PSYCHODYNAMIC THEORY - Psychodynamic theories focus on the psychological drives and forces within individuals that explain human behavior and personality.(Sharf, 2012)

Sigismund (Sigmund) Freud - was born either on March 6 or May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, Moravia, which is now part of the Czech Republic. . A scholarly, seriousminded youth, Freud did not have a close friendship with any of his younger siblings. He did, however, enjoy a warm, indulgent relationship with his mother,leading him in later years to observe that the mother/son relationship was the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships.

UNCONCIOUS - Violent motives, and traumatic experiences

PRECONCIOUS - Memories and Stock knowledge

CONCIOUS - Thoughts and Perceptions

ID, EGO, SUPEREGO - Provinces of Mind

Id - At the core of personality and completely unconscious is the psychical region called the id, a term derived

from the impersonal pronoun meaning “the it,” or the not-yet owned component of personality. The id operates through the primary process.

Ego - It is governed by the reality principle, which it tries to substitute for the pleasure principle of the id. As the sole region of the mind in contact with the external world, the ego becomes the decision-making or executive branch of personality. The ego has no strength of its own but borrows energy from the id.

Super Ego - In Freudian psychology, the superego, or above-I, represents the moral and ideal aspects of personality and is guided by the moralistic and idealistic principles as opposed to the pleasure principle of the id and the realistic principle of the ego. The superego is not concerned with the happiness of the ego. It strives blindly and unrealistically toward perfection.

Dynamics oPersonality - Levels of mental life and provinces of the mind refer to the structure or composition of personality; but personalities also do something. Thus, Freud postulated a dynamic, or motivational principle, to explain the driving forces behind people’s actions. To Freud, people are motivated to seek pleasure and to reduce tension and anxiety. This motivation is derived from psychical and physical energy that springs from their basic drives.

Drives - Freud used the German word '“Trieb” to refer to a drive or a stimulus within the per son. Freud’s official translators rendered this term as instinct, but more accurately the word should be “drive” or “impulse.” Drives operate as a constant motivational force. As an internal stimulus, drives differ from external stimuli in that they cannot be avoided through flight.

Sex - The aim of the sexual drive is pleasure, but this pleasure is not limited to genital satisfaction. Freud believed that the entire body is invested with libido. Besides the genitals, the mouth and anus are especially capable of producing sexual pleasure and are called erogenous zones.

Aggression - Partially as a result of his unhappy experiences during World War I and partially as a consequence of the death of his beloved daughter Sophie, Freud (1920/1955.)

Anxiety - Sex and aggression share the center of Freudian dynamic theory with the concept of anxiety. In defining anxiety, Freud (1933/1964) emphasized that it is a felt, affective, unpleasant state accompanied by a physical sensation that warns the person against impending danger.Three kinds of anxiety: neurotic, moral, and realistic. The ego’s dependence on the id results in neurotic anxiety; its dependence on the superego produces moral anxiety; and its dependence on the outer world leads to realistic anxiety.

Neurotic anxiety - is defined as apprehension about an unknown danger. The feeling itself exists in the ego, but it originates from id impulses. People may experience neurotic anxiety in the presence of a teacher, employer, or some other authority figure because they previously experienced unconscious feelings of destruction against one or both parents. During childhood, these feelings of hostility are often accompanied by fear of punishment, and this fear becomes generalized into unconscious neurotic anxiety.

Moral anxiety - stems from the conflict between the ego and the superego. After children establish a superego—usually by the age of 5 or 6 they may experience anxiety as an outgrowth of the conflict between realistic needs and the dictates of their superego. Moral anxiety, for example, would result from sexual temptations if a child believes that yielding to the temptation would be morally wrong.

DEFENSE MECHANISM - Techniques such as repression, reaction formation, sublimation, and the like, whereby the ego defends itself against the pain of anxiety.

REPRESSION - The unconscious act of keeping threatening thoughts, feelings, or impulses out of consciousness. The mother of all defense mechanisms.

SUBLIMATION - People deny particular ideas, feelings, or impulses and project them onto others.

PROJECTION - Expressing a socially unacceptable impulse in a socially acceptable way.

REACTION FORMATION - when an unpleasant idea, feeling, or impulse is turned into its opposite. 

RATIONALIZATION -  giving logical reasons to justify unacceptable behavior that is motivated by unconscious instinctual impulses.

REGRESSION - the individual reverts to immature behavior or to an earlier stage of psychosexual development. 

DISPLACEMENT - the individual discharges tensions by taking them out on a less threatening target.

