Chapter 15 - Personality Flashcards
Personality
An individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling and acting.
Sigmund Freud
Focused largely on the role of our unconscious and our childhood experiences in determining our personality.
Free Association
In psychoanalysis, a method of exploring the unconscious in which the person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind, no matter how trivial and embarassing.
Psychoanalysis
Freud’s theory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts; the techniques used in treating psychological disorders by seeking to expose and interpret unconscious tensions.
Unconscious
The part of the mind that contains material of which we are unaware but that strongly influence our behavior.
Id
The unconscious system of personality, consisting of basic sexual and aggressive drives, that supplies psychic energy to personality (devil)
Ego
The unconscious division of personality that attempts to mediate between the demands of the id, the superego and reality (umpire)
Superego
The division of personality that contains the conscience and develops by incorporating the perceived moral standards of society (angel)
Psychosexual Stages
The childhood stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital) during which, according to Freud, the Id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones.
Oedipus Complex
A boy’s sexual desire for his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father.
Identification
Children cope with threatening feelings by repressing them and by identifying with the rival parent. (superego gains strength that incorporates their parents value)
Fixate
According to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure - seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved.
Defense Mechanisms
Certain specific means by which the ego unconsciously protects itself against unpleasant impulses or circumstances.
Repression
defense mechanism: banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feeling and memories from consciousness.
Regression
defense mechanism: individual faced with anxiety retreats to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated.
Reaction Formation
defense mechanism: causes the ego to unconsciously switch unacceptable impulses into their opposites. (People may express feelings of purity when they may be suffering anxiety from unconscious feelings about sex).
Projection
defense mechanism: when people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others (hypocrite).
Rationalization
defense mechanism: offers self-justifying explanations in the place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions.
Displacement
defense mechanism: shifts sexual or aggressive impulses towards a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, as when redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.
Collective Unconsciousness
Carl Jung’s concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species history.
Projective Tests
Open ended. More unstructured. (own interpretation of various ambiguous stimuli)
TAT
Thematic Appreciation Test. A projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes.
Rorscach Inkblot Test
Consists of a series of 10 cards with inkblot designs and a system for interpreting blotches.
Alfred Adler
Inferiority Complex
