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Originally Posted by TapSkilz  Garland- I'm missing the joke. Sorry. ??? |
Oh... Well here's an excerpt on a paper I wrote about it.
Sigmund Freud developed a unique and insightful concept of how the mind worked, which varied greatly from what the other scientists and psychologists of the time had come to believe. His theory of the topology of the mind not only extended the focus of psychology to the unconscious as well as the conscious, but it led to furthering our understanding of the workings of the networks that bind the unconscious mind to conscious thought, as well as inquiries into the idea that there was a correlation between past forgotten or seemingly trivial events causing present and future psychosis for people.
Freud described the mind as working within three distinctly different states; the conscious mind, which we know of as the fleeting stream of sensations and perceptions that comprise our perception of the external corporeal world as well as internalized thought, the preconscious, which is essentially everything that is readily rememberable, acts as a “buffer zone” between the conscious and unconscious mind, and the unconscious mind, which is the place wherein all of our unavailable memories lie.
According to Freud, these different components of the mind are governed by hypothetical constructs, the id, the superego, and the ego. The id is a center of our instinctual and primordial needs, ruled by the two forces that Freud claimed drive all human action, Eros and destructiveness, and its one and only goal is to reach satisfaction of the senses. The id is wanton, and lacks all regard in of itself for survival or preservation of the whole of the organism, working only toward the fulfillment of the pleasure principle or drive reduction. It is up to the ego to urge an agent to change strategies and perhaps even shrink away from fulfilling the wants of the id in order to keep the agent safe. An example of this would be the urge to kiss a gorgeous girl in front of her partner, to do so would satisfy the id, but the ego would want to urge the agent against it due to the risk of bodily harm. The ego is responsible for “reality testing”, in which it governs cognitive skills like reasoning, thinking (analytical and critical), planning, and perception, all of which respond directly to external reality, thus keeping an agent from doing something to get itself hurt in the pursuit of fulfilling the id’s wants in a straightforward manner. The super-ego can be thought of as the conscience. It acts to replace the authority figures or parents who instilled within us the values and precepts upon which we base our morality, and acts in a similar manner as the ego, wherein a violation, or attempted violation of a moral rule or value is met with threats of repercussions, or diminished sense of self worth or character. In other words, the super-ego is what prevents somebody from stealing the tip money off of a vacant table at a restaurant. These hypothetical constructs are ultimately what make up one’s personality.
Freud used these constructs and this topography of the mind to illustrate his theory of development, which he called libido theory. The libido theory of development deals with “critical periods”, and a “biologically predetermined sequence of stages” that outline the development of personality and libido. Freud described libido as the ego-id complex that maintains the organism and also tries to fulfill the urges of the id. He claimed that with the development, awareness of, or heightened use of, certain “erotogenic zones” (oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital) also came a change in libido development.
The oral stage begins at birth, and focuses first upon the psychical needs of the mouth, i.e. nourishment from breast feeding, despite the obvious physiological needs, Freud describes the overzealous and persistent suckling of a child to go above and beyond the fulfillment of self preservation and declares it to be something sexual. His definition of sexual extends to anything which gives pleasure, which seems to me a...Freudian slip. To use sexual in this type of context is going to give out a certain connotation, and I believe Freud knew this when he was drafting his findings. He was obsessed with sex acts and sex organs, regardless of how he decided to change the meaning of the word “sex” and tailor it to his research.
According to Freud’s stages, the second stage, anal, begins about at the same time as a child begins to grow teeth. It focuses on sadistic urges and excretory and eliminatory functions, although the handout on Freud failed to draw a correlation between the two actions.
The third stage is the phallic stage, in which only the presence or lack of male genitals are considered to be important in development. This is the stage wherein Freud sets his infamous Oedipus phase, which applies to both sexes, but presents in different ways for each. In a male, the Oedipus phase presents as the child wanting to, in some sense, do away with the father as a rival so that he can take his place for the mother’s affections. When the boy is threatened with castration and recognizes the absence of penises on females, he passes on to a latent stage. For a female, the phase revolves around penis envy, followed by giving up on masturbation, and the eventual turning away from sexuality altogether. In an attempt to remedy this, the girl will see the mother as a rival, and seek to take her place in the father’s eyes. Because there is no castration complex to instill the same type of extreme and harsh super-ego in women as in men, leading therefore to the incompletion of this developmental stage.