EDF 2085 Reflection #12

Jackie Lawrence
EDF 2085
Reflection Paper #12

According to Sigmund Freud, there are two major contributors that constitute the entire human thought process, including emotions and behavior, both of which are motivated by his Pleasure Principle. These concepts, Eros and Thanatos, or sex and aggression, are the primary driving forces of human nature and procreation. To Freud, it’s pretty simple; our entire personality is based on the primitive, basic instinct of survival. The ego, an idea introduced in 1923, is a part of conscious thought which emerges in early childhood to control feelings of instant gratification that the id seeks out. The ego also satisfies the superego’s need to behave in moral and ethical ways. This model on psychosexual development also included the Oedipus and Electra complex, in which children lust for their parent of the opposite sex during early childhood. Each stage of growth represented a shift of sexual energy in various erogenous zones. For example, during the phallic stage from ages 3 to 5, Freud believed little girls felt inferior to boys, and little boys feared losing their sexual reproductive systems. Hence, the concepts of penis envy and castration anxiety were developed.
Many professionals believe Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory had an unhealthy and unnecessary overemphasis on sex. Other critics scrutinize the absence of adult developmental stages in his research, and even attribute his “creative” thinking process to a cocaine problem. Regardless, Freud’s efforts did supply significant groundwork in understanding the developmental stages of humans, which psychologists have examined and analyzed throughout the years. In all actuality, the study of psychology escalated with an extraordinary intensity after Freud’s theories became notorious. Many contemporary psychologists still have confidence in the idea that we are only aware of a minute fraction of our total thought processes at any given time, which Freud identified in his iceberg model of the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Defense mechanisms are also acknowledged today, which were originally a Freudian view. Sigmund Freud definitely had some interesting beliefs concerning how the human psyche functions, but I truly respect and admire just how tremendous his contributions were to today’s modern psychological views.