Psychoanalytic Theory

Freudian Theory

• Sigmund Freud believed that one’s personality was essentially set in early childhood.

  • He proposed a psychosexual stage theory of personality.

• Stage theories are ones in which development is thought to be discontinuous.

• During the oral stage (birth to one year), Freud proposed that children enjoy sucking and biting because it gives them a form of sexual pleasure.

• During the anal stage (one to three years), children are sexually gratified by the act of elimination.

• During the phallic stage (three to five years), sexual gratification moves to the genitalia.

• The Oedipus crisis, in which boys sexually desire their mothers and view their fathers as rivals for their mothers’ love, occurs in this stage.

• Some theorists have suggested that girls have a similar experience, the Electra crisis, in which they desire their fathers and see their mothers as competition for his love.

• Castration anxiety, the fear that if they misbehave, they will be castrated.

• Freud believed that the boys used the defense mechanism of identification.

• After the phallic stage, children enter latency (six years to puberty), during which they push all their sexual feelings out of conscious awareness (repression).

• During latency, children turn their attention to other issues.

  • They start school, where they learn both how to interact with others and a myriad of academic skills.

• At puberty, children enter the last of Freud’s stages, the adult genital stage.

• A fixation could result from being either undergratified or overgratified.

  • A child who was not fed regularly or who was overly indulged might develop an oral fixation.

• Someone with an anal expulsive personality tends to be messy and disorganized.

• The term anal retentive is used to describe people who are meticulously neat, hyperorganized, and a bit compulsive.

• Freud believed that much of people’s behavior is controlled by a region of the mind he called the unconscious.

• Freud contrasted the unconscious mind with the preconscious and the conscious.

  • The conscious mind contains everything we are thinking about at any one moment, while the preconscious contains everything that we could potentially summon to conscious awareness with ease.

• Freud posited that the personality consists of three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego.

• The id is in the unconscious and contains instincts and psychic energy.

• Freud believed two types of instincts exist: Eros (the life instincts) and Thanatos (the death instincts).

• Libido is the energy that directs the life instincts.

• The ego follows the reality principle, which means its job is to negotiate between the desires of the id and the limitations of the environment.

Repression

• Blocking thoughts out from conscious awareness.

• When asked how he feels about the breakup with Muffy, Biff replies, “Who? Oh, yeah, I haven’t thought about her in a while.”

Denial

• Not accepting the ego-threatening truth.

• Biff continues to act as if he and Muffy are still together.

• He waits by her locker, calls her every night, and plans their future dates.

Displacement

• Redirecting one’s feelings toward another person or object.

• When people displace negative emotions like anger, they often displace them onto people who are less threatening than the source of the emotion.

• For instance, a child who is angry at his or her teacher would be more likely to displace the anger onto a classmate than onto the teacher.

• Biff could displace his feelings of anger and resentment onto his little brother, pet hamster, or football.

Projection

• Believing that the feelings one has toward someone else are actually held by the other person and directed at oneself.

• Biff insists that Muffy still cares for him.

Reaction formation

• Expressing the opposite of how one truly feels.

• Biff claims he loathes Muffy.

Regression

• Returning to an earlier, comforting form of behavior.

• Biff begins to sleep with his favorite childhood stuffed animal, Fuzzy Kitten.

Rationalization

• Coming up with a beneficial result of an undesirable occurrence.

• Biff believes that he can now find a better girlfriend.

• Muffy is not really all that pretty, smart, and fun to be with.

Intellectualization

• Undertaking an academic, unemotional study of a topic.

• Biff embarks on an in-depth research project about failed teen romances.

Sublimation

• Channeling one’s frustration toward a different goal.

• Sublimation is viewed as a particularly healthy defense mechanism.

• Biff devotes himself to writing poetry and publishes a small volume before he graduates high school.

Criticisms of Freud

• Psychoanalytic theory is also criticized for overestimating the importance of early childhood and of sex.

• Much contemporary research contradicts the idea that personality is essentially set by the age of five.

• Freud’s almost exclusive focus on sexual motivation led some psychologists to try to broaden the theory.

• Feminists such as Karen Horney and Nancy Chodorow believe that this idea grew out of Freud’s assumption that men were superior to women rather than from any empirical observations.

Impact of Freudian Theory

• Freudian theory changed the world despite its flaws.

• Many believe children are sexual and that unconscious thoughts shape our behavior.

• Freud influenced culture more than psychology.

• Freud's terms have become commonplace (e.g., ego, unconsious, penis envy, denial).

• Freud's ideas influence art.

• Salvador Dali's surrealist paintings depict the unconscious, and Woody Allen's films often feature Freudian dramas and psychoanalysis.

Psychodynamic Theories

• A number of Freud’s early followers developed offshoots of psychoanalytic theory.

  • These approaches are now usually referred to as psychodynamic or neo-Freudian approaches.

