Sigmund Freud was a physician specializing in neurology, when he began his medical practice in Vienna towards the end of the 19th Century. Like other neurologists in his era, he often treated people troubled by nervous problems such as irrational fears, obsessions and anxieties. Eventually he devoted himself to the treatment of mental disorders using innovative procedures that he developed, called psychoanalysis. He suggested that people are not masters of their own minds and that childhood experiences strongly determine adult personality. He further asserted that individual personalities are shaped by how they cope with their sexual urges. He divided personality structure into three components: the id, the ego and the superego. He saw that person’s behaviour as the outcome of interactions among these three components.
The id is the primitive component of personality that operates according to the pleasure principle. Id houses the raw biological urges (to eat, sleep, defecate, copulate and so on) that energize human behaviour. The id operates according to the pleasure principle, which demands immediate gratification of its urges. It engages in primary process thinking, which is primitive, illogical, irrational and fantasy oriented. The ego is the decision-making component of personality that operates according to the reality principle. The ego mediates between the id, with its forceful desires for immediate satisfaction, and the external social world, with its expectations and norms regarding suitable behaviour. The ego considers social realities-society’s norms, etiquette, rules and customs- in deciding how to behave. The ego is guided by the reality principle, which seeks to delay gratification of id’s urges until appropriate outlets and situations can be found. In short, to stay out of trouble, the ego often works to tame the unbridled desires of the id. As Freud put it, the ego is “like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse”.
In the long run, the ego wants to maximise gratification, just like the id. However, the ego engages in secondary process thinking, which is relatively rational, realistic, and oriented toward problem solving. Thus, the ego strives to avoid negative consequences from society and its representatives (for example, punishment by parents or teachers) by behaving “properly”. It also attempts to achieve long-range goals that sometimes require putting off gratification.
While the ego concerns itself with practical realities, the superego is the moral component of personality that incorporates social standards about what represents right and wrong. Throughout their lives, but especially during childhood, individuals receive training about what is good and bad behaviour. Eventually they internalise many of these social norms. This means that they truly accept certain moral principles, then put pressure on themselves to live up to these standards. The superego emerges out of the ego at around 3 to 5 years of age. In some people, the superego can become irrationally demanding in its striving for moral perfection. Such people are plagued by excessive guilt. According to Freud, the id, ego and superego are distributed across three levels of awareness. He contrasted the unconscious with the conscious and preconscious. The conscious consists of whatever one is aware of at a particular point in time. For example, at one moment your conscious may include the current train of thought in this text and a dim awareness in the back of your mind that your eyes are getting tired and you are beginning to get hungry. The preconscious contains material just beneath the surface of awareness that can be easily retrieved. Examples might include your middle name, what you had for supper last night, or an argument you had with a friend yesterday. The unconscious contains thoughts, memories and desires that are well below the surface of conscious awareness, but that nonetheless exert great influence on one’s behaviour. Examples of material that might be found in your unconscious would include a forgotten trauma from childhood or hidden feelings of hostility toward a parent.
DEVELOPMENT: PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES
Freud made the startling assertion that the foundation of an individual’s personality is laid down by the tender age of 5! He emphasised how young children deal with their immature, but powerful, sexual urges (he used the term ‘sexual’ in a general way to refer to many urges for physical pleasure, not just the urge to copulate). According to Freud, these sexual urges shift in focus as children progress from one stage to another. Indeed, the names for the stages (Oral, anal, genital, and so on) are based on when children are focusing their erotic energy at the time. Thus, psychosexual stages are developmental periods with a characteristic sexual focus that leave their mark on adult personality.
| STAGE | Approximateages | Erotic Focus | Key task & experience | E.g of unsuccessful task completion |
| Oral | 0-1 | Mouth(Sucking, biting) | Weaning(from breast or bottle) | Smoking, alcoholism, Obesity, Nail biting, drug addiction, difficulty in trusting others |
| Anal | 2-3 | Anus(Expelling or retaining faeces) | Toilet training | Constipation, perfectionism, obsessive compulsive disorder |
| Phallic | 4-5 | Genitals(Masturbation) | Identifying with adult role models; coping with Oedipal crisis | Homosexuality, transsexuality, sexual identity problems in general, difficulty in accepting authority |
| Latency | 6-12 | None(sexuality repressed) | Expanding social contacts | Inability to conceptualise, lack of motivation in school or job |
| Genital | Puberty onwards | Genitals(being sexually intimate) | Establishing intimate relationships; contributing to society through working | Frigidity, impotency, premature ejaculation, unsatisfactory relationships |
Fixation is failure to move on forward from one stage to another as expected. Essentially, child’s development stalls for a while. Fixation is caused by excessive gratification of needs at a particular stage or by excessive frustration of those needs. Either way, fixation left over from childhood affect adult personality. Generally, fixation leads to an overemphasis on the psychosexual needs that were prominent during the fixated stage.
