Sigmund Freud and Lev Vygotsky: Two Facets of Development

Freud's facets of development are the development of consciousness and developing ego strength. An iceberg model can be used to describe part of Freud's development of consciousness. The ego sits on top of the id and the superego occupies a space sloped downward across the ego and the id. He asserts that consciousness is the middle portion of the ego and the unconscious is in the id. Our consciousness receives various of information below the radar of our immediate detection that can be retrieved if given the correct retrieval cues. Freud stated that the preconscious is between being conscious and unconscious to which information is taken and molded into a form that the conscious mind recognizes. Repression can be explained as something that happens when the ego cannot handle memories or painful situations. These items are stored outside of the conscious mind, but are free to "pop" up whenever triggered.

A weak ego and a strong ego were outlined under characteristics of developing ego strength. The ideas were extracted from Freud's writing and compiled. An individual with a strong ego has fulfilled the needs of the id and has a superego whose expectations are met along with the external expectations from the environments around the individual. A person with a strong ego is rational, efficient, and effective in accomplishing tasks at hand. An individual with a weak ego does not have the tools to handle situations around them and have trouble with being able to please the superego. This management issue leads to internal problems. Individuals may resort to repression or multiple repressions if this deficiency is ignored. Therefore, the expectations from external sources and internal ones (i.e. superego) will exert demands until they can be lifted away by another person. Freud went as far as to say that such issues can be helped if people were allowed to explore their sexual urges. A baby was used as an example for a weak ego because it does not have the tools to manage the demands placed before them. A caregiver must meet the requirements of the child's needs through environmental changes.

In contrast, Lev Vygotsky developed another way to examine psychological development.

Vygotsky projected that humans use various symbols and items that help us to develop cultures. Through our cultures, we might be greatly influenced because we change, interact and go through development within our cultures. Vygotsky believe that higher thinking skills depended on the internalization of the items we used to develop within our culture and communicate.

Before thinking of true conceptual ideas or concepts, children group things together and put things together. Later they learn how to truly think conceptually about different problems, issues, and ideas.

Vygotsky wanted to develop a means of testing this type of conceptual development and then comparing the findings to those of others in the field. He used blocks to distinguish children's mastery of the concept from simple memorization. The solutions the children came up with led to Vygotsky's different stages and sub stages pertaining to conceptual thought development. There are three stages and eight sub stages. During the first stage, the child tries to group and label by: putting similar items together, randomly creating different groups, modifying groups. During the second stage the child begins to think within different types of complexes. These five sub units include but are not limited to: orientation and color of the object (associative complexes), noticing the differences between the objects (collection complexes), grouping the objects in similar pairs (chain complexes), generalizing characteristics from one object to another (diffuse complexes), genuine conceptual thinking (pseudoconcept complexes). The third stage does not have a sub group. It is the point in which the child is drawing all of his/her ways of thinking into what makes true conceptual thinking possible. The child is beyond singling out several characteristics of items that bond them together or make them different. Thinking of objects becomes a process of combined efforts and are not limited to verbal situations.