Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The reality principle and pleasure principle are two competing concepts established by Freud. The pleasure principle is the psychoanalytic concept based on the pleasure drive of the id in which people seek pleasure and avoid suffering in order to satisfy their biological and psychological needs.
Freud states that when any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it creates a feeling of mild resentment as it clashes with the reality principle. Primitive instincts—for example, the desire to kill and the insatiable craving for sexual gratification—are harmful to the collective wellbeing of a human community.
Originally, Freud used the word ego to mean the sense of self, but later expanded it to include psychic functions such as judgment, tolerance, reality testing, control, planning, defense, synthesis of information, intellectual functioning, and memory. The ego is the organizing principle upon which thoughts and interpretations of the world are ...
Freud contrasted the pleasure principle with the counterpart concept of the reality principle, which describes the capacity to defer gratification of a desire when circumstantial reality disallows its immediate gratification. In infant and early childhood, the id rules behavior by obeying only the pleasure principle. People at that age only ...
The reality principle is what the Ego operates in order to help satisfy the Id's demands as well as compromising according to reality. The Ego is a person's "self" composed of unconscious desires. The Ego takes into account ethical and cultural ideals in order to balance out the desires originating in the Id.
Freud's ego at this stage was relatively passive and weak; he described it as the helpless rider on the id's horse, more or less obliged to go where the id wished to go. [4] In Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926), Freud revised his theory of anxiety as well as delineated a more robust ego. Freud argued that instinctual drives (id), moral ...
The ego develops slowly and gradually, being concerned with mediating between the urging of the id and the realities of the external world; it thus operates on the 'reality principle'. The super-ego is held to be the part of the ego in which self-observation, self-criticism and other reflective and judgmental faculties develop.
[9] [10] The ego is driven by the reality principle. The ego seeks to balance the conflicting aims of the id and superego, by trying to satisfy the id's drives in ways that are compatible with reality. The Ego is how we view ourselves: it is what we refer to as 'I' (Freud's word is the German ich, which simply means 'I').