Depending on Freudian concept, Personality has been classified into following clinical types. 1) Anxious 2) Schizoid 3) Paranoid 4) Cyclothianic 5) Hysterical 6) Obsessive 7) Timid 8) Sensitive 9) Explosive 10) Epileptic 11) Passive aggressive 12) In adequate personality 13) Antisocial personality.
All of us have a particular personality which varies from time to time, like for example sometimes angry, sometimes sad, so our personality makes us respond & react to situations in a particular way. Therefore, personality is defined on the basis of behavioural pattern evolved in an individual through his experiences. Our founder, Master Hahnemann & Dr Kent & other reowned homoeopaths introduced this basic human behaviour as mental individualization about 200 years ago. In Homoeopathy, Individual reactive pattern decides the selection of remedy. For example; Argentum Nitricum develops diarrhoea out of anxiety, whereas Gelsemium develops fever out of anxiety. Now anxiety is common in both remedies, but reactive pattern decides the selection of the remedy.
So Personality is the totality of an individual’s spontaneous tendencies, behaviours, intellectual qualities & acts of interest. The extravert has tendency to want to be noticed (e.g., Argentum Nitricum, Argentum Metallicum, Phosphorus, Palladium, Platina, Lachesis, Sulphur, etc. The introvert influences others inadvertentlt through his silent deeds (e.g., Aurum- Metallicum, Natrum-Sulphuricum). The introvert is more cautious, anxious, and may be timid, with a phlegmatic or nervous temperament. He sees obstacles even where none exist(e.g., Silica, Gelsemium, Lycopodium and Aurum-mettalicum who sees obstacles everywhere occasioned by fate and then by himself) and is guarded about the future and any task at hand. In Natrum-Sulph we come across the symptom; Mental affections from injury to head, as in persistent confusion of mind with inability to think sets in after an accidental fall from the bike, vertigo and nosebleeds as part of after effects of the fall, gradually patient becomes progressively melancholic with loathing of life & inclination for suicide, and since the patient is introvert, all these alterations in personality’s disposition may go unnoticed.
Even in different stages in our remedies, especially when linked to the miasms, will show that over the evolution of the remedy type, the person can go from extravert to introvert.
Natrum muriaticum is a perfect example. During the first, psoric phase, a very naive and impulsive Natrum-mur certainly portrays an extraverted type- laughs and sings all day long. But already in the middle phase (sycosis with its exaggerated efforts to stay in a relationship) and even more in the final(isolated) syphilitic phase of withdrawal, refuge, loneliness and hatred, the extraverted type develops an introverted attitude.-Avoids company, talks of the dead, sees is wretched when looking in the mirror. Enjoys thinking about the past sad occurences although it exhausts her.
Carcinosin– An introvert, suppressive, earnest and responsible person with excessive sense of duty, who has been dominated from childhood to adulthood. The rigidity and high expectations in the upbringing of carcinosin leave him with a heavy legacy. They are overburdened and prone to stress as they are constantly worried about trifles. We have a fragile person who undermines his own confidence by pleasing others while suppressing his own wishes. Failure in any task is just not acceptable and is tantamount to not receiving love and validation from others and the self. ‘I can’t say no; I hate confrontations; I feel guilty when I take time off. This leads to a great deal of suppressed anger. Which eventually leads to physical illness. The greatest injustice is that I am not accepted the way I am. Long lasting grief. A typical type C personality.
Anacardium– This is a split personality (feels and thought he had two wills, one commanding to do what the other forbids; thinks he is double; duality, sense of). Anacardium has no control over who will win this battle: the devil or the angel, the bad or the good. These thoughts persevere in the back of his mind, he is overcome by rage and panic, leading to sudden violent rage, so violent that he could have stabbed someone. ‘Someone makes me do it’, expressing the delusion of being under the influence of a powerful being, a sort of possession by primitive impulses and urges. So Anacardium can resort to unacceptable acts of cruelty. In this drug we see reflections of multiple personality syndrome and paranoid schizophrenia.
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