Prof. Cloninger
Theories of Personality
13 November 2011 The Ego as Fundamental Component of Personality and Three Therapies to Modify it.
In a normal human life, a person is susceptible to various forces that one is not usually consciously aware of. These unconscious forces still nevertheless remain a constant influence upon us and a constant stimulus that results from the interplay between our environment and our continuous and evolving sense of self. In order to become a highly functional person in our society, a person must become aware of these unconscious influences that constantly surround oneself, acknowledge that the ego and its development is the most crucial aspect of our lives, and only by learning healthy methods of mitigating our motives and needs against the opportunities and limitations of our environments will we be able to attain the highest levels of success in our lives.
Besides our conscious awareness of the world there are unconscious influences which play an integral role in how we function within our environment. According to Sigmund Freud, the unconscious mind is “a repository for urges, feelings, and ideas that are tied to anxiety, conflict, and pain” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 162). Our waking consciousness can be seen as only a small component of the mind, while the greater majority of our individual mental world is comprised of an unconscious and unseen element which Freud states is responsible for the “core operations” of our personality (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 162). If this is true, then our conscious experience is only a small fragment of the greater functioning of our minds.
According to Freud, our minds are comprised of three individual parts: the ego, the id, and the superego. The id “is all the inherited, instinctive, primitive aspects” of our personality that is largely unconscious, deriving from our biological states which constantly seek out satiation in our environments (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 163). Our superego is our value system that we inherent from our parents and our greater society as a whole (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 166). It is our ego that is always caught in the middle of the id and the superego, always trying to maintain a proper balance between “the desires of the id and the constraints of the external world” in the form of our own superego (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 165). This constant need to balance the unconscious yet ever present demands of the id and the superego can cause much stress if a person is unable to develop a healthy ego which is able to satisfy these demands.
Our unconscious mind is also comprised of instincts that drive us toward our survival as found in the life, or Eros instincts, and our death, or Thanatos instincts (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 170). Our life instincts comprise our drives toward “survival, reproduction, and pleasure”, while our death instincts exist as a unconscious drive toward a “return to nothingness” perhaps forming in the pursuit of self-destructive acts and risky behaviors (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 170). These life and death instincts play a largely unseen yet important influence on our lifestyles as well as the people that our egos are attracted to and reciprocated by.
As we go through life our ego must learn methods to balance our unconscious yet powerful drives and impulses against the need to satisfy the need to please our social environment. Not all of our unconscious yet ever present drives can be satiated all of the time which results in the need to either “displace” or “sublimate” our desires (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 172). Displacement is “a change in how energy is used or the object toward which it’s used”, or how we direct our feelings which may be uncomfortable for us to express in one instance with one person, is now channeled towards an another instance where it is comfortable for us to vent, or express these feelings (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 172). Sublimation on the other hand, is shifting the feelings which cause us discomfort away from “socially unacceptable” actions to those that are “acceptable or even praiseworthy” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 172). Depending upon our individual personalities and how functional we tend to be in learning how to express ourselves, our behaviors can leads us toward actions of displacement or sublimation.
Our ego and the understanding for the need for its healthy development is crucial if we are to be successful in our social interactions and attain the quality of life that we feel we deserve. Carver and Scheier (2008) state that our “ego identity is the consciously experienced sense of self. It derives from transactions with social reality. A person’s ego identity changes constantly in response to events in the social world” (p. 244). This ongoing and continuous sense of self in our ever changing environment necessitates that we become as educated as we can in the development of our egos.
