Invitation to Psychology

Chapter 2 Theories of Personality 45

on his toys or his younger sister. When displace-

ment serves a higher cultural or socially useful

purpose, as in the creation of art or inventions, it

is called sublimation. Freud argued that society has

a duty to help people sublimate their unacceptable

impulses for the sake of civilization. Sexual pas-

sion may be sublimated into the creation of art or

literature, and aggressive energy into sports.

4

Regression occurs when a person reverts to

a previous phase of psychological develop-

ment. An 8-year-old boy who is anxious about his

parents’ divorce may regress to earlier habits of

thumb sucking or clinging. Adults may regress to

immature behavior when they are under pressure,

perhaps by having temper tantrums when they

don’t get their way.

5

Denial occurs when people refuse to admit that

something unpleasant is happening, such as

mistreatment by a partner; that they have a prob-

lem, such as drinking too much; or that they are

feeling a forbidden emotion, such as anger. Denial

protects a person’s self-image and preserves the

illusion of invulnerability: “It can’t happen to me.”

The Development of Personality. Freud

ar gued that personality develops in a series of

psychosexual stages, in which sexual energy takes

different forms as the child matures. Each new

stage produces a certain amount of frustration,

conflict, and anxiety. If these are not resolved

properly, normal development may be inter-

rupted, and the child may remain fixated, or stuck,

at the current stage.

Freud believed that some people remain fix-

ated at the oral stage, which occurs during the first

year of life, when babies experience the world

through their mouths. As adults, they will seek

oral gratification in smoking, overeating, nail bit-

ing, or chewing on pencils; some may become

clingy and dependent, like a nursing child. Others

remain fixated at the anal stage, at ages 2 to

3, when toilet training and control of bodily

wastes are the key issues. They may become “anal

retentive,” holding everything in, obsessive about

neatness and cleanliness. Or they may become

just the opposite, “anal expulsive”—messy and

disorganized.

For Freud, however, the most crucial stage

for the formation of personality was the phallic

(Oedipal) stage, which lasts roughly from age 3 to

age 5 or 6. During this stage, he said, the child

unconsciously wishes to possess the parent of the

other sex and to get rid of the parent of the same

sex. Children often proudly announce, “I’m going

psychosexual stages

In Freud’s theory, the

idea that sexual energy

takes different forms as a

child matures; the stages

are oral, anal, phallic

(Oedipal), latency, and

genital.

tension. These unconscious strategies, called

defense mechanisms, deny or distort reality, but

they also protect us from conflict and anxiety.

They become unhealthy only when they cause self-

defeating behavior and emotional problems. Here

are five of the primary defense mechanisms identi-

fied by Freud and later analysts (A. Freud, 1967;

Vaillant, 1992):

1

Repression occurs when a threatening idea,

memory, or emotion is blocked from con-

sciousness: for example, a woman who had a

frightening childhood experience that she cannot

remember is said to be repressing her memory

of it. Freud used the term repression to mean

both unconscious expulsion of disturbing mate-

rial from awareness and conscious suppression

of such material. However, modern analysts tend

to think of it only as an unconscious defense

mechanism.

2

Projection occurs when a person’s own unac-

ceptable or threatening feelings are repressed

and then attributed to someone else. A person

who is embarrassed about having sexual feelings

toward members of a different ethnic group may

project this discomfort onto them, saying, “Those

people are dirty-minded and oversexed.”

3

Displacement occurs when people direct emo-

tions that make them uncomfortable or con-

flicted (commonly, anger and sexual desire) toward

people, animals, or things that are not the real

object of their feelings. A boy who is forbidden to

express anger toward his father may “take it out”

defense mechanisms

Methods used by the ego

to prevent unconscious

anxiety or threatening

thoughts from entering

consciousness.

Sidney Harris/ScienceCartoonsPlus.com