Psycho-dynamic Approaches to Personality

1. PERSONALITY Psychodynamic Approaches to Personality

2. Psychodynamic Approach Approaches that assume that personality is motivated by inner forces and
conflicts about which people have little awareness and over which they have no control

3. Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory: Mapping the Unconscious Mind Freud’s theory that unconscious
forces act as determinants of personality Unconscious: a part of the personality that contains the
memories, knowledge, beliefs, feelings, urges, dries, and instincts the individual is not aware of

4. Freud's Three Levels of Mind • The conscious mind includes everything that we are aware of. This is
the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and talk about rationally. • The preconscious
mind is the part of the mind that represents ordinary memory. • The unconscious mind is a reservoir of
feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that outside of our conscious awareness. presents ordinary
memory.

5. Structuring Personality: ID, Ego and Superego

6. Structuring Personality: ID, Ego and Superego • ID: The raw, unorganized inborn, part of personality
whose sole purpose is to reduce tension created by primitive drives related to hunger, sex, aggression,
and irrational impulses

7. Structuring Personality: ID, Ego and Superego (Cont’d) • Ego: The part of the personality that provides
a buffer between the id and the outside world

8. Structuring Personality: ID, Ego and Superego (Cont’d) • Superego: according to Freud, the final
personality structure to develop; it represents the rights and wrongs of society as handed down by a
person’s parents, teachers, and other important figures