Psychoanalytic Approach Notes
Introduction
Sigmund Freud greatly influenced personality theory.
Psychoanalysis: the first formal personality theory and remains well-known.
Freud's theory, though controversial, is a framework for studying personality.
Freud's work impacted thinking about personality and views of human nature.
Understanding Freud's system is essential for comprehending personality field development.
Instincts: The Propelling Forces of the Personality
Instincts: basic personality elements, motivating forces driving behavior.
Freud's term: Trieb, meaning driving force or impulse.
Instincts: transformed physiological energy connecting body's needs with mind's wishes.
Stimuli for instincts are internal (e.g., hunger, thirst).
Need arousal generates physiological excitation or energy.
The mind transforms bodily energy into a wish.
Wish: mental representation of physiological need, the instinct motivating behavior.
Example: A hungry person seeks food.
Instinct is not the bodily state but the bodily need transformed into a mental state (wish).
Body in need experiences tension or pressure.
Pleasure Principle and Homeostasis
Freud: All behavior aims to obtain pleasure, avoid pain (pleasure principle).
Homeostatic approach: motivated to restore and maintain physiological equilibrium, free of tension.
Instinctual tension is constant; we act to reduce it.
Physiological needs' pressure is inescapable.
Influence and Diversity of Instincts
Instincts constantly influence behavior in a need-reduction cycle.
Needs can be satisfied through various paths (e.g., heterosexual, homosexual, autosexual).
Psychic energy can be displaced, determining personality.
Instincts are the exclusive energy source; energy invested in various activities.
This explains human behavior diversity.
Adult interests, preferences, and attitudes: displacements of energy from original instinctual objects.
Life and Death Instincts
Freud revised his view of instincts: sexuality vs. self-preservation (hunger, thirst).
Final theory: two instincts - life and death (sexual and destructive/aggressive).
Life instincts: survival of individual/species, satisfying needs (food, water, air, sex).
Oriented toward growth and development.
Psychic energy of sexual instinct: libido (aggressive energy unnamed).
Libido may refer to both sexual and destructive energies.
Libido is wholly intrapsychic, attaching to mental representations of objects satisfying needs: cathexis.
Example: Infant's cathexis for the mother as a source of satisfaction (feeding, oral stimulation, contact).
Stranger: weakly cathected with libido.
Cathexis: investment with mental/emotional energy, having emotional significance.
Hunger increases libido expenditure in thoughts of food.
Sex is the most important life instinct, defined broadly to include pleasurable behaviors/thoughts.
Sex is the primary motivation.
Erotic wishes arise from erogenous zones: mouth, anus, sex organs.
People are pleasure-seeking, personality theory involves inhibiting/suppressing sexual longings.
Death Instincts
Destructive or death instincts oppose life instincts.
Drawing from biology, all living things decay and die.
People have an unconscious wish to die.
Aggressive drive: death wish turned against objects other than the self.
Compels us to destroy, conquer, and kill.
Freud considered aggression as compelling as sex.
The concept of death instincts had limited acceptance.
Instincts are fused, erotic acts are partly aggressive and aggressive acts are partly erotic.
Both instincts are present at birth.
Psychic Determinism and Parapraxes
Psychoanalytic theory: nothing in the psyche happens by chance.
All mental/physical behavior is determined by prior causes.
Random thoughts, forgetting, slips, and dreams have underlying unconscious reasons.
This is psychic determinism; examples are parapraxes (erroneous actions).
Forgetting appointments or exams has definite reasons.
Explanations may be simple (e.g., anger, fear).
Causes of psychic phenomena are numerous (overdetermined) and complex.
Example: A forgetful student may also want to punish parents and herself due to guilt.
Freudian slips reflect unconscious motivation.
Example of patient smashing husband's car due to anger, desire for punishment, and repressed sexual desires.
Levels of Mental Life
Freud's contribution: exploration of the unconscious and its motivational role.
Mental life has two levels: unconscious and conscious.
Unconscious: unconscious proper and preconscious.
