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Justifying behaviours by substituting acceptable reasons for less-acceptable real reasons Yumi often cheats on her girlfriend because she suspects she is already cheating on her. Transferring inappropriate urges or behaviours onto a more acceptable or less threatening targetĭuring lunch at a restaurant, Karn is angry at his older brother but does not express it and instead is verbally abusive to the server.Īttributing unacceptable desire to others The id is why we smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, view pornography, tell mean jokes about people, and engage in other fun, harmful, risky, or “taboo” behaviours, often at the cost of doing more productive activities.Įxplanations and Examples of Defense Mechanisms Table that explains and provides examples for varying defense mechanisms Denial According to Freud, the id is driven by the pleasure principle - the desire for immediate gratification of our sexual and aggressive urges. The id is entirely unconscious, and it drives our most important motivations, including the sexual drive (libido) and the aggressive or destructive drive (Thanatos). According to Freudian theory, the id is the component of personality that forms the basis of our most primitive impulses. In comparison, our consciousness, which is visible, only represents a smaller portion of who we are, based on what we are willing to reveal to othersįreud proposed that the mind is divided into three components: id, ego, and superego, and that the interactions and conflicts among the components create personality (Freud, 1923/1949). The Id, Ego, & Superego In Freud’s conceptualization of personality, the most important motivations are both out of site and unconscious, just like the majority of an iceberg which sits under water hidden from view.

For Freud the mind was like an iceberg, with the many motivations of the unconscious being much larger, but also out of sight, in comparison to the consciousness of which we are aware. Freud argued that we rarely understand why we do what we do, although we can make up explanations for our behaviours after the fact. These forces show themselves in our dreams, in neurotic symptoms such as obsessions, while we are under hypnosis, and in Freudian “slips of the tongue” in which people reveal their unconscious desires in language.

Rather, he believed that all behaviours are predetermined by motivations that lie outside our awareness, in the unconscious.

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In terms of free will, Freud did not believe that we were able to control our own behaviours. As is true of all theories, many of Freud’s ingenious ideas have turned out to be at least partially incorrect, and yet other aspects of his theories are still influencing psychology. Freud is probably the best known of all psychologists, in part because of his impressive observation and analyses of personality (there are 24 volumes of his writings). Many people know about Sigmund Freud because his work has had a huge impact on our everyday thinking about psychology, and the psychodynamic approach is one of the most important approaches to psychological therapy (Roudinesco, 2003 Taylor, 2009).

Superego examples