Main Concepts of Sigmund Freud

Freud identified three levels of mental life—unconscious, preconscious, and conscious.
•Early childhood experiences that create high levels of anxiety are repressed into the unconscious, where they may influence behavior, emotions, and attitudes for years.
•Events that are not associated with anxiety but are merely forgotten make up the contents of the preconscious.
• Conscious images are those in awareness at any given time.
• Freud recognized three provinces of the mind—id, ego, and superego.
•The id is unconscious, chaotic, out of contact with reality, and in service of the pleasure principle.
•The ego is the executive of personality, in contact with the real world, and in service of the reality principle.
•The superego serves the moral and idealistic principles and begins to form after the Oedipus complex is resolved.
•All motivation can be traced to sexual and aggressive drives. Childhood behaviors related to sex and aggression are often punished, which leads to either repression or anxiety.
•To protect itself against anxiety, the ego initiates various defense mechanisms, the most basic of which is repression.
•Freud outlined three major stages of development—infancy, latency, and a genital period—but he devoted most attention to the infantile stage.
•The infantile stage is divided into three substages—oral, anal, and phallic, the last of which is accompanied by the Oedipus complex.
•During the simple Oedipal stage, a child desires sexual union with one parent while harboring hostility for the other.
•Freud believed that dreams and Freudian slips are disguised means of expressing unconscious impulses.