Personality involves individuals’ characteristic ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. There exist theories that inform learners of their understanding of personality. They include straight theories that examine individuals’ behavior patterns, and social cognitive theories focus on people’s traits, thinking, and social context. Humanistic theories center on individuals’ inner abilities to grow and achieve self-fulfillment. Lastly, psychodynamic theories focus on human functioning based on the interaction of internal drives and forces within people, mostly on the unconscious mind and in the existing structures of one’s personality.
These theories emerged from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis theory of personality-related treatment techniques. Through his discovery of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud came up with speculations surrounding the cause of the psychological disorder. These speculations failed, and he later turned to the free association. He claimed that this aspect gave individuals in therapy the freedom to examine their thoughts without intervention from a therapist (Myers & DeWall, 2020). Freud proposed that the consciousness is divided into three elements known as the id, ego, and superego and that the relations and conflicts among these components created personality. He proposed that personality development occurs during the five stages of psychosexual, oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital.
Freud believed that people defended themselves from anxiety through the ego that shields themselves using defense mechanism strategies that lower and redirect anxiety through altering reality. He proposed seven mechanisms that protected the ego from conflicts created by the id and superego. Freud’s theory was widely accepted and rejected by many people. For example, the theory of the unconscious was widely accepted and is currently utilized in several models of human behavior and different professions. Neo- Freudians rejected his claims that sex and aggression were consuming motivations. Psychodynamic theorists and therapists in the contemporary world reject Freud’s emphasis on sexual motivation. As per the modern research findings, most of one’s mental state is unconscious and that childhood occurrences impact an adult’s personality and attachments patterns. For personality assessment, projective tests are used to discover emotions, wants, and conflicts that are invisible from conscious awareness.
Reference
Myers, D. G., & DeWall, N. C. (2020). Psychology. In Psychology. Worth Publishers.13ed. Web.