Gradually, Freud ’s ideas gained acceptance within the growing field of
psychology. In 1909 Freud was invited to the United States to present a series
of lectures on psychoanalysis at Clark University. For Freud the occasion
marked the beginning of international recognition of his work. However,
resistance to psychoanalysis by academic psychologists kept Freud ’s theory
out of American textbooks for another quarter of a century (Fancher, 2000).
Freud continued to develop his theory and write about psychoanalysis until
his death in 1939. Many consider Freud the most influential psychologist inthe relatively short history of the field. A Time magazine cover story at the
end of the 20th century featured a picture of Albert Einstein and SigmundFreud, identifying the two as “The Century ’s Greatest Minds. ”
We begin our examination of this influential perspective by looking at
classic Freudian theory. Contemporary advocates of the psychoanalytic ap-proach vary in the degree to which they agree with Freud ’s initial descriptions
of personality (Westen, 1998). Most accept key psychoanalytic concepts, such
as the importance of unconscious thoughts. But modern psychoanalytic psy-
chologists typically back away from other aspects of Freudian theory, suchas his description of infantile sexuality. Nonetheless, you need to understand
what Freud said before deciding which parts make sense to you and which
parts to jettison. More than a century after introducing psychoanalysis to the
world, the Viennese neurologist still casts a shadow across the field of
personality.
THE FREUDIAN THEORY OF PERSONALITY
The Topographic Model
The starting point for understanding the Freudian approach is the division
of the human personality into three parts. Freud originally divided personalityinto the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. This division is
known as the topographic model . The conscious contains the thoughts you
are currently aware of. This material changes constantly as new thoughts
enter your mind and others pass out of awareness. When you say something
is“on your mind, ”you probably mean the conscious part of your mind.
However, the conscious can deal with only a tiny percentage of all the infor-
mation stored in your mind. You could bring an uncountable number of
thoughts into consciousness fairly easily if you wanted to. For example, what
did you have for breakfast? Who was your third-grade teacher? What didyou do last Saturday night? This large body of retrievable information makes
up the preconscious .
Although many people consider the material in the conscious and precon-
scious to be fairly exhaustive of the thoughts in their minds, Freud described
these as merely the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority of thoughts, and the
most important from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, are found in the uncon-
scious . This is material to which you have no immediate access. According to
Freud, you cannot bring unconscious thoughts into consciousness except
under certain extreme situations. Nonetheless, this unconscious material isThe Freudian Theory of Personality 43