Applications of Psychoanalytic Theory - Freud was an innovative speculator, probably more concerned with theory building than with treating sick people. He spent much of his time conducting therapy not only to help patients but to gain the insight into human personality necessary to expound psychoanalytic theory. This section looks at Freud’s early therapeutic technique, his later technique, and his views on dreams and unconscious slips.

Freud’s Early Therapeutic Technique - Prior to his use of the rather passive psychotherapeutic technique of free association, Freud had relied on a much more active approach. In Studies on Hysteria Freud described his technique of extracting repressed childhood memories.

Freud’s Later Therapeutic Technique - The primary goal of Freud’s later psychoanalytic therapy was to uncover repressed memories through free association and dream analysis.

Transference - refers to the strong sexual or aggressive feelings, positive or negative, that patients develop toward their analyst during the course of treatment.

Transference feelings - are unearned by the therapist and are merely transferred to her or him from patients’ earlier experiences, usually with their parents. In other words, patients feel toward the analyst the same way they previously felt toward one or both parents. As long as these feelings manifest themselves as interest or love, transference does not interfere with the process of treatment but is a powerful ally to the therapeutic progress. Positive transference permits patients to more or less relive childhood experiences within the nonthreatening climate of the analytic treatment.

Dream Analysis - Freud used dream analysis to transform the manifest content of dreams to the more important latent content. The manifest content of a dream is the surface meaning or the conscious description given by the dreamer, whereas the latent content refers to its unconscious material.

Freudian Slips - Freud believed that many everyday slips of the tongue or pen, misreading, incorrect hearing, misplacing objects, and temporarily forgetting names or intentions are not chance accidents but reveal a person ’s unconscious intentions. In writing of these faulty acts, Freud used the German Fehlleistung, or “faulty function, ” but James Strachey, one of Freud’s translators, invented the term parapraxes to refer to what many people now simply call “Freudian slips.

Freud believed that many everyday slips of the tongue or pen, misreading, incorrect hearing, misplacing objects, and temporarily forgetting names or intentions are not chance accidents but reveal a person ’s unconscious intentions. In writing of these faulty acts, Freud used the German Fehlleistung, or “faulty function, ” but James Strachey, one of Freud’s translators, invented the term parapraxes to refer to what many people now simply call “Freudian slips.

Parapraxes or unconscious slips - are common that we usually pay little attention to them and deny that they have any underlying significance. Freud, however, insisted that these faulty acts have meaning; they reveal the unconscious intention of the person: “They are not chance events but serious mental acts; they have a sense; they arise from the concurrent actions—or perhaps rather, the mutually opposing action— of two different intentions”. One opposing action emanates from the unconscious; the other, from the preconscious. Unconscious slips, therefore, are similar to dreams in that they are a product of both the unconscious and the preconscious, with the unconscious intention being dominant and interfering with and replacing the preconscious one.

Alfred Adler - Alfred Adler was born on February 7, 1870, in Rudolfsheim, a village near Vienna As a young boy, Adler was weak and sickly and at age 5, he nearly died of pneumonia. He had gone ice skating with an older boy who abandoned young Alfred. Cold and shivering, Adler managed to find his way home where he immediately fell asleep on the living room couch. As Adler gradually gained consciousness, he heard a doctor say to his parents, This experience, along with the death of a younger brother, motivated Adler to become a physician. Adler was one of the founding figures of psychoanalysis, along with Freud and Jung, but he eventually broke away from Freud's psychoanalytic circle to develop his own school of thought, known as individual psychology. Adler's theory emphasized the importance of individual uniqueness and the pursuit of goals as key aspects of personality development. He believed that people are primarily motivated by social factors and the desire to overcome feelings of inferiority and achieve a sense of superiority. Adler also introduced the concept of the inferiority complex, suggesting that feelings of inadequacy or inferiority can drive behavior.

Striving for  Sucess or Superiority - FIRST PRINCIPLE OF ADLER THEORY, Individual psychology holds that everyone begins life with physical deficiencies that activate feelings of inferiority— feelings that motivate a person to strive for either superiority or success.

The Final Goal - In striving for their final goal, people create and pursue many preliminary goals. These subgoals are often conscious, but the connection between them and the final goal usually remains unknown. When an individual’s final goal is known, all actions make sense and each subgoal takes on new significance

The Striving Force as Compensation - People strive for superiority or success as a means of compensation for feelings of inferiority or weakness. These physical deficiencies ignite feelings of inferiority only because people, by their nature, possess an innate tendency toward completion or wholeness

Striving as Personal Superiority - Some people strive for superiority with little or no concern for others. Their goals are personal ones, and their strivings are motivated largely by exaggerated feelings of personal inferiority, or the presence of an inferiority complex

Striving for Success - People who strive for success rather than personal superiority maintain a sense of self, of course, but they see daily problems from the view of society’s development rather than from a strictly personal vantage point.

