Unit 4 Part 2 (Modules 4.4-4.8b)

personality

our own unique ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving

Psychodynamic theories of personality

view human behavior as an interaction between the conscious and unconscious mind, emphasizing the influence of early childhood experiences and inner drives

Freud’s psychoanalysis theory

is a method of treating psychological disorders by exploring the unconscious mind, often through techniques like free association and dream analysis that released previously repressed feelings

Freud’s discovery of the unconscious

a resevoir for unwanted feelings, wishes, thoughts, and memories

ex. lost feeling in one’s hand can be caused by a fear of touching one’s genitals

free association

one of Freud’s treatment methods; person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind no matter how embarrassing in order for unconscious memories to be retrieved

conscious, preconscious, and unconscious mind

conscious: floats above the surface and is easily retrieved

preconscious: outside awareness but accessible and can be retrieved to conscious awareness

unconscious: not accessible

repress

forcibly block a memory, feeling, thought, etc because it is too unsettling to acknowledge

Where did Freud believe that human personality arised from?

a conflict between impulse and restraint and that personality springs from efforts to fix this conflict (feeling satisfied instead of guilt with these impulses)

id (and what is the libido?)

• satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives to survive, reproduce, and aggress

• operates on pleasure principle (immediate gratification)

• libido: life energy force that fuels this impulsiveness and pleasure-seeking

ego

• operates on reality principle (responding to impulses in realistic ways to bring long-term pleasure rather than destruction)

• weighs decision’s risks and rewards

superego

• conscious voice of our moral compass that forces ego to consider both the real and ideal

• how we ought to behave and strives for perfection

How does the superego try to reconcile the id and ego?

• oppose the id but the go tries to reconcile the two by mediating the impulsive demands of id, restraining demands of superego, and real-life demands of external world/ego

Freud’s 5 Psychosexual Stages

1. Oral (0-18 months): pleasures centers on the mouth - chewing, sucking, biting

2. Anal (18-36 months): pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination; coping with demands for control

3. Phallic (3-6 years): pleasure centers at genitals; coping with incestuous sexual feelings such as unconscious sexual desires for mother and hatred towards father that make them feel guilty (known as the oedipus complex and electra complex for girls)

4. Latency (6 years to puberty): phase of dormant sexual feelings

5. Genital (puberty onwards): maturation of sexual feelings

How do children eventually cope with the threatening feeling for people such as their parents?

• repress them and try to become like the rival parents (identification process)

• children’s superegos gain strength as they incorporate many of their parents’ values and provides more info about gender identity

fixate

• how a strong conflict can lock the person’s pleasure-seeking energies in a certains tage if it ever goes unresolved

• can either show a passive dependence or an exaggerated denial

defense mechanism (and Freud’s view on them)

tactics that reduce to redirect anxiety by distorting reality

Freud’s view:

• all defense mechanism function indirectly and unconsciously

• repression underlies all the other defense mechanisms

Freud’s 7 Defense Mechanisms

1. regression: retreating to an earlier psychosexual stage and some psychic energy remains fixated

   • ex. curl up with a stuffy for comfort

2. reaction formation: switching unacceptable impulses/reactions to the opposite

   • ex. wanting to cry out of disappointment but instead, laughing it off

3. projection: disguising one’s own impluses by attributing it to something else

   • ex. telling everyone that you parents are mad at the coach instead of you

4. rationalization: self-justifying instead of acknowledging the real, more threathening unconscious reasons

   • ex. “I wasn’t trying that hard anyways”

5. displacement: shifting sexual or aggressive impulses into more acceptable one

   • ex. yelling at someone else for no reason

6. sublimation: transferring unacceptable impulses to socially valued motives

   • ex. wanting to yell at the soccer coach but intead coaching your brother

7. denial: refusing to believe painful realities

   • ex. insists there was a error on the team list

manifest content and latent content

remembered content of dreams (manifest content) is a censored expression of the dreamer’s unconscious wishes (latent content)

neo-Freudians

• Freud’s followers who are young, ambitious physicians and adopted his interviewing techniques and basic ideas

• eventually, broke away by emphasizing the role of the conscious mind in interpreting experience and they doubted that sex and aggression were all-consuming motivations

Alfred Alder and Karen Horney

• believed that childhood social tensions are important for personality formation

• Alder: much of our behaviour is driven by efforts to conquer childhood inferiority feeling

• Horney: childhood anxiety triggers our desire for love and security

Carl Jung

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