Psychology
5/4/2013
Campus: City Campus
Subject: Psychology
Topic: Understanding Human Behaviour and Diversity.
Table of Contents:
Topic Page
Rationalization 4
Cultural Assimilation due to Globalization 6
Drive Reduction Theory 8
Rationalization
The Topic I chose from unit one for my Reflective Journal is Rationalization which is based on Freud’s Psychodynamic Theory.
Freud’s Psychodynamic Theory of Personality emphasizes the importance of early childhood experiences, unconscious or repressed thoughts that are not voluntarily accessed and conflicts between conscious and unconscious forces that influence our feelings. Freud’s theory was his belief that the mind is like an iceberg (mostly hidden). Our conscious awareness is the part of the iceberg that floats above the surface. Below the surface is a much larger, unconscious region containing thoughts, wishes, feelings and memories of which we are unaware. Some of the thoughts that we store are temporarily in a preconscious area, and can be retrieved to the conscious area. He believed that there is a mass of unacceptable passions and thoughts that would be too repressed or forcefully blocked out of our unconscious because they were too unsettling to acknowledge. In Freud’s view, human personality, including emotions, arises from a conflict between our aggressive, pleasure-seeking biological impulses and the internal social restraints against them. He believed that personality is the result of our efforts to resolve basic conflict. To understand the mind’s dynamics during the conflict Freud proposed three interacting systems. They are the id, ego and superego. The id contains a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy, which according to Freud, strives to satisfy the basic sexual and aggressive drives. The id operates on a pleasure principle demanding immediate gratification. The ego is the largely conscious,