  • Two of the best-known creators of psychodynamic theories are Carl Jung and Alfred Adler.

• The personal unconscious is similar to Freud’s view of the unconscious.

• Jung contrasted the personal unconscious with the collective unconscious.

• The collective unconscious is passed down through the species and, according to Jung, explains certain similarities we see between cultures.

• The collective unconscious contains archetypes that Jung defined as universal concepts we all share as part of the human species.

• Adler is called an ego psychologist because he downplayed the importance of the unconscious and focused on the conscious role of the ego.

• Adler believed that people are motivated by the fear of failure, which he termed inferiority, and the desire to achieve, which he called superiority.

• Adler is also known for his work about the importance of birth order in shaping personality.

Trait Theories

• Trait theorists believe that we can describe people’s personalities by specifying their main characteristics, or traits.

• Some trait theorists believe that the same basic set of traits can be used to describe all people’s personalities.

  • Such a belief characterizes a nomothetic approach.

• Hans Eysenck believed that by classifying all people along an introversion-extroversion scale and a stable-unstable scale, we could describe their personalities.

• Raymond Cattell developed the 16 PF (personality factor) test to measure what he believed were the 16 basic traits present in all people, albeit to different degrees.

• More recently, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae have proposed that personality can be described using the Big Five personality traits: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and emotional stability (or neuroticism).

  • Extroversion refers to how outgoing or shy someone is.

  • Agreeableness has to do with how easy to get along with someone is.

• Factor analysis is a statistical technique used to accomplish this feat.

  • Factor analysis allows researchers to use correlations between traits in order to see which traits cluster together as factors.

• Idiographic theorists assert that using the same set of terms to classify all people is impossible.

• Gordon Allport believed that although there were common traits useful in describing all people, a full understanding of someone’s personality was impossible without looking at his or her personal traits.

  • He referred to such traits as cardinal dispositions.

• Central dispositions have a larger influence on personality than secondary dispositions.

Biological Theories

• Biological theories of personality view genes, chemicals, and body types as the central determinants of who a person is.

• Heritability is a measure of the amount of variation in a trait in a given population that is due to genetics.

• Temperaments, typically defined as their emotional style and characteristic way of dealing with the world.

• Hippocrates believed that personality was determined by the relative levels of four humors (fluids) in the body.

• William Sheldon’s somatotype theory

  • Sheldon identified three body types: endomorphs (fat), mesomorphs (muscular), and ectomorphs (thin).

  • Sheldon argued that certain personality traits were associated with each of the body types.

Behaviorist Theories

• According to this view, personality is determined by the environment.

• The reinforcement contingencies to which one is exposed creates one’s personality.

• By changing people’s environments, behaviorists believe we can alter their personalities.

Social-Cognitive Theories

• Albert Bandura suggested that personality is created by an interaction between the person (traits), the environment, and the person’s behavior.

  • His model is based on the idea of triadic reciprocality, also known as reciprocal determinism.

• Bandura also posited that personality is affected by people’s sense of self-efficacy.

• George Kelly proposed the personal-construct theory of personality.

  • Kelly argued that people, in their attempts to understand their world, develop their own individual systems of personal constructs.

  • His theory is based on a fundamental postulate that essentially states that people’s behavior is influenced by their cognitions and that by knowing how people have behaved in the past, we can predict how they will act in the future.

• Julian Rotter’s concept of locus of control.

  • A person can be described as having either an internal or an external locus of control.

  • People with an internal locus of control feel as if they are responsible for what happens to them.

• People with an external locus of control generally believe that luck and other forces outside of their own control determine their destinies.

Humanistic Theories

• Determinism is the belief that what happens is dictated by what has happened in the past.

  • According to psychoanalysts, personality is determined by what happened to an individual in his or her early childhood (largely during the psychosexual stages).

• Free will is an idea that has been embraced by humanistic psychology.

  • This perspective is often referred to as the third force because it arose in opposition to the determinism so central to both psychoanalytic and behaviorist models.

• Self-concept is a person’s global feeling about himself or herself.

• Two of the most influential humanistic psychologists were Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers.

  • Both of these men believed that people are motivated to reach their full potential or self-actualize.

Assessment Techniques

• Reliability is often likened to consistency; reliable measures yield consistent, similar results even if the results are not accurate.

• Validity, on the Testing and Individual Differences, other hand, means accuracy; a valid test measures what it purports to measure.

• Projective tests are often used by psychoanalysts.

  • They involve asking people to interpret ambiguous stimuli.

• For instance, the Rorschach inkblot test involves showing people a series of inkblots and asking them to describe what they see.

• The thematic apperception test (TAT) consists of a number of cards, each of which contains a picture of a person or people in an ambiguous situation.

• Self-report inventories are essentially questionnaires that ask people to provide information about themselves.

• The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2) is one of the most widely used self-report instruments.

  • A potential problem with such inventories is that people may not be completely honest in answering the questions.