The Psychoanalytic Perspective

Myers EXPLORING PSYCHOLOGYModule 33 The Psychoanalytic Perspective

1What is Personality?Personality: An individuals characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.Four basic perspectivesPsychoanalytic: Childhood sexuality and unconscious motivations influence personality.Humanistic: Focuses on our inner capacities for growth and self-fulfillment.Trait: Identifies personality dimensions that account for our consistent behavior patterns.Social-cognitive: Emphasizes how we shape and are shaped by our environment.2The Psychoanalytic PerspectiveExploring the UnconsciousPsychoanalysis: Freuds theory of personality that attributes our thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflictsPsychoanalysis: Technique of treating psychological disorders by seeking to expose and interpret unconscious tensions.

3The Psychoanalytic PerspectiveExploring the UnconsciousMotivationUltimately, the driving force behind all we do comes from two different instincts:

Libido: Life or sexual instinctThanatos: Death or aggressive instinct4-These two instincts form the core of the idExploring the UnconsciousBasic Beliefs of Psychoanalysis

5-1. The mind is like an iceberg-2. Our conscious awareness is the part which floats above the surface.-3. Below the surface is our unconscious region containing thoughts, wishes, feelings and memories, of which we are largely unaware.-4. Some of these thoughts are stored in the preconscious area, from which we can retrieve them into conscious awareness.-5. Unacceptable passions and thoughts are repressed, or forcibly blocked, from our consciousness because they are too disturbing.-6. Although we are not consciously aware of them, these repressed thoughts can powerfully influence us. Unacknowledged impulses express themselves in disguised forms.-7. Methods which access the unconsciousness such as free-association or dream analysis could be used to heal inner conflicts.-Psychologists have used an iceberg image to illustrate Freuds idea that the mind is mostly hidden beneath the conscious surface. Note that the id is totally unconscious, but ego and superego operate both consciously and unconsciously. Unlike the parts of a frozen iceberg, however, the id, ego, and superego interact.-Human personality arises from a conflict between our aggressive, pleasure seeking biological impulses and the internalized social restraints against them. Personality is the result of our efforts to resolve this basic conflict.

The Psychoanalytic PerspectiveExploring the UnconsciousPersonality StructureId: Provides the push for behavior by seeking to satisfy basic biological needs.Operates on the pleasure principle.Ego: Mediates between the demands of the id, the superego and reality.Operates on the reality principleSeeks to meet the demands of the id in realistic waysSuperego: Internalized ideals.Creates conscience6-Id-Contains a reservoir of unconscious energy that strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. The Id operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification. Remember the infant that screams for food, regardless of the situation of its caregiver.-Ego-The largely conscious executive part of personality that mediates among the demands of the id, the superego, and reality. The ego operates on the reality principle, satisfying the ids desires in ways that will realistically bring pleasure rather than pain.-Superego-The part of personality that represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations.The Psychoanalytic PerspectiveExploring the UnconsciousFree Association: Method whereby patients merely say the things which come readily to mind, thus, hopefully, revealing and releasing painful unconscious memories.Freudian slipsTransferencesDreams: Manifest vs. Latent ContentHypnosis7The Psychoanalytic PerspectiveExploring the UnconsciousPersonality DevelopmentPersonality forms in the first few years of lifeProblems with personality arise from unresolved conflicts from early childhood.Children pass through a series of psychosexual stages during which the ids pleasure seeking energies focus on distinct pleasure sensitive areas of the body called erogenous zones.8

The Psychoanalytic PerspectiveExploring the UnconsciousPersonality DevelopmentPsychosexual Stages-During Phallic Stage-Boys develop unconscious sexual desires for their mothers and jealousy of their fathers as a rival. Given these feelings, boys feel guilt and fear of punishment. This is called the Oedipus conflict. -Some researchers believe there is an analogous Electra Complex in girls.-Maladaptive behavior of adults is caused by conflicts unresolved during earlier psychosexual stages.

-At any point in the oral, anal, or phallic stages strong conflict can fixate the persons pleasure seeking energies in that stage. -Orally fixated adults might continue to seek oral gratification from smoking or eating. -Anal expulsive adults which tend to be messy and disorganized and anal retentive adults, arise because of an inability to resolve the conflict between the desire to eliminate at will and the demands of toilet training.

9The Psychoanalytic PerspectiveExploring the UnconsciousDefense MechanismsBecause we are social, we can not act out our sexual and aggressive impulses.When ego fears losing the battle between id and superego, anxiety results.Anxiety is the price we pay for civilizationThe ego uses Defense Mechanisms to reduce anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.10-In order to live in social groups, we can not act out our sexual and aggressive impulses at will. We must control them. When the ego fears losing the battle between the id and the superego, the result is a dark cloud of unfocused anxiety.

-Repression is incomplete, repressed urges slip out during dreams and slips of the tongue.

