Upon expanding her father's ideas, Anna Freud developed the theory of adolescent defense mechanism. She gave greater importance to puberty as a critical factor in character formation. Freud believed that adolescence was a universal phenomenon and included behavioural, social and emotional changes; not to mention the relationships between the physiological and psychological changes, and the influences on the self-image. Thus, physiological changes are related to emotional changes, especially an increase in negative emotions, such as moodiness, anxiety, loathing, tension and other forms of adolescent behaviour.
Anna Freud also placed more emphasis on the relationship between the id, the ego and the superego. What does this all mean? The painfully established balance between ego and id during the latency period is disturbed by puberty, and internal conflict results. On one hand, the id wants to fulfil its sexual and aggressive desires, but on the other hand, the superego has internalised society's views on what's moral and not — and the ego suffers to reconcile both ends. Thus, there is puberty conflict where the adolescent struggles to regain equilibrium. The resulting anxiety produces a variety of defense mechanisms, of which repression, asceticism and intellectualization are most common for coping with stress in adolescence. As a result of such psychological disequilibrium, adolescence was viewed as a state of flux, alternating between periods of high enthusiasm and utter despair between energy and lethargy, between altruism and self-centredness.
References:
Freud, A. (1948). The Ego and the Mechanism of Defense. New York, NY: International Universities Press.
Muuss, Rolf E. (1975). Theories of Adolescence (3rd Edition).
New York: Random House.
this was very helpful
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