Chapter 9: Personality and Human Potential
Personality and Nature/Nurture
Freud’s Psychodynamic Theory of Personality: Nurture against Nature
Arguably, one of the most influential and controversial figures in the history of Psychology is the Viennese physician, Sigmund Freud (Figure 9.6). Certain facts must be kept in mind when evaluating Freud’s contributions to psychology. First, Freud’s model of personality predates Allport’s introduction of trait theory. Second, Freud did not contribute to or interact with the early schools of psychology; structuralism, functionalism, Gestalt psychology, and behaviorism. Second, he was a practitioner, not a scientist. He was a physician, who would today be considered a psychiatrist, treating individuals suffering from psychological and/or psychiatric complaints. An astute observer of human behavior, he proposed general models of human personality and abnormal psychology based on the case history material obtained from a small sample of non-representative individuals. Based on his clinical observations, Freud concluded that humans are unaware of most of the factors that influence their thoughts, feelings, and behavior. This perceptive and important assumption is often portrayed as an iceberg (see Figure 9.7).
Figure 9.7 Freud’s theory of personality.
Freud distinguished between those things of which we are currently aware (i.e., the contents of short-term memory); those things which we can voluntarily retrieve (i.e., the contents of long-term memory); and those things we ordinarily cannot voluntarily retrieve (i.e., the "unconscious"). Freud felt thoughts related to our essential sexual and aggressive natures created conflict and must ordinarily be prevented from reaching consciousness. He postulated the existence of different defense mechanisms to accomplish this objective. The assumption of unconscious psychic determinism is perhaps Freud’s greatest lasting contribution. The assumption argues for the appropriate use of the scientific method to study psychology. There are presumed causes which may be difficult to study, since they are “below the surface” of consciousness. However, with the same ingenuity demonstrated by other natural sciences, there is the potential to explain the totality of human experience. As we will see in Chapter 11, Freud’s approach to the assessment and treatment of human disorders is essentially the attempt to bring unconscious material to consciousness.
Perhaps best known, is the three-part psychic apparatus Freud (1920; 1923) created to “explain” human personality and behavior. He described the human condition as a “tug of war” between one’s genetically determined and entirely unconscious drives (called the id) and one’s mostly unconscious conscience (the superego). The mostly conscious ego was the component of the psychic apparatus that must reconcile these opposing objectives and the demands of reality. According to Freud, “The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to se