Neopsychoanalytic Approach Notes

Neopsychoanalytic Approach

Several personality theorists, initially loyal to Freud, diverged due to disagreements, including Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Henry Murray. Erik Erikson's work also stems from Freudian psychoanalysis. These theorists opposed Freud's emphasis on instincts and deterministic view, presenting a more optimistic view of human nature.

Carl Jung

Jung's analytical psychology differed from Freud, disagreeing on the role of sexuality and the direction of forces influencing personality. Jung redefined libido as generalized psychic energy and believed in the influence of the future, not just the past, while emphasizing the unconscious more than Freud, incorporating inherited experiences.

Psychic Energy: Opposites, Equivalence, and Entropy

Jung redefined libido as a broad life energy. Psychic energy drives psychological activities, and its investment creates psychic value. Jung proposed principles of opposites, equivalence, and entropy. Opposites drive behavior, equivalence conserves energy, and entropy balances energy differences within the personality.

Systems of Personality

Jung's psyche comprises the ego, personal unconscious, and collective unconscious. The ego is the center of consciousness. Attitudes include extraversion (outward focus) and introversion (inward focus). Psychological functions are sensing, intuiting, thinking, and feeling. Sensing and intuiting are non-rational, while thinking and feeling are rational.

The Personal Unconscious

Similar to Freud’s preconscious, it stores forgotten or suppressed material, grouped into complexes. Complexes influence behavior and can be conscious or unconscious, originating from personal and ancestral experiences.

The Collective Unconscious

The deepest level of the psyche, containing universal experiences of the human and prehuman species, passed down through generations. It influences present behavior through archetypes or primordial images.

Archetypes

Recurring themes such as the hero, mother, child, God, death, and power. Major archetypes include the persona (public face), anima/animus (bisexual aspects), shadow (primitive instincts), and self (unity of personality).

Development of the Personality

Personality is shaped by future aspirations and past events, developing throughout life towards self-realization. It includes stages from childhood to young adulthood, where the ego develops, and middle age (35-40), which involves major personality changes and a shift from extraversion to introversion.

Individuation

Becoming an individual, fulfilling capacities, and developing the self. It requires abandoning old behaviors and confronting the unconscious to achieve balance and psychological health.

Alfred Adler

Adler's individual psychology emphasizes the uniqueness of each person and the role of social environment. He focused on conscious processes. Inferiority feelings are the primary motivator, leading to compensation and striving for higher development.

Inferiority and Superiority Complexes

Inability to overcome inferiority feelings leads to an inferiority complex. Overcompensation results in a superiority complex. Adler later emphasized striving for superiority or perfection as a fundamental aspect of life characterized by the pursuit of completion or wholeness.

Fictional Finalism

Finalism is the idea that we have an ultimate goal that guides our behavior. Goals are based on subjective ideals. Fictional finalism describes how fictional ideas guide behavior toward a complete state of being.

Style of Life

Unique pattern of characteristics developed to compensate for inferiority feelings. It's shaped by social interactions and crystallized by age 4 or 5, guiding later behaviors.

Creative Power of the Self

Individuals create their style of life through conscious attitude toward experiences. Neither heredity nor environment fully explains personality development. People face universal problems categorized into behavior towards others, occupation, and love, leading to dominant, getting, avoiding, and socially useful types.

Social Interest

Innate potential to cooperate with others for personal and societal goals. Realization depends on early social experiences shaped by the mother's behavior.

Birth Order

Birth order influences childhood social environment and helps shape our style of life.

Karen Horney

Horney challenged Freud's views on women, emphasizing social relationships, security, and love needs over sexual and aggressive forces. Her theory was influenced by her gender, experiences, and cultural shifts in attitudes toward sex and gender roles.

Childhood Need for Safety

Social forces in childhood, especially parental relationships, shape personality. The need for security and freedom from fear is critical, influenced by parental warmth and affection. Repressed hostility arises from parental behaviors undermining security, leading to basic anxiety.

Basic Anxiety

Defined as feeling lonely and helpless in a hostile world, stemming from repressed hostility and undermining the need for safety.

Self-Protective Mechanisms

Strategies such as securing affection, being submissive, attaining power, and withdrawing from others are employed to cope with basic anxiety. However, these mechanisms can lead to impoverished personality and conflicts.

Neurotic Needs and Trends

Self-protective mechanisms become neurotic needs, irrational solutions to resolving basic anxiety. These are compulsive and pursued intensely. Neurotic trends categorize attitudes toward self and others: moving toward (compliant), against (aggressive), and away (detached) people.

The Compliant Personality

Exhibiting an intense need for affection and approval, compliant personalities seek a dominant partner and suppress hostility, displaying subservience and helplessness.

The Aggressive Personality

Aggressive personalities move against others; acting tough and domineering, they seek control and superiority to alleviate basic anxiety. They strive to excel and judge relationships based on personal gain.

The Detached Personality

Detached personalities move away, maintaining emotional distance and striving for self-sufficiency. They avoid constraints and suppress emotions, emphasizing reason and logic.

Conflict and Neurosis

Conflict arises from the incompatibility of neurotic trends, forming the core of neurosis. Neurotic individuals rigidly adhere to a dominant trend, while healthy individuals can express all three as warranted.

