Personality Psychology Notes

Personality - Chapter 13

Definition of Personality

  • Personality is the distinctive and relatively stable pattern of behaviors, thoughts, motives, and emotions that characterizes an individual.
  • It describes how we are different from other people and what patterns of behavior are typical of us.

Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory

  • One of the earliest theories of personality, emphasizing unconscious processes and unresolved past conflicts.
  • Freud worked from about 1890 until his death in 1939.
  • Freud's Path to Developing Psychoanalysis:
    • Started his career as a physician.
    • Explored how mental and physical symptoms could be caused by purely psychological factors.
    • Became aware that many powerful mental processes operate in the unconscious.
    • Developed a theory of the structure of human personality and its development.
    • Named his theory and therapeutic technique psychoanalysis.
  • Psychoanalytic theorists emphasize the symbolic meanings of behavior and the deep inner workings of the mind.
  • Early experiences with parents extensively shape development.

Conscious and Unconscious Processes

  • Behavior is governed by both conscious and unconscious processes.
  • Libido: The internal drive for physical pleasure (sex drive), considered the motivating factor behind most behavior.

Levels of Consciousness

  • Conscious: Awareness.
  • Preconscious: Not explicitly mentioned in the transcript, but refers to thoughts and feelings that are not currently in awareness but can be easily retrieved.
  • Unconscious: Reservoir of unacceptable thoughts, feelings, memories, and other information that lies beneath our conscious awareness, but has an enormous impact on personality development.

Structure of Personality

  • Freud called the mind the "psyche" and asserted that it contains three levels of consciousness, or awareness: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious.
  • Id: The part of personality containing inherited psychic energy, particularly sexual and aggressive instincts, driven by the libido and operating on the "pleasure principle."
  • Ego: Mediates between the Id’s demands and the external world, operating on the "reality principle."
  • Superego: The moral branch of the personality that determines right and wrong, internalized from parents and society, following a "morality principle."

Development of Personality

  • We start life with the Id, striving to meet basic needs.
  • In a toddler, the Ego develops.
  • Around age 4 or 5, the child develops the Superego.
  • The ego works as the "executive" to manage bodily needs and wishes in a socially acceptable way.

Defense Mechanisms

  • The ego’s protective method for reducing anxiety by distorting reality.
  • The "morality" demands of the superego often conflict with the "infantile" needs and drives of the id.
  • When the ego fails to satisfy both the id and the superego, anxiety slips into conscious awareness.

Types of Defense Mechanisms:

  • Denial: Refusing to admit that something unpleasant is happening.
  • Repression: Blocking a threatening idea, memory, or emotion from consciousness.
  • Displacement: Directing emotions toward things, animals, or other people who are not the real object of their feelings. When displacement serves a higher cultural or socially useful purpose, it is called sublimation.
  • Sublimation: When displacement serves a higher cultural or socially useful purpose, as in the creation of art or inventions. Freud argued that society has a duty to help people sublimate their unacceptable impulses for the sake of civilization. Sexual passion, for example, may be sublimated into the creation of art or literature.
  • Projection: Attributing one's own unacceptable or threatening feelings to someone else.
  • Regression: Reverting to a previous phase of psychological development.
  • Reaction Formation: Compensating for an unacceptable desire by acting in the opposite direction.

Examples of Defense Mechanisms:

  • A politician gives anti-gay speeches, then turns out to have homosexual tendencies. à Reaction Formation
  • Someone with an anger problem accuses everyone else of being angry and threatening. à Projection

Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual Stages

  • The id is focused on the needs of erogenous zones, sensitive areas of the body.
  • People feel shame about these needs and can get fixated at one stage, never resolving how to manage the needs of that zone’s needs.
  • At each stage, the id's impulses come into conflict with social demands.
  • If a child's needs are not met, or are overindulged, at one particular stage, the child supposedly may fixate, and a part of his or her personality will remain stuck at that stage.
  • During stressful times, people may return (or regress) to an earlier stage.

