What is Personality - Part 1 - Freud and Psychoanalysis

Personality is a complex organization of cognitions, affects, and behaviors that gives direction and coherence to a person's life. Personality consists of structures and processes of a biological, psychological, and social nature.

So defined Pervin (1996, p.414). Let's see what it means: Personality is a set of "things" that give direction and coherence to a person. These things are of a biological (genetics, organic disease, physical appearance), cognitive (thoughts, memories, worries), affective (emotions, feelings, moods), behavioral (the things we do), and social (the external environment that has accompanied us from the womb to the present) nature.

Basically, personality is a union of biological, psychological, and social processes. However, this doesn't help much when trying to understand people's behaviors. That's why other ways of looking at personality exist — in this series of articles we'll explore the most important ones.

Freud and Personality According to Psychoanalysis

1.1. The Iceberg Model

The iceberg model is a popular metaphor that illustrates personality in Freud's psychoanalysis.

The tip of the iceberg (above water level), the conscious mind, is what we are aware of at this very moment, such as thoughts, memories, emotions, and fantasies. Just below the water level is the preconscious mind — that is, everything that, although not conscious, can be accessed consciously, like our memories of what we had for lunch yesterday.

Larger than these two accessible parts is the unconscious mind, where automatic mental processes reside along with things that are not easily brought to consciousness because they are too painful to deal with consciously, such as motivational drives, repressed memories, or repressed thoughts.

Simultaneously, there are 3 psychological structures in personality: Id, Ego, and Superego. The Id is located exclusively in the unconscious mind, while the other two structures exist across all three levels of the mind, but to different degrees.

1.1.1. The Id

The Id represents our biological needs. It is the motivational energy (drive) to satisfy an organic need, such as eating and sex. The motivational energy of the Id can be divided into two categories:

• Eros, libido, or life instincts: these refer to the energy that motivates us toward passion, reproduction, reducing hunger, and avoiding pain.

• Thanatos or death instincts: these refer to the unconscious desire to return to the inanimate state from which we emerged and motivate us toward aggressive behaviors (including self-inflicted injuries and suicide).

The accumulation of Id energy produces tension and unconscious discomfort, therefore an immediate drive occurs to reduce this tension in the form of desire (this is called the Pleasure Principle), regardless of the consequences of that behavior.

To discharge this energy, the Id creates desire — a mental image of an object toward which it directs this energy in a quick and irrational way (primary process — pre-rational). However, a mental image cannot satisfy the Id's needs, and the energy must be discharged onto the real object (e.g., the mental image of a hamburger doesn't satisfy the discomfort of hunger). In order to mediate the unconscious impulses of the Id and the demands of the external world (e.g., not having money to buy a hamburger), the Ego develops.

Note: by object, I refer to any existing substance, such as people, body parts, material objects, artistic paintings, music, etc.

1.1.2. The Ego

The Ego's objective is the preservation of the organism, which happens on the thin line between satisfying the Id's needs and the demands of the external world. The Ego is responsible for identifying the real objects that represent the mental images the Id conjures to satisfy its desires. For example, if the Id conjures the image of food to satisfy the need for hunger, but there happens to be no food available at that moment, it's up to the Ego to devise a plan to gratify that need.

The Ego has the ability to delay the gratification of the Id's drives. It operates through the secondary process — that is, it involves logical, deliberate, and rational thinking. However, after the first years of childhood, another psychological structure forms from the Ego: the Superego.

1.1.3. The Superego

The Superego develops within the Ego through the internalization of the influence of the child's parental figures. In this way, the Superego is the set of moral values and reasoning patterns of the parental figures (that is, the child's behaviors that parents reward or punish) and, indirectly, of society in general.

Another way to think about the Superego is to understand that, while in early childhood it was the caregivers' job to control the child's actions and tell them what is right and wrong, later it becomes the Superego's job to exercise that parental control in the form of self-control (in everyday language we call this part of the Superego "having a conscience").

Sometimes what is socially right or wrong is in opposition to the Id's desires — in these situations the Superego inhibits such desires.

The Superego also constitutes the person's aspirations, what they value and wish to achieve (the Ego Ideal), and so it pushes toward the satisfaction of these aspirations in the same way as the Id.

1.2. Personality

From this perspective, personality is the way in which the Id's energy is distributed and used by the Ego and the Superego.

