Personalty Assessment Theory

Freud’s model of Personality theory suggests that human behavior is the result of interactions among three component parts of the mind: Id, Ego, and Superego. The id is the moist primary of the model of personality. It operates unconsciously in the mind. It is concerned on the instant gratification of basic physical needs and uses. Being less primitive than id the ego is the partly conscious and unconscious. Freud considered this to be the “self” part whose job is to balance the demands of the id and superego. The ego serves as the rational part of our personality.

Our Superego represents the rights and wrong of society as taught and modeled by a person’s parents, teachers, and other significant individuals. (Feldman 384) Freud believed that the nature of the conflicts among the id, ego, and superego change over time as a person grows from child to adult. Specifically, he maintained that these conflicts progress Freud sought to understand the nature and variety of these illnesses by retracing the sexual history of his patients. This was not primarily an investigation of sexual experiences as such. Far more important were the patient’s wishes and desires, their experience of love, hate, shame, guilt and fear – and how they handled these powerful emotions. through a series of five basic stages, each with a different focus: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital.

He called his idea the psychosexual theory of development, with each psychosexual stage directly related to a different physical center of pleasure. Freud believed that when we explain our own behavior to ourselves or others (conscious mental activity) we rarely give a true account of our motivation. This is not because we are deliberately lying. While human beings are great deceivers of others, they are even more adept at self-deception. Our rationalizations of our conduct are therefore disguising the real reasons. Freud’s life work was dominated by his attempts to find ways of penetrating this often subtle and elaborate camouflage that obscures the hidden structure and processes of personality.

Carl Jung followed in Adler's footsteps by developing a theory of personality called analytical psychology. One of Jung's major contributions was his idea of the collective unconscious, which he deemed a "universal" version of Freud's personal unconscious, holding mental patterns, or memory traces, that are common to all of us (Jung, 1928). These ancestral memories, which Jung called archetypes, are represented by universal themes as expressed through various cultures' literature and art, as well as people's dreams. Jung also proposed the concept of the persona, referring to a kind of "mask" that we adopt based on both our conscious experiences and our collective unconscious.

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