Psycho-Analytic Approach to Personality - Introduction to Freud and Nature of Human

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Introduction

Sigmund Freud was a major intellectual figure of the twentieth century and founded the psychoanalytic approach to personality. At the core of the psychoanalytic approach is the belief that most of our behaviour is driven by motives of which we are unaware. These motives are conceptualised as unconscious forces that make it difficult for us to truly know ourselves. This may lead us occasionally to behave in ways that we have difficulty explaining. In our everyday life, for example, people frequently refer  to  factors  in  their  unconscious having influenced their behaviour. A colleague might forget to go to a meeting, despite having it in his diary and being reminded about it earlier in the day. When thinking about it, he admits that he knew it was likely to be a boring meeting; and consequently, Freud would have suggested that he was unconsciously motivated to forget about it.

The psychoanalytic approach, as we shall see, explains how much of our psychological energy is taken up with suppressing our unconscious urges or finding socially acceptable ways of expressing them. Freud’s theory is controversial, and some current psychologists are keen to dismiss him as merely a historical figure, albeit an important one. Freud is a central figure in the development of the clinical strand of personality theorising. Freud’s work is important historically, but Freud and related psychoanalytic theories are included here because of the continuing influence that his concepts have, not just on psychology but in many other disciplines also. Many psychoanalytic concepts provide such useful descriptions of human behaviour that they have been incorporated into our everyday language. By the end of the chapter, you will have come across many of these examples.

We begin by exploring in some detail the work of Sigmund Freud. The discussion of Freud reflects on the importance and extent of his contribution to personality theory.

 

The nature of human beings and the source of human motivation

Personality theory aims to address several questions about human nature; the biggest of these is arguably what motivates us as human beings? For Freud (1901/1965), the answer to this question lies in the way that personality is structured and in how it develops. When Freud began his work on the development of personality, it was within a scientific culture where Darwin’s evolutionary theory was dominant. The human infant was seen to be somewhere between apes and human adults in terms of development, hence it was assumed that the same basic biological drives would be shared by human infants and other animals. Hunger and sexuality were seen to be the most important drives for animals and for human infants also.

Linked to Darwinism, there was great interest in explaining how specific behaviour arose and in explaining how behaviour was energised. Freud (1901/1965) assumed that each child was born with a fixed amount  of mental energy. He called this energy the libido. This libido, after development, will in time become the basis of the adult sexual drives. We will examine this concept in more detail later in the chapter. In his approach to development, Freud emphasised not only the child’s biological inheritance in terms of instinctual drives – libido and the pleasure principle, for example – but also the child’s environmental factors, such as developmental experiences. All behaviour was energised by fundamental instinctual drives. Freud initially described two types of drives or instincts. There were the sexual drives energised by the libido, as we have just discussed. Then there were life-preserving drives, including hunger and pain. Both of these drives can be conceptualised as being positive and  leading to  prolongation  of life and renewal of life. Later in the 1920s Freud introduced the  death  instinct,  sometimes  termed  Thanatos,  which is thought  to be a response to the First World War. He suggests that human beings also possess a self-destructive instinct.  It  is  different  from  an  aggressive instinct,  as the emphasis is not on destroying another but on wiping out oneself. Hence, to Freud (1920/1977), the human species appeared to possess a death instinct. It could be observed  both  at  the  group  and  the  individual  level. Human motivation is explained by our attempts throughout our lives to satisfy these basic instinctual drives. The form taken by this gratification of our instinctual needs typically changes with age, as we shall see.