Three levels: both a process and a hypothetical location.
Unconscious exists as processes and a hypothetical location.
The Unconscious
The unconscious contains drives, urges, and instincts beyond awareness, motivating words, feelings, and actions.
We may be conscious of behavior but not the mental processes behind it.
Example: Attraction to someone may have irrational reasons.
The unconscious's existence is proved indirectly.
It explains dreams, slips of the tongue, and repression.
Dreams are a rich source of unconscious material.
Childhood experiences can appear in adult dreams without conscious recollection.
Unconscious processes enter consciousness disguised to elude censorship.
Censorship
Analogy: a guardian or censor blocks passage between the unconscious and preconscious.
Prevents anxiety-producing memories from entering awareness.
Images disguised to slip past primary censor, then past final censor.
Memories are no longer recognizable; seen as pleasant, nonthreatening.
Images often have sexual or aggressive motifs due to childhood punishment/suppression.
Punishment and suppression create anxiety, stimulating repression.
Repression: forcing unwanted experiences into the unconscious to defend against anxiety.
Not all unconscious processes stem from repression.
A portion of our unconscious comes from ancestral experiences: phylogenetic endowment.
Similar to Jung's collective unconscious.
Freud emphasized individual experiences but used inherited dispositions as a last resort.
Preconscious
The preconscious contains elements not conscious but easily accessible.
Contents come from conscious perception and the unconscious.
Conscious perception quickly passes into preconscious when attention shifts.
These ideas are free from anxiety and similar to conscious images.
The unconscious ideas can slip past the censor into the preconscious in disguise.
Some images never become conscious to avoid anxiety; others gain admission to consciousness:
Gaining admission happens through dreams, slips, or defensive measures.
Conscious
Consciousness plays a minor role in psychoanalytic theory.
It includes mental elements in awareness at any given time.
It is the only level directly available to us.
Ideas reach consciousness from the outer world (perception) or inner mental structure.
Perception of external stimuli (if not threatening) enters consciousness.
The preconscious elements and disguised unconscious menacing images can access consciousness escaping the censor.
They evade the primary censor.
By the time they reach consciousness, images are distorted/camouflaged (e.g., defensive behaviors, dream elements).
Structure of Personality
Freud originally defined personality with the topographic model (unconscious, preconscious, conscious).
Model incomplete, as repression should be accessible to awareness, yet patients lacked conscious knowledge of repression.
His conclusion was, “all that is repressed is unconscious, but not all that is unconscious is repressed”.
Freud developed the structural model (id, ego, superego).
Id, ego, superego are not separate compartments; they blend together.
The Id
The id (das Es) is present at birth, including all instincts and psychic energy.
It is entirely unconscious and represents the dark, inaccessible part of our personality.
The id supplies energy for the other two components.
As the instinct reservoir, it relates to bodily needs satisfaction.
Tension arises when the body has needs; the person acts to reduce tension.
The id operates by the pleasure principle: increasing pleasure, avoiding pain through tension reduction.
It strives for immediate satisfaction without delay.
The id is selfish, pleasure-seeking, primitive, amoral, insistent, and rash, with no awareness of reality.
Example: Deprived infant cathects thumb for tension discharge.
The id's irrational, impulsive, and image-producing mode of thought: primary process.
The Ego
The ego (das Ich) starts developing around 6-8 months from the id.
Experiences aid ego formation, helping infants differentiate self from not-self.
Touching self involves being touched; the body is a source of pleasure/pain.
Id images cannot reduce drives; environment contains objects that can satisfy id's demands.
Mental representations incorporated in the ego; ego growth increases capacity to deal with reality.
Children learn to deal rationally with the external world, developing perception, judgment, and memory.
Freud called these abilities secondary-process thought.
The ego: the rational master of personality; facilitates id tension reduction by determining appropriate times, places, objects.
The ego serves both the id and reality, mediating their conflicting demands.
The ego is never independent; deriving power/energy from the id.
The ego forces you to work a disliked job to provide food.
