PSY 101 Lecture : Personality.pdf
Document Summary
Personality refers to a person"s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling and acting. The id"s conscious psychic energy strives to satisfy basic drives to survive, reproduce and aggress. The ego seeks to gratify the id"s impulses in realistic ways that will bring long-term pleasure. The superego forces the ego to consider not only the real but also the idea (focuses on how we ought to behave) According to freud, personality forms through a series of psychosexual stages during which the id"s pleasure seeking energies focus on distinct pleasure-sensitive areas of the body called erogenous zones. Defense mechanism the ego"s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality. For example, regression allows us to retreat to an earlier, more infantile stage of development. Regression leads an individual faced with anxiety to retreat to a more infantile psychosexual stage. Repression banishes anxiety arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness. Reaction formation causes the ego to unconsciously switch unacceptable impulses into their opposites.
