Evaluate The Extent To Which Freud’s Theory Of Psy

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INTRODUCTION Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia, Austria and was almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris his interests turned psychology, and after another ten years of clinical work in Vienna initially working alongside an older colleague Breuer, came the birth of his own creation, psychoanalysis. Starting as a simple method of treating neurotic patients it developed into his discovery of the unconscious mind and the influence it has on our everyday thoughts and actions. Without doubt he has been hugely influential in shaping psychology practices of the twentieth century, and he is also considered to be highly original and controversial thinkers of our time. An overview of Freud’s theory of psychosexual development In order to the evaluate how Freud’s theory of psychosexual development can help in the understanding a clients presenting issues we first need to look at the theory itself. Freud divided the psyche into three levels of awareness known as conscious, what we are aware of, and preconscious, what we can be aware of if and adjust if we attend to it and the unconscious which we can not be aware of unless accessed through therapy. The id represents our conscious mind and is the biological basis of personality, the partly or pre conscious is known as the ego which develops in the first year and is the psychological executive of personality and the superego that develops from the age of 3 to five years and is the social and moral component of personality. Freud proposed the theory that personality development centred on the effects of the sexual pleasure drive on the individual psyche. He argued that there are particular stages in the development process, especially during the first five years of life, that are fundamental to a persons behaviour in adult life. He believed it was important to complete each stage
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