Need an argumentative essay on Lifespan Development and Personality. Needs to be 4 pages. Please no plagiarism.Download file to see previous pages... As an example, Oprah Winfrey’s life was shaped b

Need an argumentative essay on Lifespan Development and Personality. Needs to be 4 pages. Please no plagiarism.

As an example, Oprah Winfrey’s life was shaped by the environment, and this can best be explained through the neo-analytic theory of personality. This paper uses the psychoanalytic and neo-analytic perspectives in understanding Oprah Winfrey’s lifespan development. Oprah was born on 29 January 1954 in Kosciusko, Mississippi. For the first six years of her life, she stayed with her fraternal grandparents in Mississippi. Her grandmother became sick and had to send Oprah to her mother, a poor housemaid in Wisconsin. While there, she underwent sexual abuse in the hands of male relatives. Her mother did not offer much direction in her life and she reacted by stealing money, playing truant and eventually ran off to stay with her father in Nashville. She got pregnant at 14 but the child died from complications related to premature birth. Her suffering afterwards made her develop a strong thirst for success. She went into television and radio broadcasting and in 1976 established a successful TV chat show, People Are Talking. The success inspired her to start the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1986, a hit which helped make her one of the wealthiest and influential women worldwide (Nagle, 2008). Oprah’s life appears to have been shaped by a problematic emotional development. According to Engler (2009), emotional development is one of the major aspects that determine the personality development of an individual. The troubles in her development are mostly traceable to hardship in upbringing, and most importantly, sexual abuse which affected her self-esteem and need to stand out from other people. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Personality was provided by Sigmund Freud. It focuses on ‘the Unconscious’ as a concept. This divides a person’s mind into three. the conscious, preconscious and unconscious. The human personality is on its part divided into three. the Ego, the Id and the Superego. According to Ryckman (2008), the Id is made up of primitive drives, desires and emotions while the Superego is a product of internalized societal and parental morals. The Ego plays a mediating role as it tries to balance the influences of the Superego and the Id. In Oprah’s case, a psychoanalytic analysis would suggest that she possessed a highly overactive Id, especially when she engaged in promiscuous behavior and overeating. She was sexually abused as a child and opted to use food in dealing with the inner tension that she had. In addition, she ended up engaging in promiscuous behavior so as to fulfill sexual urges. An explanation for this behavior is that the human Id works in response to what the pleasure principle demands as a way of trying to reduce inner tensions and get some pleasurable satisfaction. Oprah’s sexual activity resulted in her pregnancy at 14. During the time, getting a child while not married was a social taboo. While she had, like anybody else internalized the social norms of the time and was therefore feeling the pressure associated with the Superego, there was no much effect on her tendency towards sexual deviance. In the Freudian perspective, it is not possible that Oprah’s ego was weak but rather the personal victimization of her self made it difficult for her to try and solve the problems that she faced in a rational way, as is dictated by the reality principle.