Personality - Deep dive

My interest area is to understand the structure and development of personality.
Personality is enduring or lasting patterns of behavior and thought. 
So we have four major perspectives on personality

• Psychoanalytic - Unconscious motivations 
• Trait - Specific dimension of personality
• Humanistic - inner capacity for growth 
• social cognitive - influence of environment.

Sigmund Freud Theories

Its very common scene in movies and books, as part of psychology and therapies - Psychologist involves himself in psychoanalysis but do we know who is the founder - it is Sigmund Freud. He is an Austrian neurologist, Voracious reader, medical school graduate and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. 

He divided personality mainly in three parts. 

• The id is the most primitive part of the personality that is the source of all our most basic urges. This part of the personality is entirely unconscious and serves as the source of all libidinal energy. Primary driving force for pleasure principle.
• The ego is the component of personality that is charged with dealing with reality and helps ensure that the demands of the id are satisfied in ways that are realistic, safe, and socially acceptable. Seeks to gratify the ID - Reality principle.
• The superego is the part of the personality that holds all of the internalized morals and standards that we acquire from our parents, family, and society at large - We ought to behave this way. 

There are three levels of awareness 

1. Conscious mind - Small part visible - Visible Iceberg - people show this personality. 

2. Preconscious mind - underneath the visible zone - -Reality principle , secondary process thinking. (EGO )

3. Unconscious mind - Difficult to retrieve - Thoughts, feelings, wishes and memories not visible part of Iceberg- involuntarily shown but not voluntarily. People try to curb this to show the expected behavior. Primary process thinking (ID )

Repression - Banishing unacceptable thoughts and passions to unconscious - dreams and slips.

Deep Diving 

1. ID 
 Basic biological urges (hunger and self protection) works on pleasure principle.
-> seeks pleasure avoids pain -" I want what i want now".  It operates at unconscious level. 
Has two major instincts. 
EROS - Life Instinct - Motivates people to focus on pleasures. 
Thanatos - Death instinct - Motivates people to use aggressive urge to destroy.
The energy for id instinct comes from libido (the energy store house).
2. EGO 
Conscious faculty or perceiving and dealing intelligently with reality. 
Acts as mediator between the id and super ego. 
Partly conscious, deals with  the demands of reality, and makes rational decisions. Works on Reality principle  and understands what consequences are there to behavior.
It is the executive of the personality 
controls higher mental processes - reasoning , problem solving.
The five stages of psycho sexual development are:

• The oral stage: The libidinal energies are focused on the mouth.

• The anal stage: The libidinal energies are focused on the anus.

• The phallic stage: The libidinal energies are focused on the penis or clitoris.

• The latent stage: A period of calm in which little libidinal interest is present.

• The genital stage: The libidinal energies are focused on the genitals.

 1. The Oral stage - In this stage if not properly focused might develop

1. Oral receptive personality. 

• Key symptoms could be - Over eating, being overly talkative, smoking to addictions,  alcoholism and biting nails.  

            They reduce tension through oral activity - eating, drinking, smoking and biting nails  

• Personality symptoms -  sarcastic , biting personality - oral sadistic personality.

 
     2.Oral Aggressive personality  
            Key symptoms - aggressiveness,exploitation, ambition and envy, also called as oral aggressive personality.