The ego does not prevent id satisfaction but postpones/redirects it to meet reality demands.
It perceives/manipulates the environment realistically: functions by the reality principle.
The ego exerts control over the id impulses.
Freud compared ego/id to a rider on a horse needing guidance.
The Superego
A third set of largely unconscious forces acquired in childhood are ideas of right and wrong, called superego by Freud.
The basis of morality is learned by age 5 or 6, initially the rules of conduct set down by our parents.
Punished behaviors form the conscience (part of the superego); praised behaviors form the ego-ideal (second part).
Children learn rules to earn parental acceptance/rejection.
Parental control is replaced by self-control.
We experience guilt/shame when violating the moral code.
The superego is relentless and cruel in seeking moral perfection, like the id.
The superego inhibits id's pleasure-seeking demands, especially sex/aggression.
The superego strives solely for perfection.
The id presses for satisfaction, the ego delays, the superego urges morality.
The superego admits no compromise.
The ego is pressured and threatened by the id, reality, and superego.
Anxiety results from friction when the ego is severely strained.
Anxiety
Freud described anxiety as objectless fear; the source is often unclear.
Anxiety is fundamental to neurotic/psychotic behavior.
The ego serves three masters: the external world, the id and the superego.
The ego responds to threats with anxiety, an unpleasant emotion similar to nervousness.
Anxiety is self-preservative, readying for appropriate action.
The ego produces/feels anxiety, involving the id, superego, and external world.
Dependence on the id: neurotic anxiety; superego dependence: moral anxiety.
Outer-world dependence: realistic anxiety.
Types of Anxiety
First, to be derived, is reality or objective anxiety (fear of tangible dangers).
Reality anxiety protects us from actual dangers.
These fears can be extreme, such as agoraphobia, exceeding normality.
Neurotic and moral anxieties are more troublesome.
Neurotic anxiety originates in childhood, from conflict between gratification and reality.
Children punished for sexual/aggressive impulses develop neurotic anxiety fear of punishment for expressing the id.
It is fear of what may happen not the instincts itself.
The conflict becomes between the id and ego.
Moral anxiety stems from conflict between the id and the superego, is a fear of one’s conscience.
Retaliation leads to shame/guilt, being conscience-stricken.
Moral anxiety has some basis in reality derived from violating moral codes.
Anxiety as a Warning
Anxiety is a warning of something amiss; induces tension, becoming a drive to satisfy; alerts that the ego is threatened and could be overthrown.
The ego can protect itself through:
Running from the situation
Inhibiting the need or obeying the conscience
If these fail, defense mechanisms are nonrational strategies to defend the ego.
Defense Mechanisms Against Anxiety
Anxiety signals impending danger, a threat to the ego; it must be counteracted.
The ego reduces conflict between the id and society/superego; Freud: defenses are always operating.
All behavior is defensive against anxiety; the intensity fluctuates but never ceases.
We use multiple, overlapping defense mechanisms.
These share two characteristics:
denial or distortion of reality—necessary but unreal.
operate unconsciously—distorted images of the world and ourselves.
Repression
Repression is involuntarily removing something from awareness, being unconscious forgetting of what brings discomfort.
It happens to memories, perceptions, and physiological functioning and is difficult to eliminate.
Example: strongly repressing sex drive leads to impotence.
Denial
Denial entails denying external threats or occurred traumatic events such as denying illnesses.
Reaction Formation
Opposite impulses will be actively expressed such as repressing impulses and replacing them with socially acceptable behaviors.
Projection
Disturbing impulses are attributed to others, not oneself, so the impulse is externalized still being Less threatening to the individual.
Example: The person says, in effect, “I don’t hate him. He hates me.”
Regression
In regression, the person retreats to an earlier, pleasant life free of frustration manifesting behaviors displayed at that time such as childish behavior.
Displacement
Impulse shifts toward another object as the original object does not satisfy the impulse and will accumulate tension seeking new ways to reduce tension.
