Psychoanalytic Theory and Personality

Personality Theories

Psychologists have described personality as specific way of feeling, thinking and self-conduct (Mcleod, 2014) of an individual. Personality is the constantly changing system in the minds of individuals and made up of specific psychological traits that influence their specific self-conduct and thinking. Personality is the combination of behavior that distinguishes a person. The personality of a person is affected by genetic and biological factors as well as factors such as upbringing, environment etc.

Personality theories are broken down into two classes:

• Trait theories of personality that believe that personality depends more on biological factors

• State theories, which see upbringing and societal factors as the major determinants of personality

This paper will be exploring two personality theories: Hans Eysenck's Personality Theory and Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory.

Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory

This theory of personality believes that our differing personalities arise from the communication between what Sigmund Freud described as the three basic composite parts of human thinking namely the id, ego, and the superego.

The first and earliest developed of these parts is the 'id', which has to do with immediate satisfaction of the normal human yearnings and desires and it works on its own, uncontrolled by humans. The superego deals with moral and societal conduct which is also referred to as "conscience." A little child's upbringing and knowledge of what his tradition describes as right or wrong develops his conscience. However, the ego is the most logical and practical part of our personality. It is not as crude as the id and is partly controllable by human reasoning. Freud describes the ego as the "self," and states that it has the function of balancing the id and the superego's needs in a feasible manner. Freud holds the opinion that the id, ego and superego are in a state of constant conflict, and that the behavior and conduct of mature persons are based on these childhood mind battles. Freud stated that persons with big egos mostly possess very good personalities while those who do not balance these needs suffer problems such as worry or constant sadness as well as harmful self-conduct. (Boundless, 2016)

The kind of conflict between the id, ego, and superego varies with time and as per the developmental processes that occur during growth of an individual, according to Freud. He stated that these battles are subject to a process of five stages, each stage giving attention to these various areas: oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital. Freud named his process the psychosexual theory of development with each stage associated with a specific area of bodily gratification. While undergoing this process, the developing child is faced with several battles between their biological urges (id) and their ethical conscience (superego) because these urges are aimed at various parts of the body (which Freud describes as "erogenous zones"). The child's capacity to counter the internal battles has significant effect in defining his/her future capacity to perform and behave as an adult. Inability to get past a stage in the process could cause the person to be stagnated on that stage, which causes harmful personality features; whereas, successfully completing all the stages of the process makes a child develop into a healthy person (Boundless, 2016)

Freud's opinion met with strong disapproval by several sections over the last couple of years due to its sole consideration of sexuality as the major determinant of personality development among humans. He took no cognizance of other features like environment, societal values and tradition and paid full attention to biology and formally sidelined healthy bodily operation.

Eysenck's Personality Theory

Eysenck developed theories based on personality features. In the years of 1952, 1967, and 1982, he built an effective brand of personality. Carefully analyzing the data from responses to questionnaires on personality, he recognized three distinct classes of personality: extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism (Mcleod, 2014).

According to Mcleod (2014), in the 40's, Eysenck was a worker at the psychiatric department of the Maudsley hospital located in London. Eysenck's job assignment was to do a pre-diagnosis of a patient's mental problems before he/she sees a psychiatrist. Using this position to his advantage, he was able to gather questions about self-conduct, which he used on about 700 soldiers who were under therapy for various mental ailments at the Maudsley hospital. Consequently, he discovered that the responses from the soldiers happened to have certain similarities with one another, showing that there were certain personality features which could be deduced from their responses. He termed this first order personality features and applied a strategy he named factor analysis. This strategy breaks peculiar actions and individual self-conduct into different classes which are classified into different groups called dimensions. According to Eysenck, two dimensions were identified: Introversion / Extroversion (E); Neuroticism / Stability (N) which he called second-order personality features.