Dr. Wail S. Araim Associate Prof.

Consultant psychiatrist

The ID It is the most primitive part of the personality, from which the ego and the superego later develops Freud believed that the sexual and aggressive drives were the most important instinctual determinants of personality throughout life. The ID seeks immediate gratification of impulses. Like a young child, the ID operates on the pleasure principle: it endeavours to obtain pleasure to avoid pain, regardless of the external circumstances.

The EGO The ego develops as the young child learns to consider the demands of reality. The ego obeys the reality principle: the gratification of impulses must be delayed until the appropriate environmental conditions are found. The ego delays satisfaction of sexual impulses until conditions are appropriate. The mediates among the demands of the id, the realities of the world, and the demands of the superego.

The SUPEREGO The third part of the personality, the superego, is the internalized representations of the values and morals of society as taught to the child by the parents and others. It is essentially the individuals conscience. The superego judges whether an action is right or wrong. The id seeks pleasure, the ego tests reality, and the superego strives for perfection. Parents control childrens behaviour directly by reward and punishment. Through the incorporation of parental standards into the superego the child brings behavior under his own control. Violating the superegos standards produces anxiety.

The three components of the personality are often in opposition: the ego postpones the gratification that the id wants immediately, and the superego battles with both the id and the ego because behavior often falls short of the moral code it represents. In the well integrated personality the ego remains in firm but flexible control; the reality principle governs.

Freud believed that during the first 5 years of life, the individual progresses through several developmental stages that affects personality. He called these periods psychosexual stages During each stage, the pleasure seeking impulses of the id focus on a particular area of the body and on activities connected with that area

Oral stage: infant derives pleasure from nursing and sucking in the first year Anal stage: children experience control in the form of toilet training. Gratification is derived from withholding or expelling feces. Phallic stage: from about age 3 to age 6, children derive pleasure from fondling their genitals. They began to direct sexual impulses toward the parent of opposite sex.

Latency period: lasts from the age 7 to age 12. During this sexuality quiescent time, children become less concerned with their body and turn their attention to the skills needed for coping with their environment Genital stage: the mature phase of adult sexual concerns and pleasures.

Anna Freud in 1936 systematically listed 9 defense mechanisms, and added a tenth (sublimation). A few more have been subsequently added.

Ego defense mechanisms are habitual, unconscious and sometimes pathological mental processes which are employed to resolve conflict between instinctive needs (ID), internalised prohibition (SUPEREGO) and external reality

1. Repression the most basic defense mechanism, repression refers to the refusal to recognize external reality, preventing the perception of instincts and feelings with the unconscious inhibition of the conflicting impulse.

2. Denial- the refusal to recognize external reality. 3. Projection- the attribution of ones own unacknowledged or disowned feelings onto others, May be of delusional intensity. 4. Distortion- this involves the (sometimes gross) reshaping of external reality to suit ones inner needs.

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Reaction formation- behaving or feeling in a way directly opposite to unacceptable (hostile) instinctual impulses. Turning against self- unacceptable aggression to others is turned indirectly onto oneself eg. in hypochondriasis, passive aggressive individuals.

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Displacement- the re-direction of feelings towards another person (kicking the dog). Regression- abandoning ones adult functioning and reverting to more childlike modes of action, feeling, behaving. Isolation- the separation of an idea from its associated affect

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Projective identification- the dissociation of unacceptable parts of the personality and projection onto another. Splitting- either between two individuals (mother/father) or the same individual sequentially idealised and denigrated.

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Acting out- the direct expression of an unconscious impulse in order to avoid the awareness of the accompanying affect Intellectualisation- thinking and speaking in jargon, rather than feeling Sublimation- (seen as healthy defence mechanism) the indirect expression of instincts without adverse consequences eg. Great works of art, or hostility channelled into sport.