The three most useful ideas that one can learn from this course is that: we are subject to the influence of unconscious forces, that ideas have power, and that the ego is something we construct based on the stimulus of our social environments.
Along with our conscious awareness of our existence, there is a larger and greater mental world that influences our perception of reality in the form of the unconscious. Sigmund Freud states that the unconscious mind is “a repository for urges, feelings, and ideas that are tied to anxiety, conflict, and pain” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 162). This repository is responsible for the “core operations” of our personalities (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 162). These core operations of Freud also contain the Eros, or life instincts, and the Thanatos, or death instincts (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 170). As much as we are able, we can still only express so much in one lifetime, most often we have to “displace” or “sublimate” our unconscious desires and urges (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 172). Displacement is “a change in how energy is used or the object toward which its used”, or directing feelings which we may be uncomfortable expressing in our personal lives into an environment where we are more comfortable (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 172). Sublimation is a shifting “socially unacceptable” actions into actions that are “acceptable or even praiseworthy” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 172). Along with these urges, feelings, ideas, and instincts that comprise the core operations of our personalities that we can displace and sublimate, we are also subject to unconscious reflexes that we become conditioned to perform when some stimulus from our environment activates these automatic responses. These unconscious reflexes can be changed when we recognize that we are performing these automatic, yet unconscious responses to our detriment in our lives. Upon discovering our conditioned, yet self-sabotaging responses to some environmental stimulus, we can then counter condition ourselves to display “a new response that is incompatible” with our former behavior (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 506). A great deal of our lives is guided and influenced by forces which are largely unconscious, yet nevertheless these forces play an important part in our functioning and participation in the world.
The world constantly projects upon our minds information that has a power over us, whether or not one recognizes this fact. In the cognitive self-regulation perspective, we are introduced to the idea of schema, or “mental organizations of information” that forms our mental experience, and our personal interpretations of the world (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 373). These schemas “develop over experience” and are adapted to emulating the behavior of successful “prototypes” which are actual or idealized representatives that we respect and admire (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 396). “Problems in behavior can come from information-processing deficits”, according to Carver and Scheier (2008), come from our inability to encode or absorb information from our environment, from “ineffective allocation of attention” to information that would assist us in developing our potentials, and “negative self-schemas” or the beliefs that we create and maintain about ourselves which limit our proper functioning in the world (p. 396). Ideas as powerful information is also reflected in the social-cognitive learning perspective. This perspective recognizes that “thought processes” play an integral part in our behavior, and through observing successful people, one can “learn from one another” to emulate this successful behavior (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 315). In this perspective people can be divided into an “internal” who recognizes the importance of reinforcement on their behavior, or an “external” who is not motivated by “social reinforcers such as acceptance and approval”, and who believes “their outcomes to be unrelated to their actions” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 316). One can also find in the observational conditioning perspective a basis for the concept of world as powerful information. In the observational conditioning perspective, one observes a model of desired behavior to absorb “huge amounts of information quickly” by “paying attention to the model”, and retaining this observed behavior by mental imaging or “imaginal coding”, or by “verbal coding” which is mentally describing the behavior which has been observed (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 301). Once we recognize the fact that our world is constantly projecting information upon us, it then up to us to best learn how to make use of this information to our own personal advantage.
The egos with which we use to participate in our social environment is a personal construction with which we can continuously update and modify to improve our functioning in the world. Freud states that the ego is only one part of our conscious, waking mind that is responsible for mitigating and maintaining a balance between the other two components of our minds, the id and the superego. The id “is all the inherited instinctive, primitive aspects” of our personality that largely remains unconscious, coming from basic, biological drives which are constantly looking to our environments for stimulation and satiation (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 163). Our superego is the value system our mind creates to mediate the id desires against the need for control and order within our social environments (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 166). The need for the ego to constantly balance the desires of the id, against the moralizing superego, can result in much stress if a person is unable to construct a strong, yet flexible sense of self. Once one understands that it is crucial to our success in our social environment, and to our own healthy development, we can then create an ego identity with which we can achieve a life of satisfaction. Our “ego identity”, Carver and Scheier (2008) state “is the consciously experienced sense of self”, deriving “from transactions with social reality”, which constantly modifies itself “in response to events in the social world” (p. 244). Our ego identities go through eight “psycho-social stages” in our lifetimes, each of which has its own respective crisis “that dominates each stage” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 245). The respective eight stages (and their respective crisis) are: infancy (the sense of trust), early childhood (independence), preschool (influence and power in social environment), school age (sense of personal value), adolescence (the consolidation of self), young adulthood (learning intimacy), adulthood (creating something that will outlive oneself, whether it is art or children), and old age (sense of satisfaction). Our highest potential can only be reached by navigating each stage as best as we are able to learn to accomplish. There are various psychological perspectives that we can use to evolve and adapt our personal construction of the ego throughout our lives. One such perspective is known as the personal construct theory, where one attempts to create a structure of personality “through the lens” of an interpretation of reality that is based on predicting and anticipating future events (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 351). In this personal construct perspective, a person essentially becomes a scientist of self, measuring their self-created hypotheses against their effect in social environments (Neimeyer and Bridges, 2003, para. 2). Identifying the fact that our egos are of our own creation, we can then learn to construct an ego that can evolve and adapt to place ourselves in the best position that we are capable of, and achieving the highest potential that we are wholly committed to and determined to pursue.
There are three useful ideas that can be learned from this course. The first is the influence of unconscious forces upon our lives, and once we recognize the effect that these forces have, we can then begin to distinguish what decisions we are making consciously, and what is motivating us without our conscious realization into automatic behavior. The second most useful idea is that ideas have power, and these ideas are merely a reflection of the information that our world is constantly projecting upon our senses. It is up to us to learn to decipher this information and how we can use this knowledge for our own, and for others betterment as well. The third and final most useful idea is that the ego is something we construct based on the stimulus of our social environments. Instead of seeing ourselves as having a fixed and unchanging personality, we should see our egos as a mere tool that can continuously be enhanced for higher functioning within our social environments, modifying and adapting it to our present circumstances, yet attempting to prepare our egos for possible and probable events in the foreseeable future as well.
References
Carver, C. S. & Scheier, M.F. (2008). Perspectives on Personality, 6th ed. Boston, MA:
Pearson.
Neimeyer, R.A. & Bridges, S.K. (2003). “Personal Construct Theory”. The Internet
Encyclopaedia of Personal Construct Psychology. Retrieved from
http://www.pcp-net.org/encyclopaedia/main.html
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