Still within the Id, psychic energy is not completely fixed to mental objects (desires), which means it can be redirected or reused by another psychological structure. The Ego identifies a real object that allows the satisfaction of the Id and redirects that energy to put into practice whatever is necessary to reach that object. In a way, as long as the Ego satisfies the Id's desires, it is the Ego that controls the existing psychic energy and can then use it for other personal purposes (e.g., studying, going for walks — basically all activities not involved in satisfying the Id), as long as it clearly continues to meet the Id's needs, because if it fails, the energy returns to the Id's control.

Generally, working in opposition to the Id's desires (especially sexual and aggressive ones) are the social values internalized in the Superego. The Superego, as part of the Ego, has the same access to psychic energy. In this way, the Superego pushes the person toward virtuous or perfectionist behaviors as dictated by society or by the person's parental figures. So while the Ego has to discover and act on satisfying the Id, it also has to manage the constraining pressures of the Superego, which can take the form of moralizing about what the Ego can or cannot do to satisfy the Id, or the form of perfectionism, where no matter what the Ego does, it will never be good enough.

As one structure exerts more or less pressure, the dynamics of personality change, and after adolescence the dynamic between the Id, Ego, and Superego is more or less stabilized (for example, a person's personality could be 15% dominated by the Id, 75% dominated by the Ego, and 10% by the Superego). However, personality is an eternal battle of the Ego trying to establish peace between the person's primitive instincts and the rules imposed by the society they inhabit. And all of this produces anxiety.

1.3. The Famous Defense Mechanisms

To deal with so much pressure, the Ego developed defense mechanisms to protect itself, instantly relieving internal tension. Defense mechanisms operate unconsciously and in some way deny, fabricate, or distort reality. Much of the study on these mechanisms was carried out by Anna Freud.

Repression

Repression was one of Freud's earliest concepts. It consists of the active keeping of psychological content (e.g., memories) in the unconscious Id — that is, the Ego is constantly spending energy to keep something out of the conscious mind. However, this mechanism could have consequences, as the repressed material continues to exert pressure to express itself, potentially giving rise to physical symptoms such as headaches, hives, loss of vision, loss of sensation in parts of the body, or even the loss of function such as the use of one's legs... Another way the material could be released is in the form of displacement — for example, being furious with someone you can't express that anger toward and, without realizing it, taking it out on other people.

Repression would continue to cause problems in the person's life until there were finally conditions for its content to become conscious and be expressed safely. Freud reached this conclusion when he observed that patients whose symptoms had no physical explanation would see them disappear when given the opportunity to talk about their origins and meanings.

Denial

Denial involves blocking or distorting the perception of disturbing events. The person does not recognize (or refuses to recognize) some painful aspect of external reality or subjective experience that would be apparent to others, often conjuring stories or explanations that support their interpretation of the facts.

For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic there were reports of many people not believing in the existence of the virus or downplaying its importance, and despite extensive national and international media coverage, for some people it was more plausible that it was a conspiracy.

Projection

Projection involves falsely attributing to other people the Id's desires that the Ego cannot handle. Projection works in that it still allows a certain degree of expression of the Id's desire, as it replaces a disturbing desire with a less disturbing one. As an example, a person might feel angry at someone, but instead of recognizing it, they would say that the other person is angry at them. In another example, a person might be homosexual, but without recognizing it, they would instead become preoccupied that their friends were homosexual and were interested in them.

There are many other defense mechanisms, but they will not be covered in this text.

1.4. The Current State of Scientific Evidence for This Perspective

A large part of Freud's perspective, which extends beyond what was presented here, was questioned in the mid-1960s, to the extent that it could be neither refuted nor proven. Some concepts like repression were highly called into question. Several studies found no evidence of such a psychological process, explaining that the difficulty some trauma victims have in remembering traumatic events is better explained by the effects of stress on the brain, which "damaged" access to those memories. Other mechanisms, like denial, gathered considerable scientific evidence and can be found under the name "experiential avoidance," which closely resembles the definition of denial.

Some of Freud's insights have become relevant today. The Id resembles the functions of the amygdala, the part of the brain generally associated with emotions, sexual impulses, fight, flight... The Ego presents itself as the prefrontal cortex, which has the capacity for emotional regulation. Regarding the Superego, we currently know that some of our emotions like guilt, shame, pride, and the capacities for empathy and compassion evolved with the function of social cohesion. When we feel these things, we understand whether we are acting against or in favor of our social group, and we frequently restrict our actions out of fear of feeling guilt, shame, embarrassment...

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