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Freudian Psychology: Main Ideas

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Freudian Psychology: The Main Ideas Psychoanalysis is Sigmund Freud’s work, thought to be created between 1900 and 1939, which still is a very vibrant thread in history and psychology today. According to Sigmund Freud the unconscious mind is a reservoir of repressed impulses and desires in your mind, while you may be completely awake you are still unaware of the mental processes that are taking place. Though the repressed impulses control the way we think, act, and above all feel. Freud also talks about the conflict within each individual between the internalized ideals (your superego) and impulses (your id), also how your ego (your conscious self) tries to keep out the awareness of such using a defense mechanism to distort reality …show more content…

When a toddler is expelling the bowels, for example, while wearing diapers, this would be characterized as “anal expulsion”, but when the toddler starting the potting training process this is called the “anal retention”. Third, the phallic phase, whereas young boys encounter an Oedipus phase, much like the Oedipus complex, they fear the father and castration and has sexual fantasies about the mother. For a young girl she would enter the Electra phase, where she could acquire penis envy, which often can cause one to turn away from sexual life all together. After the phallic phase there is a pause of latency in the sexual development, though finally in the Genital phase sexual functions are organized and coordination of sexual urges involving pleasure is completed. “These investigations led him to conclude that childhood fears and experiences, often sexual in nature, accounted for neuroses-hysteria, anxiety, depression, often obsessions and so on” (Freud). Freud also claims that if there is an error that occurred in the sexual development it can result in homosexuality or sexual perversions in a person. Freud continues to explain that the child would get the appropriate gender-related behaviors enforced though indentifying with a same-sex parent, which would need to take place naturally. In Freud’s theories the libido also plays in important role; the primary process of the libido is the dreamlike and irrational state of the libido and it

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