Stages:

  1. Oral Stage (Birth to 18 Months): Satisfaction through sucking, eating, biting, etc. Fixation can lead to becoming gullible, dependent, passive (overindulged) or aggressive, sadistic (underindulged). Orally fixated adults often orient their life around their mouth—chewing their nails, smoking cigarettes, overeating, becoming alcoholics, or talking a great deal.
  2. Anal Stage (18 to 36 Months): Satisfaction by having and retaining bowel movements. Fixation can lead to anal-retentive (highly controlled and compulsively neat) or anal-expulsive (messy, disorderly, rebellious, and destructive) personalities.
  3. Phallic Stage (3 to 6 Years): Pleasure centers on the genitals. The Oedipus complex (unconscious sexual longing for the mother and jealousy/hatred for the father) occurs. Unresolved issues can lead to resentment of the father and generalization of this feeling to all authority figures. Girls develop penis envy and fail to develop an adequate superego, which Freud believed resulted in women being morally inferior to men
  4. Latency Period (6 Years to Puberty): Repression of sexual thoughts and engagement in nonsexual activities to develop social and intellectual skills.
  5. Genital Stage (Puberty to Adulthood): Seeking to fulfill sexual desires through emotional attachment to members of the opposite sex. Unsuccessful outcomes lead to participation in sexual relationships based only on lustful desires, not on respect and commitment.

Oedipus Complex

  • Boys develop unconscious sexual desires for their mothers and hate their father as a rival, feeling guilt and fearing punishment by castration.
  • Resolution involves identifying with their fathers rather than seeing them as a rival.
  • Oedipus kills a man he later realizes is his birth father, and later marries a queen that he eventually realizes was his birth mother.

Assessing the Unconscious: Psychodynamic Personality Assessment

  • Freud tried to get unconscious themes to be projected into the conscious world through free association and dream analysis.
  • Projective tests: Structured, systematic exposure to a standardized set of ambiguous prompts, designed to reveal inner dynamics.
    • Rorschach test: "What do you see in these inkblots?"
    • Problem: Results don’t link well to traits (low validity) and different raters get different results (low reliability).

Flaws in Freud’s Scientific Method

  • Unfalsifiability: Theories are hard to prove or disprove.
  • Unrepresentative sampling: Theories based on a narrow sample of observations.
  • Biased observations: Theories based on patients, with an incentive to see them as unwell before treatment.
  • Post facto explanations (hindsight bias) rather than predictions.

Freud’s Legacy

  • Benefitted psychology by seeking to cure people instead of warehousing them in asylums.
  • Ideas about: the impact of childhood on adulthood, human irrationality, sexuality, evil, defenses, anxiety, and the tension between our biological selves and our socialized/civilized selves.
  • Specific concepts we still use often, such as ego, projection, regression, rationalization, dream interpretation, inferiority “complex,” oral fixation, sibling rivalry, and Freudian slips.

The Unconscious As Seen in Today’s World

  • Processing, Perceptions, and Priming, But Not a Place
  • The following processes operate at an unconscious level, not because they’re repressed, but because they are automatic:
    • Schemas guide our perceptions
    • Right hemisphere makes choices the left hemisphere doesn’t verbalize
    • Conditioned responses, learned skills and procedures, all guide our actions without conscious recall
    • Emotions get activated
    • Stereotypes influence our reactions
    • Priming affects our choices
  • The unconscious isn't being a storage area for repressed memories, but more a set of processes that operate without the need for the involvement of our conscious awareness.

Neo-Freudians

  • Initial followers of Freud who later extended his theories, often in social and cultural directions.
  • Accepted most of Freud's basic ideas, such as the id, ego, superego, and defense mechanisms, but broke away for various reasons.

Key Figures:

  • Carl Jung
    • Highlighted universal themes in the unconscious as a source of creativity and insight. Found opportunities for personal growth by finding meaning in moments of coincidence.
  • Alfred Adler
    • Focused on the fight against feelings of inferiority as a theme at the core of personality, although he may have been projecting from his own experience.
  • Karen Horney
    • Criticized the Freudian portrayal of women as weak and subordinate to men. She highlighted the need to feel secure in relationships.

