Analysis Of Sigmund Freud And Someday My Elders Will Be Proud

Psychologists have created different theories to explain and determine what it means to have a healthy personality. Sigmund Freud was one of them. It was Freud’s belief that personality characteristics should be fully developed by early childhood. His theories contained the idea that unconscious conflicts and motivations in childhood are the basis for personality and that if a child’s needs are not met; it will result in difficulties in adulthood. Freud created this theory, now referred to as the psychodynamic theory of personality, out of his experiences with patients with conversion disorder, a mental condition that provides physical symptoms with no medical explanation. Freud found that these patients suffered from childhood trauma that led to their unexplainable symptoms, but the trauma was not present in the awareness of the patient. It was only revealed that there was …show more content…
It can also differ in severity. In the story, Someday My Elders Will Be Proud, a young woman named Jean describes her struggle with alcohol abuse and the issues in her childhood that may have had an influence on her inability to responsibly handle alcohol. Based on Freud’s theory, the events in Jean’s childhood lead to her dependent personality. When Jean was little an uncle that babysat her for her mother abused her. Jean’s mom relied on her uncle because Jean’s father left the family when Jean was around 4 years old because of an alcohol addicition. Because her father was not around during the phallic stage where Jean presumably underwent the Electra complex, Jean was unable to successfully complete this stage before moving on to the next and by not having a stable father figure and instead having an abuse male caretaker Jean developed the wish to be appealing to men by her unresolved wishes for her father, unconscious anger towards her mother, and a weak Superego