psychoanalytic theory part 1

So, hello, everybody. I'm going to be taking you for the next few lectures, so I thought I'd start off by introducing myself.

My name is Kerry Gibson, and I have been working at the University of Auckland for about 12 years,

and I've been based in New Zealand for the last 20 years.

But in fact, as you might be able to tell from my accent, I don't think I have an accent at all.

But I do come originally from South Africa and I have a picture there of the Beautiful Table Mountain.

I did all my degrees at the University of Cape Town and in fact, my house is right down at the bottom in the mountain slopes.

And you could look up and see the mountain,

not the flat side that you see in all those pictures of Table Mountain with the tablecloth coming down with the clouds.

But the other side, which is a bit craggy, but that's where the University of Cape Town is.

And you can see it in that beautiful picture over there. And this is where I hang out now, which is I don't know if anybody knows what beach that is.

Anyone know when from the North Shore.

Anyway, I probably won't tell you because they'll come and catch me one of them while I'm swimming and changing.

I'm not sure I want people to see that, but that's my favourite thing to do.

I like hanging out in the ocean. I do lots of ocean swimming right through the season and it's one of the things that I sort

of one of the ways that helped me really feel at home here in New Zealand when I arrived.

Um, I'm a clinical psychologist in terms of my training.

As I said, my background training was in South Africa and in fact,

strangely I had a very strong training in psychoanalysis, which is quite rare in New Zealand.

A lot of people here don't get that background, but that's one of the reasons why I'm so enthusiastic about talking to you about psychoanalysis today.

In terms of things I'm interested in, I like all of the relational therapy, so I'm really interested in I can do CBT and all of that,

but I am interested in the theories that talk about the importance of the therapeutic relationship.

So that's kind of where I come from. And I'm not, strictly speaking, a personality theorist, although all of us who work in in clinical psychology,

in psychotherapy are interested and have to be interested in personality because we have to be interested in how we come

to be the way that we are and how we get all those kind of funny quirks that can sometimes get in the way of your life.

Yes, that's I live with my husband, who is a musician, and we have a son who's 30 years old.

So so in this first period that I'm going to teach you for the next this week is I'm going to be talking about psychoanalysis.

Next week. I'm going to be talking to you about attachment theory, and then I'm going to be talking to you about Carl Rogers.

These are some of the sort of fundamental approaches that we have in psychology to understanding how personality develops.

And just in case you think that they're old fashioned or they were developed a long time ago, we've moved on from there.

I want you to remember that some of these foundation approaches we take,

all of them seep into so many of the understandings and the practices and the ways we think about the world as psychologists.

So they're really important for understanding in themselves and are used today,

but also important for understanding that all the theories that came after them.

So this is the foundational stuff.

So by the end of today's lecture, you're going to know a little bit about who Freud is and the significance of his work for understanding personality.

And we'll be talking about the two models in particular today.

I'm focusing on the models that he uses to describe the way that the mind is structured.

So the two models that he developed,

one early in his career and one later one and they actually kind of map on to each other and explain how they fit together as we go along.

I think a lot of this stuff will be familiar to you. You did a little bit of this in 1 to 8, so it's a little bit of a refresher,

but now we're going to a little bit more depth and understanding what it means for personality in particular.

So that's what you will look at.

Your textbook is actually pretty good at the stuff It's got quite it's it's it's quite surprisingly in-depth account of,

of of psychoanalysis which I very seldom seen in.

Read your textbook before it's worth reading, but it is quite dense,

which is so I guess it's the value of the lectures is I'm gonna try and pull out some of the key ideas so that when you read the textbook,

you kind of got a framework to hang it all on.

And we also, if I can, so we never going to ask you some random thing out of the textbook that we didn't discuss in class.

So it will all centre on the material I cover in my lectures.

So today we're looking at the structure of the mind. In the lectures on Thursday, I'm talking about the course of development through childhood,

into adulthood, and how we become who we are from a psychoanalytic perspective.

But before I go into it, I want to just ask for your general perceptions.

What if I say psychoanalysis to you? What do you think of the person next to you?

And what are the first words that come to mind for?

But. I.

Okay. You got your brain cells working. Let's hear some words.

What words come to mind? Anything tied to childhood?

Yes. The importance of childhood. Yes. And how that kind of shapes who we become.

Yes. Subconscious. Subconscious.

Although the actual word is unconscious.

So actually, subconscious is one of the sort of colloquial words we tend to use when we're talking about stuff that's not conscious.

So Freud actually used the word unconscious sometimes with a capital U?

Yes. Pseudoscience. Pseudoscience. Yeah. Okay.

I was waiting for a few of the negative ideas to come through.

Yes. And it is interesting that he he Freud psychoanalysis tends to invite quite strong feelings from people.

You know, we have people discussing psychoanalysis all over the place. What a weird set of things.

It's not really a science. It doesn't conform to any of the standards that we have when we talk about science.

But I'm going to challenge that a little bit.

Oh, I hope I'm not telling you that you may not believe me and you're allowed to not believe me and have a different view.

What else? Understanding the mind.

Understanding the mind. You also sense of what you've clearly done the stuff for me and you know about it.

Yes. Strange dreams. Yes. The wonder of dreams.

And how we can learn about what's in our unconscious by exploring the dreams that we have.

Yes. Taking some on a path, picking somebody apart, analysing people.

Hey, isn't that what we do? And some people will look at me at a dinner party and they'll say, You know, I hope you're not analysing me.

And my my answer to that is only if you pay me.

Okay? So if people ask you that because you're studying psychology, that's an answer.

Archetype Yes, that's a version of psychoanalysis comes from Jung in ideas that expanded out of Freudian ideas.

Now, okay, you're obviously all sort of well educated.

You kind of have some brown grounding in Croydon psychoanalysis.

I guess if we ask members of the public about psychoanalysis, you probably get some interesting responses.

Oh, it's all about sex. And what about the Oedipus complex?