The Idealized Self-Image

Neurotic individuals construct an idealized self-image based on an unattainable ideal of perfection, leading to the tyranny of the shoulds.

Externalization

Conflicts are projected onto the outside world to alleviate anxiety but fail to bridge the gap between the idealized self-image and reality.

Erich Fromm

Fromm emphasized culture, history, and the social forces shaping personality, rather than instincts. Paradoxically, increased freedom leads to more intense loneliness and isolation. Personal conflicts originate from societal structures.

Freedom vs Security

People have achieved more freedom, yet feel more lonely, alienated, and insignificant. The less freedom, the greater the feelings of belonging and security.

Alienation from Nature

Humans are separate from nature because humans are conscious. Isolation causes a desire to belong.

Psychic Escape Mechanisms

Authoritarianism, destructiveness, and automaton conformity are used to regain security and escape freedom. Authoritarianism manifests as masochistic or sadistic strivings. Destructiveness eliminates sources of powerlessness. Automaton conformity involves becoming like everyone else.

Personality Development in Childhood

The development of the individual repeats the development of the human species. Different parental relationships include symbiotic relatedness, withdrawal- destructiveness, and love, which determine a child's capacity to develop relationships with others.

Basic Psychological Needs

Universal needs include relatedness, transcendence, rootedness, identity, a frame of orientation, and excitation/stimulation. Satisfaction depends on cultural and social conditions.

Productive and Nonproductive Character Types

Character types describe how we relate to the world. Nonproductive orientations include receptive, exploitative, hoarding, and marketing types. The productive type is the ideal. Later he proposed additional orientations: necrophilous and biophilous as unproductive and productive respectively. Finally he proposed having and being as unproductive and productive.

Having Vs Being

Having is nonproductive and being is productive. The having character is dependent on comparing their successes to those of others.

Questions About Human Nature

Fromm's is optimistic because he considered people to be shaped by their society rather than immutable biological forces.

Henry Murray

Murray combined conscious and unconscious forces with physiological and sociological factors. Two features of Murray's system are emphasis on needs and empiricism.

Principles of Personology

Personality is rooted in the brain guided towards less tension, but tension is good. Personality changes and progresses; it is not fixed.

Divisions Of Personality

Murray divided the personality into the id, ego and superego. The Id is a conscious desire. The superego develops with age. Ego balances the id and superego.

Needs

Murray's use of needs is designed to explain the motivation and direction of human behavior. Needs are the motivator of behaviors. Research led to a list of 20 needs people may or may not have.

Types of Needs

Primary needs are crucial for survival, while secondary, or psychogenic, needs are about emotional satisfaction. Reactive vs Proactive.

Characteristics of Needs

The most urgent need impels a reaction from the person. Fusion and subsidiation are two concepts of action. Theme is the concept relating needs with our behavior.

Personality Development in Childhood- Complexes

Murray's childhood stage leaves its form on the personality. Extreme habits may leave a person fixated on the stage, losing flexibility and spontaneity in the ego and superego.

Stages of Development

Claustral, oral stage, rejection complex anal stage, urethral stage (unique), and genital or castration stage all influence development. Ultimately the goal is tension reduction.

The Life-Span Approach

The life-span approach focuses on personality development over the entire life.

Erik Erikson

Erikson focused on elaborating development. He emphasized the ego and cultural impact on personality.

Psychosocial stages

There are 8 stages that represent the challenges, or crisis, one meets at each developmental stage. Maladaptive tendencies prevent the normal progression.

Trust Versus Mistrust

This describes the first stage and describes how a mother's actions affects the baby. Hope is the most useful strength when children adapt to this crisis.

Autonomy Versus Doubt and Shame

Children aged 2-3 develop physical skills. Parents who are involved create children who are free of shame in the skills they obtain.

Initiative Versus Guilt

Children aged 3-5. Parental guidance and care during this stage create purposeful children.

Industriousness Versus Inferiority

Industry is a means to praise, which causes competence in the children.

Identity Cohesion Versus Role Confusion

Adolescence is about a sense of identity. If this works well they can adapt in society. Fidelity results in great sincerity in relationships.

Intimacy Versus Isolation

Establishment of independence from parents. People unable to avoid social isolation face a threat to their development of the ego. Mutual love is a great factor in these humans.

Generativity Versus Stagnation

Involved in teaching the next generation. A mentor. When older humans seek to solve stagnation they regress. Therefore, care is very important to avoid these types of issues.

Ego Integrity Versus Despair

Final stage. People choose between integrity and despair. Integrity derives from wisdom and helps express integration for future generations.

Basic Weaknesses

Maldevelopment or Malignancy- When the ego consists of one attitude. This may develop due to the adaptive and maladaptive responses that help solve each situation.

Human Nature

Theorists believe that human nature has potential, but each stage offers a positive outcome. Childhood's influence is beyond our power, but later stages may counter it. Overall, social experience matters more, with the development of ego as its ultimate priority.

Adolescent Development 5 Types

1. Identity achievement- Strong ego capable of achieving complex tasks.
2. Moratorium- Vague and in a identity crisis.
3. Folclosure- Commitments rely on past results.
4. Identity diffusion- Lack of occupational skills causes distance with others.
5. Alienated achievement- Cling to beliefs that are not socially acceptable.