Student 38

May. 2, 2000

We have discussed many people and ideas during this unit. These people and ideas are what we have used to complete our final project: our Self- Portrait. We have learned many things that contribute to our self project. These things show us how to show our personality in a visual sense. The people that we have learned about are people that made some very important steps in the psychological community. They have created much of the basis the psychologists use today. The people are Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

They came up with two important psychological theories. Sigmund Freud divided the psyche into three separate parts. These are the conscious, pre-conscious, and the unconscious. The conscious deal with the awareness of present perceptions, feelings, thoughts, memories, fantasies at any particular moment. The pre-conscious is related to data that can readily be brought to consciousness. The unconscious refers to data retained but not easily available to an individual’s conscious awareness or scrutiny. These divisions were made in the early part of his career. Later in his career (based on his clinical research) he developed another theory that was mainly based on consciousness. These are the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is constantly active and is the unconscious reservoir of drives. It is ruled by the pleasure principle and it demands immediate satisfaction of its urges, regardless of undesirable effects. The ego mainly operates in conscious and preconscious levels. It does contain some unconscious elements because the ego and the superego both are evolved from the id. The ego is ruled by the reality principle. It takes care of the id urges as soon as the adequate circumstance is found. Inappropriate desires are not satisfied, they are just repressed. The superego is only partially conscious. It serves as a censor on the ego functions and comprises one’s ideals derived from the values of his family and society, being the source of guilty feelings and fear of punishment.

Carl Jung developed a theory that shows how to determine a person’s personality. He came up with a pretty accurate way of doing this. He said that people have two main personality types: extroversion and introversion. Extrovert’s personalities tend to be the louder people who talk before they think. An introvert is usually a quieter person who thinks before he/she talks. He then developed the four functions; sensing and intuiting, and thinking and feeling. A sensing person relies on the facts at hand. An intuiting person relies more on unconscious processes. A thinking person usually an intellective. A feeling person evaluates stuff using a positive and a negative (pro-con) way. Later some other people added a fourth category: judging and perceiving. A judger is firm, decisive person and a perceiver is usually indecisive and likes to gather more information before making a decision.

I took the Keirsey Temperment Sorter II test and it told me that I am ISFJ (protector). I took a test similar to it last year in the freshman seminar class and I believe I had the same results. I am definitely an introvert. I get very shy and I am always thinking about stuff. My brain never seems to stop working! I am also a very sensing person. I am always very detailed in everything I do. I also believe I am practical to a fault. These parts of the test were completely accurate on my personality. The other two parts, however, I believe I am made up equally of both. I am more logical, but I also care about others feelings. Most of the time I perceive the world around me. I like to gather in more information before I make a decision. There are times that I can be more judging though, especially when I know I am one hundred percent sure about something.

Music, poetry and art are the ways we were shown that express the self. Rilke used poetry to express himself. The way he grew up had a lot to do with how he wrote his works. After he was finally born (his parents lost a number of children). He was a very complex person. His mother used to use him as her own personal doll. She would dress him up in dresses and pretend he was a girl. This would have an affect on anyone and it certainly did have an affect on him.

When we studied music I became a bit confused. This is because we studied the same music in another class I am taking: The Gothic Imagination with Dr. Viao. In Fine and Applied Arts we learned about Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Lizst, and others. Because of this I have been using the terms “Gothic” and “Romantic” interchangeably. In these classes, I have learned the same things about these composers. They have just been given different, yet similar categories. The music in this category tends to go from nice and calm to loud and exciting. The louder part can also give out an uneasy feeling. Romantics tend to put all of their feelings in the music. Most of the most popular classical music today was written by romantics. The romantics could show all the feelings in a single piece of music. The will use a major key to express their happiness, but they can also suddenly change to a minor key and use dissonance to express anger or sadness. Romantic composers also wrote music that was put into a sub category of Romanticism called Nationalism. This type of music showed the composer’s love for a country. A great example of this is Tschaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

The way that we were shown to use art in self expression was through our self portraits. This project was actually very interesting to do. It taught me a lot about myself. My self portrait is a box that I painted silver. This is to show my reflective personality. I tend to act on how others are acting. I also placed jewels over it to show my reflectiveness. There is a thin line of sand around the bottom to show that I can be abrasive at times. The box is in the shape of a square. This is fractional dimensional and shows my very complex personality. I don’t share all of my feelings with everyone. I also have a cross on the top of my box to show the cross roads in my life. There is also a spiral to show the change that I am going through while in college. I am growing up now and am having to make a lot of important decisions These are just a few of the things that are contained in my self portrait. This unit has all been included in this project and I think it was a fun and enjoyable way to tie everything together that we have learned.