A person’s ego goes through several stages in a typical lifetime and it is critical to a healthy sense of self that we are able to evolve and adapt through theses stages. Erickson identifies eight different “psychosocial stages” of which each has its own crisis “that dominates each stage” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 245). The first stage is of infancy, and its crisis is the sense of trust, or believing in a predicable world of relationships (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 245). The second stage is early childhood, and its crisis concerns “creating a sense of autonomy in actions versus shame and doubt” and “being able to act independently” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 245). The third stage is of preschool and its crisis is a “desire to exert influence” and “power” in one’s environment (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 246). The fourth stage is called school age and its crisis is gaining “the sense that one can do things that are valued by others” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 246). The fifth stage is called adolescence and its corresponding crisis is of developing a “consolidated identity” or a “direction in the sense of self” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 248). The sixth stage is known as young adulthood and its crisis involves learning to develop intimate relations with others (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 248). The seventh stage is labeled adulthood and its crisis involves centers around “generativity” or creating something that outlives the person whether it is a child or a work of art (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 250). The eighth and final stage is called old age, and its crisis involves having a positive outlook on the sense of satisfaction one has attained while looking back on the accomplishments and failures one has made in their lifetime (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 251). It is only by successfully navigating each crisis at each stage that a person is able to move on to the next, and by the successful navigation of these stages that the ego develops to its highest potential. Recognizing that the ego is the most crucial aspect of our lives and that it’s development is an ongoing process, we then need to search out the methods to improve and attain our highest level of functioning.
There are three different ways among many that one can improve one’s ego reality in one’s environment: classical conditioning, instrumental conditioning, and observational learning.
Classical conditioning involves associating a response to an already existing association between a stimulus and the corresponding reflex, to the introduction of a new stimulus to activate this same reflex (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 266). The most famous example of this type of conditioning is seen in the experiments of Ivan Pavlov, who trained dogs to salivate to the sound of a bell. In a person’s lifetime there are various stimulations from our environments that cause conditioned reflexes within us that result in actions that may very well be unconscious. For example, we may learn to fear being in the dark if we are conditioned as children to believe in monsters that hide under beds and in closets. As we grow and learn that monsters do not exist but we may still keep our fear of the dark into adulthood. It is by examining our unconscious behaviors that we come to understand why our behavior continues as it does. Once we discover our negative behaviors are attached to conditioned stimulus, we can then use “counterconditioning” to assign “a new response that is incompatible” with our fear of the dark (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 506).
Instrumental conditioning, or operant conditioning, is a process by which a pattern of behavior of a subject is continued if a positive outcome of the behavior results, while a negative outcome of the behavior is likely to result in its diminishment from the subject’s cycle of behavior (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 270). Unlike classical conditioning which only requires a reaction towards some stimuli, instrumental conditioning is dependent upon the active behavior of the individual (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 270). Instrumental conditioning is essentially reinforcing “desired behaviors and punishing undesired behaviors” or using a system of rewards or punishment to modify behavior (Myers, 2005, p. 509). The most common example of this therapy is when parents reward their children for good behavior and punish them for misbehavior. Although this form of therapy depends on outside reinforcement to shape one’s behavior, a person with enough determination and self-control can perhaps learn to observe their behaviors and determine for themselves their own rewards or punishment to the measure by which one hope to attain their desired potential.
Observational conditioning is a process by which a subject watches another subject perform a desired action, then the first subject learns to “acquire the ability to repeat” this desired behavior (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 301). This form of therapy allows a person to accrue “huge amounts of information quickly” by “paying attention to the model” and retain the desired observed behavior by “imaginal coding” or mental picturing, and “verbal coding” or mental description of the observed behavior (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 301). This form of therapy allows us to modify our behavior by finding those with the skills and knowledge that we desire, and then learn to copy what they do to attain this same desired levels of skill and knowledge. We become only as successful as the successful people we choose to emulate.
The lack of a formation of a healthy ego identity will likely result in a dysfunctional cycle that continues throughout our lifetimes unless we learn the structures of our ego and how to organize it within our relationships and in our greater social environment. Myers (2005) states individuals “finding their favorable self-esteem” or ego, “threatened, people often react by putting others down, sometimes with violence” which can manifest in either physical or verbal expression (p. 64). The ego of many people is a fragile and unshaped thing, reacting to random events that occur in the circumstances of our lives that come and go. Perhaps by studying the ego, and how it functions, one can learn to comfortably occupy the line between what is good for ourselves, and what is good for our environments.
References
Carver, C. S. & Scheier, M.F. (2008). Perspectives on Personality, 6th ed. Boston, MA: Pearson
Myers, David G. (2005). Social Psychology, 8th ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Myers, David G. (2002). Exploring Psychology, 5th ed. New York, NY: Worth Publishers.
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