One of my childhood friends, Karla, grew up in a very narcissistic environment. Being part of a prestigious school district meant she had to deal with the pressure of social statuses throughout all of her middle school and high school career. She confessed to me that in middle school she started to care too much about what others thought of her, which completely disrupted her personality. She is now one of the most insecure girls I have ever met, and it is all because of the way she was brought up.
This gradual change in personality is due to the scientific theory of psychoanalysis, developed by Austrian physician Sigmund Freud in the early 1900s. Psychoanalysis states that a person’s behavior is greatly influenced by their childhood experiences and events. Karla has an insecure personality because of the influence that her middle school peers had on her. Any traumas or life-changing occurrences that a child experiences are also likely to shape how they will behave in the future. When I was three years old I moved from Spain, the country I was born in, to America. That sudden change in my early life had a significant impact on the way I am today, since I act more like an American than a Spanish person because that is the culture I grew up around. Our unconscious mind adapts to our early life stages and significantly changes the way we behave as adults.
Freud started to notice the relationship between past experiences and personality through his clinical work with patients who suffered a variety of psychological problems. By listening to their life stories, Freud concluded that these problems were the result of their unconscious adaptation to the conditions they experienced in their early lives. His theory of psychoanalysis was published in the book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and had a significant impact in the study of the mind, and in the field of psychology as a whole.
Citations
Cherry, Kendra. “Psychoanalysis.” About.com Psychology. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 Feb. 2014.
“Psychoanalysis.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 28 Jan. 2014. Web. 02 Feb. 2014.