What do you think of Freud’s psychodynamic theory of personality development? What are the pros? What are the cons?

Question

1. How much do you think our unconscious really influences our behavior? Why? Are the id, ego, and superego valid? Why or why not? 
2. Is personality development fixed in childhood? Why or why not? What factors in childhood have an influence on the personality traits we acquire? 
3. In what ways are the psychosexual stages valid or invalid? Is the concept of fixation legitimate? Why or why not? 
4. Provide an example of you or someone you know using a defense mechanism. Which mechanism was it and how was it used? 
5. Do free association, hypnosis, dream analysis and other projective tests have merit? Explain your answer. 
6. What do you think of Freud’s psychodynamic theory of personality development? What are the pros? What are the cons? 

Answer 1

Freud is a determinist whose body of work is largely worthless, despite his prominence. According to Freud, our awareness of external factual reality is not informed by our senses and then interpreted by our cognition, but by indeterminate inner mental elements independent of such external factual reality. In other words, Freud sees the fundamental role of the mind not as one of perception, but creation: the creation of a subjective world by operation of innate mental structures. It is the age old confusion of the metaphysical (natural) and the man made applied to psychology, but that infects all philosophical and intellectual schools of thought since Aristotle.

According to Freud, the engine driving human nature is an internal but imperceptible entity with an independent and primal will and purpose all its own: the unconscious—what he calls the “Id." This amoral "thing" seethes with innate, bestial, inherited, and imperious cravings or “instincts." Locked in perpetual moral conflict wit the Id is man’s conscience or “Superego,” which is not comprised of volitional, rational moral convictions, but of primitive, illogical, unconscious taboos and categorical imperatives, representing the mores not of the developing child by his own conscious effort, but by the child’s parents (and ultimately of society), whose arbitrary injunctions every human passively “introjects” and cowers before. Caught between these two warring inner factions--between a pathological impulse concerned only with the pleasure in the moment, and a sort of tribal witch doctor demanding obedience to the tribe—man's Ego (i.e.,his mind and reason) which is the faculty supposed to be able to grasp reality, exists primarily to mediate between the clashing demands of the psyche’s two irrational masters, rendering the Ego perpetually guilt ridden, anxious, and neurotic. Thus, the chronic state of man's frustration and misery.