Freud’s Structures of Personality

According to Sigmund Freud’s theory of personality, human personality is comprised of three elements, namely, id, ego, and superego. The integration of the three components shapes the behavior of human beings. Each of the three elements has a unique contribution to human personality and develops at different stages of life (King, 2016). As a certain personality aspect pressure for immediate gratification, others counteract these pressures and attempt to make an individual conform to reality. The id forms the fundamental part of the personality that represents the instinctive urges such as the desire for sex and food. This element seeks immediate satisfaction of human wants. If the wants are not gratified, an individual may develop anxiety, anger or tension. The ego represents the realistic part of the personality that mediates the id’s desires and those of the superego. This can mean delaying satisfaction. The last element to develop is the superego. This element holds people internal moral standards that are developed from the society. It guides a person in making judgments.

Defense mechanisms

Defense mechanism refers to the unconscious psychological strategies that protect an individual from anxiety-evoking feelings or thoughts.  The ego plays the most significant role in the defense since it uses defense mechanism to control demands of the id and superego by averting accurate recognition of anxiety-evoking feelings hence maintaining one’s schema (King, 2016).

The Most Accurate Approach to Describe and Understand Personality

The traits perspective is the most accurate approach to describe and understand personality. This is because it focuses on identification, description, and measurement of the specific traits that make a personality (King, 2016). The researchers believe that when one understands the traits of a person, they can get the best understanding of the differences between one individual and the other. Unlike other personality theories, trait approach focuses on explaining the differences between people. Each has a unique personality which forms from a combination of several traits that can be easily observed and examined to ascertain one’s personality.

References

King, L. (2016). Experience psychology (3rd ed.)