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Where Does Personality Come From? The conscious mind is what you are aware of at any particular moment. This includes your present perceptions, memories, thoughts, fantasies, and feelings. Working closely with the conscious mind is what Sigmund Freud called the preconscious, the memories you are not at the moment thinking about but can readily bring to mind. The largest part of the mind is the unconscious. The unconscious includes all the things that are not easily available to awareness. Many things that have their origins in the unconscious, these things we are not aware of, however they are inside our mind. I do agree with Freud’s concepts of the conscious and unconscious. However, I feel that Freud’s ideas of sex and aggression, and pleasure and pain are untrue. This is basically that sex and pleasure are good, and aggression and pain are negative and everything a person does revolved around trying to move away from the pain/aggression to be relieved with sex/pleasure. Karen Horney, another psychologist, concluded that personalities were shaped from basic needs and whether or not those needs were met as a child. I agree with this very much. The need for affection and acceptance is very important for a child. A child who grows in a loveless, hostile family is much more likely to become hostile adult than a child raised a caring, affectionate family. I have concluded that there are stages that a person goes through in their lives. Erik Erikson, a Freudian, unfolded personality into eight stages. In every stage there is a developmental task which can be dealt with in two ways. For example the first stage, usually met during infancy, is trust-mistrust. In this stage the infants significant relationship is with its mother figure. Here the child will either learn to have hope and faith or if it is grown into a negative environment the infant may experience sensory distortion and withdrawal.
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