Freud

Meaning: Sigmund Freud founded psychoanalysis, the psychodynamic view that much behavior comes from unconscious drives and conflicts rooted in early childhood. Personality has three parts: the id (unconscious urges, pleasure principle), the ego (mediates using the reality principle), and the superego (internalized moral standards). The ego manages anxiety from their conflict with defense mechanisms such as repression, denial, projection, displacement, reaction formation, rationalization, and sublimation. His psychosexual stages are oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital; unresolved conflict can leave a fixation at a stage.

On the MCAT: Vignettes describe a behavior and ask which structure or defense mechanism is at work, such as someone angry at a boss who then yells at family (displacement). Stage questions pair a stage with a theme, such as toilet training with the anal stage. Freud may also be contrasted with humanistic, behaviorist, or trait approaches, or criticized as hard to test empirically.

Common confusion: Conscience belongs to the superego, not the ego; the ego is the realistic mediator between the id, the superego, and the outside world. Also, Freud's psychosexual stages are not Erikson's psychosocial stages or Piaget's cognitive stages.