-Repression forms the basis for all other defense mechanisms.Defense Mechanisms

11The Psychoanalytic PerspectiveAssessing the UnconsciousSignificant influences on our personalities arise from the unconscious, which contains residues from early childhood experiences.Even though we can see hints of the unconscious mind at times, we need a tool.The tool of choice for assessing unconsciousness would be a psychological x-ray.Projective tests provide such a view.12-Projective Tests -1. Presenting an ambiguous stimulus -2. Ask test takers to tell a story about it. -3. Any meaning people read into meaningless stimuli is presumably a projection of their interests and conflicts.

The Psychoanalytic PerspectiveAssessing the UnconsciousProjective TestsThematic Apperception TestAs seen in the assessment of achievement motivation.Draw a personComplete sentences (My mother)Rorschach inkblot test

13-In the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), the respondents are shown one or more pictures and asked to describe what is happening, what dialogue might be carried on between characters and/or how the "story" might continue. For this reason, TAT is also known as the picture interpretation technique.

-The Rorschach inkblot test is a psychological projective test of personality in which a subject's interpretations of ten standard abstract designs are analyzed as a measure of emotional and intellectual functioning and integration. The test is named after Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922) who developed the inkblots, although he did not use them for personality analysis The Psychoanalytic PerspectiveAssessing the UnconsciousProjective TestsAre projective tests good? Are they reliable and valid? Not really!Different raters would score a Rorschach differently if they had different training.They are not predictive of future behaviors.However, as a suggestive lead that supplements other information, it might have its uses.14The Psychoanalytic PerspectiveReview of Basic IdeasLibido and Thanatos drive our behaviorPersonality structures of id, ego, and superegoUnconscious very important in our personalityPersonality shaped in childhoodDynamics of anxiety and defense mechanism15The Psychoanalytic PerspectiveEvaluating the Psychoanalytic PerspectiveFreuds Early Descendants and DissentersAlfred Adler and Karen HorneyBoth agreed that childhood tensions shape personality, but believed they were social tensions, not sexual tensions.Adler felt that much of behavior is driven by efforts to conquer childhood feelings of inferiority that trigger our quest for power (inferiority complex).Horney believed that childhood anxiety caused by feelings of helplessness, triggers our desire for love and security.

16The Psychoanalytic PerspectiveEvaluating the Psychoanalytic PerspectiveFreuds Early Descendants and DissentersCarl JungDownplayed the role of sex as a primary motivator of behavior.The unconscious contains more than our repressed thoughts, he believed we also have a collective unconscious, a common reservoir of images derived from our species universal experiences.

17-Jung was originally Freuds protg, but differences arose in their beliefs. Freud felt that Jung had utterly betrayed him as an intellectual and as a friend.-Rumor has it that Freud had a very unsuccessful sex life, thus helping to explain his use of uncontrolled sexual energy as the prime motivator.-Jung on the other hand, was much more sexually successful and consequently, he downplayed the role of sex.

-Archetype: According to Jung, an inherited predisposition to respond emotionally to certain categories of experience.-The archetypes of the collective unconscious could be thought of as the DNA of the human psyche.

The Psychoanalytic PerspectiveEvaluating the Psychoanalytic PerspectiveFreuds Ideas in the Light of Modern ResearchPersonality fixed in childhoodChildhood traumaParents as primary source of personalityDreams as wish fulfillmentSexual repression as cause of mental illness18-Developmental psychologists now view our development as lifelong, not fixed in childhood.-Infants neural networks are probably not mature enough to sustain as much emotional trauma as Freud assumed.-Freud may have overestimated the role of parents and underestimated the role of peers in personality development.-New theories of dreams dispute Freuds beliefs of wish fulfillment.-Additionally, Freud believed that sexual repression caused illness, however, sexual repression has diminished but psychological disorders have not.The Psychoanalytic PerspectiveEvaluating the Psychoanalytic PerspectiveFreuds Ideas in the Light of Modern ResearchIs Repression a Myth?Entire theory rests on the assumption that the human mind represses painful experiences88% of university students believe that painful experiences get pushed out of consciousnessHowever, if it ever occurs, it is very rare19-If repression occurs, then we should recall positive events better than negative events, but it doesnt seem to be true.

-Children who witness their parents murder remember it.-Nazi death camp survivors can give amazing details about the horrors.-People that keep a diary (and thus can be checked) equally well remember the good and the bad.

-If anything, traumatic events haunt us daily even though we would rather forget.The Psychoanalytic PerspectiveEvaluating the Psychoanalytic PerspectiveFreuds Ideas as Scientific TheoryOffers after-the-fact explanations, cannot predictFreud did not come up with his ideasFreud may have caused his patients to say what he wanted them to say (remember recovered memories!)

Theories derived from few objective observationsCase studiesHypotheses are untestable20-Freuds theories rest on few objective observations and offers few hypotheses that can be tested.-Many Freudian ideas appear in literature that pre-dates Freuds work-Used case study data that was most certainly biased-Freud may have caused his patients to say what he wanted them to say

-Offers after-the-fact explanations, cannot predict -If you feel angry at your mothers death then your unresolved childhood dependency needs are threatened -If you do not feel angry then you are repressing your anger