PYSCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON HUMAN BEINGS
What is a human being? There are thousands of thousands of thousands of answers for the question but none of those answers will satisfy our curiosity or desire to know of what we are and how we were created. In physics, we can define a human being as a pack of matters like atoms and electrons. Perhaps, “human being is a member of any of the races of Homo sapiens” from the dictionary will give us an acceptable answer. But in psychology, how those psychoanalytic theorists define human being is a different story. Theoretically, it is really complicated to psychologically define what a human being is because human beings are complicated.
Through the scope of a psychoanalytic lens, we, human beings, are described as having sexual and aggressive drives. Human beings are what we could call a trinity or a combination of three things-body, mind, and soul. And what the body really is? We can see the body as a vehicle or a container and we as a soul live in this material unit. Then let’s just assume that our mind is our conscious mind. So in many ways, our conscious mind perhaps determines our personality according to Freud’s theory of personality. As we know, Freud used his view of how the mind is organized to determine the personality as how he formed his theory of personality development. According to Freud, the mind can be divided into two main parts: conscious and unconscious. Conscious is everything that we, human beings, are aware of. On the other hand, all the feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that outside of our conscious awareness is unconscious. And in order to define characteristics of a human being, Sigmund Freud determined that the personality consists of three different elements – the id, the ego, and the superego. So we could say a human being is described based on development of the personality according to Freud. However, that is not the only way to answer the question “what is a human being?” in...