Developmental psychology.pdf

Personality 399
Figure 15.2
Fraud in Later Years. He had
several dogs, and one of them, Jofi,
was said to be an astute judge of
human character.
aggression and is manifest in aggressive behavior toward the self as well as others. It
should be noted that Freud, in speaking of instincts, was referring to motivational and
emotional impulses. He did not use this term in its conventional sense today.
The newborn is "all id," wanting food right away when hungry, urinating
without consideration of time or place, and so forth. The id thus follows the pleasure
principle, which requires the immediate satisfaction of needs, regardless of the circumstances.*
Emergence of Ego As the growing infant learns to react to the outer environment,
the expression of the id becomes modified. Partly out of the energy provided by the id
and partly from the environment, there emerges a new dimension called the ego. The
ego, which in Latin means "I" or "self," becomes the executive or problem-solving
dimension of the personality, operating in the service of the id. The ego assists the id
in achieving its ends, taking into account the conditions of the external environment.
The ego follows the reality principle, meaning that it often requires a suspension
of the pleasure principle according to the circumstances in the environment. The
infant discovers that sucking on clothes does not satisfy hunger and that wet diapers
are uncomfortable. The infant seeks to alter these conditions, perhaps by calling for
its mother. As the baby calls the mother and finds other ways to solve such problems,
the ego emerges, especially through such psychological processes as perceiving, learning,
remembering, and reasoning, all aspects of the ego. Under these influences, the
child gradually refrains from acting solely according to biological impulses.
'One day while my aunt was
busy doing something else, my
four-year-old cousin asked her to
unzip her dress, but my aunt
Ignored her. A couple of minutes
later, my cousin walked into the
room with a pair of scissors in her
hand. She had cut her dress all the
way up in front.
One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a
rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotive energy and the rider
has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements
of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between
the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the
rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to
go (Freud, 1933).