Psychology

Psychology assignment Freud was interested in mass thoughts and feelings that were suppressed-forcibly blocked from the subconscious thought because it was too painful to acknowledge and he thought that this was the influence on behavior and choices. Freud also believed that errors whilst reading, writing and speaking were also the working of the unconscious. Jokes especially were an outlet for expressing repressed sexual and aggressive tendencies, for Freud nothing was accidental. Freud divided the three elements into: the id, the ego and the super ego, he saw these as “useful aids to understanding” the minds dynamics. The id is a collection of unconscious psychic energy that continually tries to satisfy the need to survive, reproduce and agress. The id demands pleasure, if left it will seek immediate gratification, for example a new born baby will cry out for gratification the moment it feels hungry, uncomfortable or tired, no matter were they are. As the child gets older its ego develops, the ego operates on the reality principle, which seeks to have responsibility over the id's impulses in realistic ways to get pleasure in practical ways, avoiding pain in the process. The ego contains partly conscious thoughts, judgment and memories. It controls the personality. The ego is the in between of impulsive demands of the id, the demands of the super ego and the real life demands of the outside world. Around the age of 4 or 5 years the child's ego recognizes the demands of the new super ego. The super ego is the voice of the conscious that forces the ego to consider the real and the ideal. It focus on how they should behave. The super ego develops as they realize the value of their parents and their culture, there by providing both a sense of right and wrong also a set of ideals. It strives for perfection, it also produces positive feelings of pride or of guilt. Freud concluded that children go through psycho sexual stages the first of which is the oral stage, this stage usually stars within the first 18 months {text:soft-page-break} where a child's sensual pleasure focuses on sucking, biting and chewing. From 18 months to 3 years the child will go through the anal stage were the sphincter muscles become more sensitive and controllable so bowel and bladder retention and elimination become a source of gratification. From the ages of 3 years to 6 years the child would enter the phallic stage where the pleasure zones shift to the genitals. Freud believed that in this stage the boys will seek genital simulation and develop unconscious sexual desires for their mothers along with jealousy and hatred for their fathers. The child will eventually cope with these feelings by repressing them. Through the identification process the child's superego's gain strength as they incorporate many of the parents values. Freud believed that identification with the same sex parent provides the child with their gender identity- the sense of being male or female. Children around the age of 6 years to puberty enter the latency period were sexuality is dormant and they tend to play with children of the same sex. Freud's ideas that each person was sexual from birth was one that caused so much controversy as well as his dream ideas, but without Freud's ideas, theories, practices and experiments, much of science, personality and psychology would not be understood.