Subjective Perceptions - SECOND PRINCIPLE OF ADLER THEORY, People strive for superiority or success to compensate for feelings of inferiority, but the manner in which they strive is not shaped by reality but by their subjective perceptions of reality, that is, by their fictions, or expectations of the future.

Fictionalism  - Our most important fiction is the goal of superiority or success, a goal we created early in life and may not clearly understand. This subjective, fictional final goal guides our style of life, gives unity to our personality. Adler’s emphasis on fictions is consistent with his strongly held teleological view of motivation. Teleology is an explanation of behavior in terms of its final purpose or aim.

Physical Inferiorities - Adler (1929/1969) insisted that the whole human race is “blessed” with organ inferiorities. Adler (1929/1969) emphasized that physical deficiencies alone do not cause a particular style of life; they simply provide present motivation for reaching future goals.

Unity and Self-Consistency of Personality - THIRD PRINCIPLE OF ADLER THEORY, Personality is unified and self-consistent. Emphasizes that each person is unique and indivisible. Inconsistent behavior doesn’t exist.

Organ Dialect - The disturbance of one part of the body cannot be viewed in isolation; it affects the entire person. In fact, the deficient organ expresses the direction of the individual’s goal, a condition known as organ dialect.

Conscious and Unconscious -  Conscious thoughts are those that are understood and regarded by the individual as helpful in striving for success, whereas unconscious thoughts are those that are not helpful.

Social Interest - is the natural condition of the human species and the adhesive that binds society together (Adler, 1927). Social interest originated from our mother. To Adler, social interest is the only gauge to be used in judging the worth of a person.

Style of Life  - used to refer to the flavor of a person’s life. It includes a person’s goal, self-concept, feelings for others, and attitude toward the world

Creative Power - places them in control of their own lives, is responsible for their final goal, determines their method of striving for that goal, and contributes to the development of social interest.

ABNORMAL DEVELOPMENT -  The most important factor in abnormal development is lack of social interest. In addition, people with a useless style of life tend to (1) set their goals too high, (2) have a dogmatic style of life, and (3) live in their own private world.

External Factors in Maladjustment -  Adler listed three factors that relate to abnormal development: (1) exaggerated physical deficiencies, which do not by themselves cause abnormal development, but which may contribute to it by generating subjective and exaggerated feelings of inferiority; (2) a pampered style of life, which contributes to an overriding drive to establish a permanent parasitic relationship with the mother or a mother substitute; and (3) a neglected style of life, which leads to distrust of other people.

Safeguarding Tendencies - Both normal and neurotic people create symptoms as a means of protecting their fragile self-esteem. These safeguarding tendencies maintain a neurotic style of life and protect a person from public disgrace. The three principal safeguarding tendencies are (1) excuses, which allow people to preserve their inflated sense of personal worth; (2) aggression, which may take the form of depreciating others' accomplishments, accusing others of being responsible for one's own failures, or self-accusation; and (3) withdrawal, which can be expressed by psychologically moving backward, standing still, hesitating, or constructing obstacles.

Masculine Protest - Both men and women sometimes overemphasize the desirability of being manly, a condition Adler called the masculine protest. The frequently found inferior status of women is not based on physiology but on historical developments and social learning.

APPLICATION OF INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY - Adler applied the principles of individual psychology to family constellation, early recollections, dreams, and psychotherapy

FAMILY CONSTELLATION - Adler believed that people's perception of how they fit into their family is related to their style of life. He claimed that firstborns are likely to have strong feelings of power and superiority, to be overprotective, and to have more than their share of anxiety. Second-born children are likely to have strong social interest, provided they do not get trapped trying to overcome their older sibling. Youngest children are likely to be pampered and to lack independence, whereas only children have some of the characteristics of both the oldest and the youngest child.

Early Recollections - A more reliable method of determining style of life is to ask people for their earliest recollections. Adler believed that early memories are templates on which people project their current style of life. These recollections need not be accurate accounts of early events; they have psychological importance because they reflect a person's current view of the world.

Dreams - Adler believed that dreams can provide clues to solving future problems. However, dreams are disguised to deceive the dreamer and usually must be interpreted by another person.

Psychotherapy - The goal of Adlerian therapy is to create a relationship between therapist and patient that fosters social interest. To ensure that the patient's social interest will eventually generalize to other relationships, the therapist adopts both a maternal and a paternal role.