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Critical Analysis of Freud's Theory of Personality

Decent Essays

SUMMARY
Personality is the enduring and unique cluster of characteristics that may change in response to different situations. It can be asses via different approaches such as Self-report or objective inventories, projective techniques, clinical interviews, behavioural assessment procedures and thought and experience-sampling procedures. In the study of personality ideographic research and nomothetic research are used and the major methods that the clinical method, the experimental method and the correlational method.
Psychoanalysis was the first formal theory of personality influenced by Sigmund Freud. Freud divided personality into three levels: the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious. He later revised this notion and …show more content…

The Oedipus complex is when the boy is in love with his mother and fears castration if his father finds out about his fantasies. In the Electra complex the girl is in love with her father and desires to have a penis as a genital organ. Freud believed that dreams represent repressed desires, dears and conflicts. He distinguished two aspects of dreams: the manifest content (Actual event) and the latent content (symbolic meaning of the event). In Freud’s latent content all of the symbolic meanings had a sexual background. He viewed dreams as revealing conflicts in a condensed and intensified form.
Freud violated his rules by analyzing his daughter and this was kept a secret for many years and this was viewed as an Oedipal acting at both ends of the couch.

CRITICAL REVIEW Sigmund Freud’s theory of personality and the stages of consciousness and its constant battle paint a very negative picture of human life. The ego constantly has to battle the id and its selfish demands and the superego flying in trying hard to aid the id in calming down and strengthening the ego. As such our mind is constantly in war, our ego constantly battling off the evil id and losing every battle.
Freud’s theory was initially based on his own person and experiences and memories, hence, lacking experimental and scientific

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