Rationalization
We excuse threatening thoughts/actions with rational explanations making it More rational such as blaming our failure on something else being Less threatening than hurting our own selves.
Sublimation
The id impulses are redirected or altered which are socially acceptable and admirable diverting sexual energy into creative behavior. As with displacement is is only a compromise being Not total satisfaction to build tension.
Psychosexual Stages of Personality
All behaviors are considered defensive though everyone has their own ways of defending one from another as all driven by the same impulse.
The nature of the ego and superego are not universal however performing the same function; though they differ because no one person has the same experiences.
Part of our personality is from unique relationships as children.
Our character type develops in childhood mostly from parent-child interactions where the child satisfies there id, and morality and reality is imposed.
From ones memories it is said the adult personality is shaped by the fifth year.
Body region conflict occurs differently with age being theorized as the psychosexual stages of development with each stages having an erogenous zone.
Stages have conflicts that must be solved to progress.
Fixation happens whether a person is reluctant or is being supremely satisfied.
Intense gratification is sources of yearning.
Parents must not allow too little or too much gratification.
Too much or too little fixation can leave pathology.
The Oral Stage
The oral stage lasts from birth to the second year
During this period the mouth is Pleasure received through sucking, biting, and swallowing.
The infant is in a state of dependence on the mother or caregiver who is the primary object of the child’s libido.
Mother’s respond determines how the baby perceives the world good or bad, satisfying or frustrating.
There are two ways of behaving biting/spitting oral aggressive, and stimulation oral incorporative behaviors.
Adults fixated at the oral incorporative stage are excessively concerned with oral activities.
If they had been gratified their adult oral personality has optimism and dependence.
As a consequence, they are overly gullible/naive trusting others inordinately being called oral passive personality types.
As teething occurs biting mommy when nipples occur leading to early weaning developing an oral-aggressive personality
These people retain a life-long desire to bite so on things have a tendency to be verbally aggressive, argumentative, sarcastic envious of other people and try to exploit and manipulate them in an effort to dominate.
Anal Stage
Society tends to defer to the infant until toilet training at 18 months.
Defecation produces erotic pleasure, but the child must learn to postpone or delay this satisfaction.
For the first time, gratification of an instinctual impulse is interfered with.
Though parents see joy in the effort/ product and are at there mercy in the process some maybe strict to be the first.
The child learns that he or she has can be used against the parents choosing compliance.
If this isn’t going well, the child will grow up to be an anal expulsive (anal aggressive) personality being sloppy.
Otherwise; the child may retain the faeces with erotice pleasure manipulating the parents trying to become constipated and will grow up to be an anal retentive personality.
The Phallic Stage
New focus of pleasure begins from the anus to the genitals 4th to 5th year.
There's a battle between society and the id.
Children are interested in exploring their, and those of their playmates genitals.
Pleasure can be derived from the behaviors, and through fantasies.
The child becomes curious about marriage with people of opposite sex and of how we are born.
The phallic stage is the last of childhood and is a complex stage for incest and of culture.
Oedipus complex: basic phallic conflict
At the center of the child’s unconscious as they desire the opposite sex wanting to replace the same sex family member
The name is originated from the play Oedipus Rex
Oedipus complex in boys
Displays behaviors of overt and sexual fantasies due mother, the obstacle is fear of father; to whom possess mother.
Then fear then of castration and thus repressing sexual fantasy identifying to better himself as father.
Freud was less clear about the female phallic conflict calling it the Electra complex
Oedipus complex in girls
Desire towards maternal and discovers not all have her feature and then is envies boy as sees her less that to do mother.
Freud “girls feel deeply their lack of a sexual organ that is equal in value to the male one”.
Believing to lead into poorly developed superegos in women the women desires for boy’s child in adult relationship.
However nothing is certain.
In conclusion one most have good self worth or rejection towards male members can lead to feminity issues.
Various phallic types will lead to extremes.
The Latency Period
The storms and stresses of psychosexual development is most apart till 6.
Here things are very quite, for family.
This stage is not apart of psychosexual and that the sex is dorminant sublimate in school and friendships.
