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According to Freud, there is an unconscious desire for one's mother to be a virgin and for one's father to be an all-powerful, almighty figure. Freud's interest in Greek mythology and religion greatly influenced his psychological theories. The Oedipus complex is when a boy is jealous of his father.
It is especially interested in the dynamic relations between conscious motivation and unconscious motivation. [1] The term psychodynamics is sometimes used to refer specifically to the psychoanalytical approach developed by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and his followers.
Freud theorised that people have an unconscious mind that would, if permitted, manifest itself in incest, murder and other activities which are considered crimes in contemporary society. Freud believes that neuroticism is a result of tensions caused by suppression of our unconscious drives, which are fundamentally aggressive towards others. [1]
The personal unconscious is a reservoir of material that was once conscious but has been forgotten or suppressed, much like Freud's notion. The collective unconscious, however, is the deepest level of the psyche, containing the accumulation of inherited psychic structures and archetypal experiences. Archetypes are not memories but energy ...
Freud viewed the unconscious as a repository for socially unacceptable ideas, anxiety-producing wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of consciousness by the mechanism of repression. Such unconscious mental processes can only be recognized through analysis of their effects in consciousness.
By 1920, Freud addressed the power of identification (with the leader and with other members) in groups as a motivation for behavior in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. [ 61 ] [ 62 ] In that same year, Freud suggested his dual drive theory of sexuality and aggression in Beyond the Pleasure Principle , to try to begin to explain ...
External circumstances can also impact the motivation underlying unconscious behavior. An example is the effect of priming, in which an earlier stimulus influences the response to a later stimulus without the person's awareness of this influence. [74] Unconscious motivation is a central topic in Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. [75]
The standard edition of Freud's works in English confuses two terms that are different in German, Instinkt (instinct) and Trieb (drive), often translating both as instinct; for example, "the hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state". [10] "