Sigmund Freud and the Oedipus Instinct :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

Sigmund Freud and the Oedipus Instinct Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are through you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the houses of tomorrow, which you can not visit, even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. Kahil Gibran Freud is to Psychoanalysis what Socrates is to philosophy. The theory of psychoanalysis is primarily concerned with the development of the human personality; it was Freud who presumed that human personality is a tripartite system, consisting of the id, ego, and the superego. "The id is said to contain all the instinctual drives that seek immediate satisfaction and like a small child (they are said to operate on the "the pleasure principle"); the ego contains the conscious mental states, and its function is to perceive the real world and to decide how to act, mediating between the world and the id (it is governed by "the reality principle"). Whatever can become conscious is in the ego (although it also contains elements that remain unconscious), where as everything in the id is permanently unconscious. The superego is identified as a special part of the mind that contains the conscience, the moral norms acquired from parents and others who were influential in early childhood; thoug h it belongs to the ego and shares its kind of psychological organization, the superego is also said to have an intimate connection with the id, for it can confront the ego with rules and prohibitions like a strict parent" (Leslie Stevenson & David L. Haberman 155). If at an early stage the child is exposed to an environment that consists of overly aggressive and dominant parents the development of that child’s superego may become a tad bit tyrannical, causing an adverse reaction within the psyche of that child.