalize their standards, those same standards that make us feel so guilty when we tell a lie or cheat on our taxes. But does everyone have a conscience? There are certain people throughout history who have committed such horrible acts of violence that we sometimes wonder if they are void of conscience. How can serial killers such as Ted Bundy or Wayne Williams commit such horrible crimes? A strong bet is that they lack the basic capacity to feel guilt, so nothing really prevents them from acting out their violent fantasies. A famous psychiatrist once said that evil men do what good men only dream of.
It could read like a newspaper headline: “Sexual Satisfaction Fuels Personality Development!” Well not really, but Freud’s psychosexual theory of personality development was definitely about pleasure. What makes your personality so different from others? Freud’s search for the answer to this question led him to the discovery that the clues to understanding the uniqueness of an individual’s personality are found in infancy and childhood. Eureka, childhood is destiny! The personality that you live with today, the one that charms in order to get dates, makes lists and never gets anything done, ensures that the bathroom is always sparkling clean, was forged and molded in the fires of infancy and struggles of childhood. In fact, according to Freud, you were a unique final product by the time you hit puberty.
But what makes you so unique? Have you ever noticed how generic the ads in the “Personals” section of the newspaper are? “Single White Female looking for healthy nonsmoker for walks on the beach and good conversation.” I don’t know about you, but I’m always wondering what the real story is. What’s that SWF really like? After the first few dates, when all the romancing wears off, will she still be tolerable? What are her quirks? Does she snort when she laughs? Does she spend too much time talking about herself? Is her apartment neater than an army barracks? This is where the personality rubber hits the road. Behind the generic masks that we all present lie those things that make us stand out, our quirks.
According to Freud, your unique character and quirks are the products of how your personality develops during childhood. As a child, and even as a teenager, you go through a series of stages in which you grow and mature:
Oral:
Birth to 18 months
Anal:
18 months to 3 years
Phallic:
3 years to 7–8 years
Latency:
7–8 years to puberty
Genital:
Puberty to adulthood
It’s like having five miniature personalities, each lasting a couple of years until you reach maturity. This reminds me of a typical high school freshman who begins school with one personality only to have an entirely new persona by the end of the year, complete with wardrobe and a secret language. It’s Geek Von Bookworm one minute and Joe Slick the next. Each personality stage presents you with a unique challenge, and if you successfully overcome that challenge, you acquire a fully mature personality. (That’s Mr. Joe Slick to you!) But, if you somehow fail to overcome the challenge of a stage, you’ll be stuck or fixated there. This is where a lot of your personal uniqueness comes from, your “stuckness” or fixation at a particular stage of personality development.
Within each stage, you also find yourself focused on a particular part of the body known as an
erogenous zone.
It’s kind of like focusing on your washboard stomach when you’re 18 years old and your love handles when you’re 28; each stands out at a different time in your life. The pleasure sought by your inborn instincts is focused on sexual desire and gratification, through proper stimulation of each erogenous zone. If properly stimulated, you progress to the top of Freud’s psychosexual peak, sexual and psychic maturity. If not, you’re fixated on that particular zone and stuck in that particular stage of personality development.