List and describe the three components into which Freud divided the personality, and indicate how these are distributed across three levels of awareness

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Psychodynamic theories include all the diverse theories descended from the work of Sigmund Freud that focus on unconscious mental processes.

Freud divided personality into three components. The id is the primitive, instinctive component of personality that operates according to the pleasure principle, which demands immediate gratification and engages in primary process thinking (primitive, illogical, irrational, and fantasy oriented). The ego is the decision-making component of personality that operates according to the reality principle, seeking to delay gratification of the id's urges until appropriate outlets can be found, thus mediating between the id and the external world. The superego is the moral component of personality that incorporates social standards about what represents right and wrong; it emerges out of the ego at around 3–5 years of age.

Freud's most enduring insight was his recognition that unconscious forces can influence behavior. Freud theorized that people have three levels of awareness: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. He believed that the ego and superego operate at all three levels and that the id is entirely unconscious, expressing its urges at a conscious level through the ego.