Psychology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 8

Psychology - Essay Example Repression is an unconscious reaction to a traumatic event or threatening feelings that enables a child who suffered abuse, for example, to completely block all memory of the event out of their mind. Denial is somewhat similar to repression in that the mind works to ignore a situation, threatening impulse or other unpleasant idea, but in this case, there is some conscious understanding of what has taken place yet the individual denies to themselves that the event occurred the way it did or that it had an effect on them. Displacement allows an individual to transfer negative feelings to a less threatening target as a means of relieving tension. In this case, an individual who has a difficult relationship with their boss might come home from work and be mean to their pet or roommate or drive home aggressively, cutting people off in traffic and yelling at people passing by (Just, n.d.). In addition to the development of the mind, Freud identified several psychosexual stages of development through which a child must pass to become a healthy adult. These begin with the oral stage in which all pleasure comes to the infant through the mouth. The next stage is the anal stage in conjunction with toilet training and represents the child’s first battle between the id and the ego and superego and can shape personality into anal retentive or anal expulsive characters. The phallic stage is when the child becomes aware of his or her genitals and begins to identify with either the mother or the father and results in the child wishing to possess the parent of the opposite sex. Once these stages are navigated, the child enters a latency period in which the sexual drive is dormant, but it reemerges with adolescence in the genital stage as individuals begin focusing their attention on heterosexual relationships in the teenage years. Attributions are basically the human need to offer an explanation for a variety of events. External