In this chapter, I discovered the different characteristics of a person's mind and how one's personality acts and reacts to situations at hand. I learned that personality is the grouped system of typical responses to situations and actions, as well as one's thoughts and emotions, which make them unique. There are four different perspectives dealing with personality: 1) the psychoanalytic perspective; 2) the trait perspective; 3) the humanistic perspective; 4) the social-cognitive perspective.
The psychoanalytic perspective deals with personality and behavior caused by unconscious motives and conflicts. Sigmund Freud is introduced and it is discussed that he researched neurological disorders dealing with psychological causes. Freud discussed different regions of the human's mind, one of which is the unconscious region- contains thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories of which are unaware; some are stored in temporarily in a preconscious area from which we can retrieve them into conscious awareness. He came to a conclusion that we are being influenced by these troublesome feelings even though we are not consciously aware of them. ID is the part of the mind that tries to satisfy basic drives that operate on the pleasure principle. The ego is the largely conscious "executive- part of the mind that mediates among the id, superego, and reality- guiding behavior to try to satisfy desires in realistic ways. The superego is the part of the mind that represents ideals, morals, and the conscience. The concept of personality development is based on the concept of perfection of oneself and one's reaction in order to acquire a well-developed personality. I think that the concept of the Oedipus/Electra complex, in the phallic stage of Freud's Psychosexual Stages, is interesting. It involves a child's unconscious desire to possess the opposite-sexed parent's attention rather than the same-sexed parent.