The Genital Stage
Final and starts at puberty and so no fixations can lead into normal life.
Here conflict is less intense and that to conform to the rules yet satisfied through social outlets.
Sublimation leads to adulthood and a good sexual partner.
If not satisfied in the first 5 years can lead into problems into teenage thus Freud paid little to the later parts of his stages.
The Neopsychoanalytic Approach
Loyal individuals that broke apart from Freud’s orthodox.
Carl Jung, Alfred Adler former works that offered differing ways.
Not known Karen Horney, Erich From where new path in orthodox views.
Forst works Erik Erikson, Henry Murray American that developed a unique view of concepts.
Though varying together is to refute the views of humans as of instincts or deterministic
The work show the diversions that quickly was a decade later.
Carl Jung
Was once designated to be to signment next spiritual heir and then made his differing analysis of psychology theory.
The point comes down to several point with first as not only the sex with definition but broad as more general psychs
With second disagreement points as direction of the human force in that not only past matters but the shape of future
Third difference rests greatly into the unconscious giving more views.
Combining areas such as history.
Psychic Energy
Here the first point is to dispute with Freud with disagreeing that is was also a general life energy.
Reusing two terms as in general energy and similar with Freud.
The energy though all activities that we do with wishing.
A great investment can cause values to life for attaining such with seeking.
Principle in opposition for generating conflict such as how greatly will equal great energy.
Principle of equivalence is not lost of a condition shift to another instead of energy loss.
Energy redistribution must come down to energy being continually shifted into desire.
The physic must balance towards equilibrium in balance with hot / cold states that must be present.
Each opposing goal must equal what ever aspect that might never achieve which creates conflict
The System of Personalities
Psyche composed of structures that come and influence one to another.
With the major system such as Id, Ego, Self with Ego.
Center of consciousness concerned. with one self in the conscious to perceive thinking and feeling
Our select parts of being available for only perception to outer to which we can only stimulus that we expose.
The Attitudes
Are the mental attitudes determining though reactions with Extraversion and Introversion
As those whom can be open social and out spoken are extraverts.
The ones which may avoid situations may be introverts.
As only one may be dominant so the other will then be influential though remain non-dominant.
Psychological Functions
Kinds of extraverts and introverts for apprehension inner and to the outer world.
Two non-rational grouped together of no reason into using and they do no evaluation
Sensing reproduction
Intuition does not arise
Thinking and feeling with rational evaluation of experiences.
Whether we like or are stimulated too.
Only one dominant pair can occur.
The Personal Unconscious
Familiarity to Sigmund but much like the preconscious that stores disturbing things that can be forgotten over past experiences.
Things can be easily recalled even with the lightest efforts.
Grouping these thing together create complex of around memories organizing common terms of influences
There can be the power complex which would influence an identification.
Complexes are always seen as intrusive that not always will you be will it will intrude thoughts causing interferences.
Complexes can originate not only as the child as a ancestral history.
The Collective Unconscious
Deep and to be least assessable but the weird part is critics are the least and bazaar parts.
This portion acts as what human as a whole as and species in that will that is in the unconscious.
This legacy is now pushed to the newer kind.
Primitive past as a basis as it influence present and the present to be controlled is ancestrial.
Each one is a connection to personal childhood and or history.
Certain events have occurred over all history with mother power then unknown like terror.
The predispsion is not directly inherited, rather the potential fear.
*Whether predisposition depends as one experiences throughout events thus Jung says baby is born certain predetermine way
Archetypes
Theme or patterns are called such though in image
Each generations images from evolution is imprinted and expressed
Among those hero, mother, child, God and more are seen.
It can include an actors wear so to act with certain actions of face traits too much of an actor though this one that not may develop.
So it happens as what may know as Inflatioon
Both sex secretes hormones as a biological stand as for that it manifest centuries. Androgynous
This allows help between both though both much show one another to express what would create one personality.
Siniester must be tamed for the shadow is where its vital but to great cant over shadow for it only cause the doom but can be creative .