Psychodynamic Theorists - Differences from Freud

  • Accepted Freud's ideas about:
    • The importance of the unconscious and childhood relationships in shaping personality
    • The id/ego/superego structure of personality
    • The role of defense mechanisms in reducing anxiety about uncomfortable ideas
  • Differed from Freud in a few ways:
    • Adler and Horney believed that anxiety and personality are a function of social, not sexual tensions in childhood.
    • Jung believed that we have a collective unconscious, containing images from our species’ experiences, not just personal repressed memories and wishes

Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology

  • Believed behavior is purposeful and goal-directed, instead of being motivated by unconscious forces.
  • We are motivated by our goals in life—especially our goals of obtaining security and overcoming feelings of inferiority.
  • Inferiority complex: Deep feelings of inadequacy and incompetence that arise from our feelings of helplessness as infants.
  • These early feelings result in a “will-to-power” that can lead to:
    • Striving to develop superiority over others through dominance, aggression, or expressions of envy.
    • Encouraging them to develop their full potential and creativity and to gain mastery and control of their lives

Karen Horney

  • Proposed that women's everyday experience with social inferiority led to power envy, not to Freud's idea of biological penis envy.
  • Personality development depends largely on social relationships—particularly the one between parent and child.
  • When a child's needs are not met by nurturing parents, the child may develop lasting feelings of helplessness and insecurity.
  • People cope with this basic anxiety in one of three ways—we move toward, away from, or against other people—and that psychological health requires a balance among these three styles.

Carl Jung's Personality Theory

  • Focuses on the interplay between the conscious and unconscious mind, universal archetypes, the process of individuation, and psychological types.

Components of the Mind:

  1. The Ego : represents the conscious mind including the thoughts, memories, and emotions a person is aware of.
  2. The Personal Unconscious: is created from our individual experiences that have been forgotten or repressed but continue to influence their behavior and attitudes on an unconscious level.
  3. The Collective Unconscious: is identical in all of us and is inherited. The collective unconscious consists of primitive images and patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that Jung called archetypes

Archetypes

  • Universal patterns and images contained in the Collective Unconscious.
  • These images are the same or at least extremely similar across all cultures.
  • We don’t learn about these patterns, or symbols… from our upbringing or culture – he claims that we are all born with this knowledge.
  • We inherit these archetypes much the way we inherit instinctive patterns of behavior.

Individuation

  • Most, if not all, people have several archetypes at play in their personality.
  • Each person carries dominate archetypes within.
  • Through Jung’s process of psychoanalysis, he encourages self-examination to identify them. This is how self- actualization occurs.
  • The individuation process is the integration of the ego (consciousness) with the personal and collective self.

Jung’s archetypes

  • Shape and define the human experience, resulting in identification of:
    • Self: Unification of the individual’s ego, personal and collective unconsciousness
    • The Shadow: Base for sexual and life instincts.
    • Anima and Animus: Male/female identities.
    • The Persona: Self-presentation.
    • The father: Authority figure; stern; powerful.
    • The mother: Nurturing; comforting.
    • The child: Longing for innocence; rebirth; salvation.
    • The wise old man: Guidance; knowledge; wisdom.
    • The hero: Champion; defender; rescuer.
    • The maiden: Innocence; desire; purity.
    • The trickster: Deceiver; liar; trouble-maker
  • Jung’s archetype of a whole, united self. Every culture around the world uses the circle in a similar way, therefore making it a universal concept .

Psychological Types

  • Jung differentiated two types of people according to attitude: extraverted (outward-looking) and introverted (inward-looking).
  • Later he differentiated several functions of the mind:
    • Thinking / Feeling
    • Sensation / Intuition
    • Judging / Perceiving
  • An individual’s personality have these functions to differing degrees.
Extraverts vs. Introverts:
  • Extraverts: Energized by the outer world, outgoing, talkative, act first then think, value breadth of experience.
  • Introverts: Energized by the inner world, inward, quiet, think then may act, value depth of experience.

Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

  • A self-report inventory designed to identify a person's personality type, strengths, and preferences.
  • Developed by Isabel Myers and her mother Katherine Briggs based on their work with Carl Jung's theory of personality types.
  • One of the world's most widely used psychological instruments.
  • Based on the answers people give to the questions on the inventory, they are identified as having one of 16 personality types.
  • The goal of the MBTI is to allow test subjects to explore and understand their personalities - their likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses, career goals, and how they get along with other people.
  • No one personality type is