Ashley Butera November 19th, 2015 PSYC-205 Theories of Personality Term Paper: Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist who became known for inventing psychoanalysis. Freud earned his degree in medicine at the University of Vienna in 1881, and then did research on cerebral palsy, aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy at the Vienna General Hospital. He then became a professor in 1902. Psychoanalysis is a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. Freud developed some methods to use in his session with his patients. His methods included free association and transference, thus establishing its central role in the analytic process. Freud used free association is used as …show more content…
He argued that humans can receive pleasure from any number of objects. He further argued that, as humans develop, they become fixated on different and specific objects through their stages of development—first in the oral stage, exemplified by an infant's pleasure in nursing, then in the anal stage, exemplified by a toddler's pleasure in evacuating his or her bowels, then in the phallic stage; focus on genitals. In the latency period, Freud contended, male infants become fixated on the mother as a sexual object. This is known as the Oedipus complex, a phase brought to an end by threats of castration, resulting in the Castration anxiety. Freud says in his later writings that there is an equivalent theory to the Oedipus complex for girls. This is known as the Electra complex. The dormant latency stage of psychosexual development preceded the sexually mature genital stage of psychosexual development. A child needs to receive the proper amount of satisfaction at any given stage in order to move on easily to the next stage of development. If a child doesn't receive the amount of gratification, they need it can lead to a fixation at the stage that they lacked gratification. This can cause a regression later on in their …show more content…
He identifies three different types of anxieties that a person can experience. Neurotic anxiety which is the unconscious worry that we will lose control of the id's urges, resulting in punishment for inappropriate behavior. Reality anxiety which is fear of real-world events. The cause of this anxiety is usually easily identified. The most common way of reducing this anxiety is to avoid the threatening object. Moral anxiety involves a fear of violating our own moral principles. In order to deal with this anxiety, Freud believed that defense mechanisms helped shield the ego from the conflicts created by the id, superego, and reality. This concept is usually represented by the Iceberg Model. This model represents the roles the Id, Ego, and Super Ego play in relation to conscious and unconscious