While some of Freud’s ideas about how children develop into adults are not considered accurate, his focus on how the quality and nature of parenting powerfully impacts who children become brought a much-needed focus to parent-child interactions and has informed the work of many developmental psychologists. More generally, Freud was one of the first people to provide long-term, intensive therapy – sometimes several sessions a week with each client – and he is one of the first people to pay a great deal of attention to what happens in the psychotherapeutic process (Blatt, 1998). The simple answer for why Freudian theory is important is twofold: (1) it inspired a field of psychotherapy that continues to be widely practiced and is known to be effective and (2) many of Freud’s ideas have entered the public consciousness and continue to influence psychologists today (Blatt, 1998). You might have noticed that a theme I mentioned earlier – the tension between our unconscious and conscious – is very much present in the relationships among the ego, id, and superego. The point of portraying Freud’s parts of the psyche this way is to make it clear how Freud saw these parts relating to each other and functioning in our lives. I wrote the examples above as though the ego, id, and superego are actually separate parts of the brain that can communicate with each other, but we have no proof that this is how our brains work, and I doubt any of us experience ourselves in this way. To finish with my example, the ego may try to negotiate between the parent’s id and superego (e.g., “It is not okay to hate your kids, but it is okay to vent to your best friend about how annoying they are.”). Stuck in between the id and the superego is the ego: it is our sense of self that seeks to balance the demands of the superego and the id. To carry on with the example of the resentful parent, the superego is the part of the brain that would remind the parent, “here is what a parent should do, and what everyone expects of you as a parent.” It is the part of the brain that blares its disapproval when a parent raises their voice in the grocery store at their demanding, hungry child. If the id is the seat of all of our innate desires, then the superego is very much the opposite: it is the part of the brain that keeps track of all moral and social expectations of us. ![]() For example, a parent might resent and want desperately to be free of their children, but because such a thought seems completely “unparentlike” to that parent, they cannot consciously acknowledge it to themselves. All of the desires and wishes we might have but not wish to consciously acknowledge were thought to reside in the id. Freud conceived of the id as the seat of the unconscious. While Freud’s ideas about the unconscious manifested in his thinking about libido, defense mechanisms, transference, and dreams, the most important place to start in understanding Freudian theory is to understand Freud’s three parts of our psyche: the id, superego, and ego (Freud, 1936): For that reason, he focused a great deal on understanding how we handle all these unconscious thoughts and feelings, especially when they clash with our conscious beliefs and desires. ![]() At the same time, he believed that many of our instinctual drives were unacceptable to our conscious minds – they were either too likely to lead to rejection from others, or too likely to clash with our ideas about who we were – for us to tolerate acknowledging them outright. He saw humans as both social animals and instinctual animals, and Freud developed his theories out of a desire to explain how people balanced their need to connect with and be accepted by others with their drive to act on their instinctual desires (Freud, 1936).įreud saw humans as growing over time in their ability to manage both instinctual and social demands – more on that later. Freudian theory takes inspiration in particular from Darwin’s revelations regarding adaptation and evolution. First of all, it is important to understand that Freud was trained as a doctor – a neurologist and psychiatrist, to be specific – and was guided in his thinking by the philosophers and scientists who came before him. There are many pieces to Freudian theory, which makes it hard to concisely define what Freud’s theory was.
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