Personality 210 Notes (Part 8) Continuing the Discussion of Drives

The Importance of Drives

• All basic drives fall into two broad categories which are life and death.

• Life or sex drives, also known as “Eros,” describe the need for survival, reproduction, and pleasure. Hunger and pain avoidance… These drives are part of the unconscious.

• “Sexual energy,” or libido, is the energy of a sexual drive or erotic desire. Erogenous zones (mouth, anus, genitals) are biophysiological sites of tension and pleasure experience.

• Death drives, also known as “Thanatos,” describes how, “The goal of life is death,” Freud (1920). Maybe pessimistic…but acknowledges that all life drives are seeking a release of tension… a cessation of that tension. From the previous example, you are eating a sandwich, so you cease the tension of being hungry.

• Physiological apoptosis describes the gene-like cell death to combat cancer and seems to be a part of human development. it helps to describe the way we age.

• Life/Eros and Death/Thanatos produces all kinds of drives and work together and against each other. For example, aggression as a product of Eros thwarting Thanatos.

• Libidinal and Aggressive energies are expressed separately but side by side, also known as sadism.

Psychosexual development was a theory developed largely from case studies of patients. This theory concludes that personality is largely developed by the age of five. As we age, our personalities become more symbolic and less literal. This means that personality is largely set, but the way it is expressed will achieve more nuance as we get older. The stages of psychosexual development correlates to body zones that are the primary sites of “sexual” energy discharge. One important thing to note; Freud means life drives; libidinal energy is not simply sexual in terms of drive from sexual intercourse.

Discussing How Fixations Can Affect Drives

• Each stage has conflicts. Fixation can occur if a conflict does not get resolved well by too much libidinal energy is invested. Each conflict, or conflicts, require psychic energy to handle. Fixation can occur for two reasons. If a child is overindulged in a stage and so they may be reluctant to leave it and if a child’s needs are not met, they cannot move on. Personality gets stuck in that stage because libido gets invested in that stage. Very strong fixations lead to a person being so unconsciously preoccupied that they have little energy for anything else. For example, if a child who is never attended well by the parents may well later develop into the kind of person who manipulates people.