As such Egos have found themselves to either be one with the self and show vitality while others may revolt then gain control and that its not under unconscious.
The Self
This the archetype unity to try and bring it together though be a goal but rare as the perfect is the one we are working toward .
All process then must have it for each component may not take part in that for them to have a complete persona.
A realization though to create future self perception with skill.
Since it require knowledge its must work with face and to use persistence.
Development of Personality
Determined with what now being as of what has been.
Not only by emphasizing parts also to not exclude the future
Has had a longer to be with others in the long run
But we can to see the long parts in the developmental and that we will get out for long but write it.
Childhood to Young Adulthood
Primitive when forming not reflecting personality of the parents.
Influence can help or to also to impede.
Ego may also only begin in child when forming the self as for world that they can not not see.
With the birth of the psyche and mark with needs to be adaptive.
Fanties that were made from childhood at as and adolescences in realities that were set to confront .
Young hood will become something we may then want for our future to settle and be ready at a place around the world in what will be exciting .
Middle Age
Now this transition can be more for more and more patient.
Though as adaptation in young will come. The more better
Yet then is the feel of empty, now then Adventure that we sought is long gone.
Changes in inevitability in people .
In reality as middle age is something that should be devoted world neglecting that we may need.
Now with shifting focus to focus with what will shift our interest.
What must be in balance or not the same sided persona.
We can obtain a new and healthy level after realizing this.
Individuation
Capacity fulfilling this self and developing of it .
We can use this and that it that we will look where they then let though to creative a picture with expression .
From there in the rational in how one sees that we have the self to not be shown over but then we must assimilate a balance with what needs to be shown during age
For only harmony to come but then for us not to have anything.
Detrhing Persona
Persona must be that what we now are from this will be the path.
Destructive and all its traits with also acceptance of shadow the primitive.
For more balance must exist.
When coming to those whom would act can be the greatest with charaters.
Each will occur and the way too be in that now those sides of personalities may even come to be expressive.
Transendnece
To come with the term of emotional to come to be family to influence.
Then all things structures come to work and how and what it really means.
Even some marriage or frustration with work may stop it.
Alfred Adler
This image now depicks not where everything goes but the forces that change you and child events
Instead focuses on uniqueness and denil of bio motives/ goals
All individuals are social from unique to interactions.
The consciouss is not that seen with forces yet to develop
Interior Feel
Interior are present and are force driving though behavior.
To be human is to want and and grow past this.
There a lot is growing with the feeling though our inferior is great motivator.
The Inferiority Complex
For someone to not grow what will have that would result is their un ability causes much to lead to a develop.
And that feeling less as not coping results this and can arise from organ, negalct, spoiling.
A children’s fist investigation that was approved to find though to be over come
Parts of body shapes you even from weakness though effort can be done .
It can work from arts even with president Roosevelt.
Efforts do not always work though.
Superior Complex
Here the to over come the complex so to develop a higher sense of abilities and a higher sense of accomplishments
To believe there is no need show with accomplishments to be able and willing to look higher than the success of others.
Striving For Superior
Feelings of weakness for what end if to rid the problem .
With the ultimate goal can often vary. And always striving
The word from perfection, to try and better from what has been so to work towards the path in general of living.
Fictional Finallsmin
Having a ultimate is that has great and need to use then to work to
We do not test the realities. Only try best to live to
By knowing what it will result in some sort of result then you would follow that.
This thought is then from reality the one who does
The we set so best ideal we so form to be like the one we must show/ express
Style of Life
Though now at least for all the we try to act though then its our choice.
This with the the behavior is now more defined by the behaviors that has done.
As behavior of skills to compensate for an act or thought its how every action is built
One way we can see them how we learn over time.
The neglected though may not cope but that can change. So more on later from relations.
Creating Power
There a point of where it all may go, however there can be no victims in that style of life has early and no chance will give that . The
In other then just we say in the and will not make a new path as much or the or envi. And
And of is not not from The that it the a and we that