Psychoanalytic Thinking

Psychoanalytical thinking appears in everyday life. Take Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality for example. According to Freud, he believed three central forces shape the personality, the id, the ego and the superego. As a college student, it may happen to you that your friend asks you to hang out but you have a paper due by midnight and you haven’t finished it. At that time, the id produces instinctual impulse to go out and have fun. The ego then employs the reason and operates in accordance with the reality principle, so even though you really want to go out with your fiends, you decide to decline the invitation and work on the paper because you do not want to miss the deadline and get a low grade. Based on the superego, you know it is wrong to hang out with friends while leaving your work unfinished. Therefor you stay at home and continue with your paper instead of going out. However, sometimes the id impulse is so strong. You have to use ego defense mechanism to control unacceptable id drive and to reduce the anxiety it arouses. Thus you may use denial, telling yourself that it’s not actually an important assignment and will not lower much of your grade even if you do not done it, and that there’s no good reason not to go out with old friends.