Chapter 15 - Vocabulary

Question 0

Sigmund Freud

Answer 0

Developed the Psychoanalytic Theory - the first comprehensive theory of personality, which included the unconscious mind, psychosexual stages, and defense mechanisms.

Question 1

Personality

Answer 1

An individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.

Question 2

Free Association

Answer 2

In psychoanalysis, a method for exploring the unconscious in which the person relaxes and says what comes to mind, no matter how trivial or embarrassing.

Question 3

Psychoanalysis

Answer 3

Freud’s theory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives.

Question 4

Unconscious

Answer 4

According to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. According to contemporary psychologists, information processing of which we are unaware.

Question 5

Id

Answer 5

Contains a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to Freud, strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. The id operates on the pleasure principle demanding immediate gratification.

Question 6

Ego

Answer 6

The largely conscious, “executive” part of the personality that, according to Freud, mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality.

Question 7

Superego

Answer 7

The part of the personality that, according to Freud, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgement and for future aspirations.

Question 8

Psychosexual Stages

Answer 8

The childhood stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital) during which, according to Freud, the id’s pleasure seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones.

Question 9

Oedipus Complex

Answer 9

According to Freud, a boy’s sexual desire toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father.

Question 10

Identification

Answer 10

The process which, according to Freud, children incorporate their parents’ values into their developing superegos.

Question 11

Fixation

Answer 11

According to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved.

Question 12

Defense Mechanisms

Answer 12

In psychoanalytic theory, the ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by distortion of reality.

Question 13

Repression

Answer 13

The basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.

Question 14

Regression

Answer 14

A defense mechanism in which an individual faced with anxiety retreats to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated.

Question 15

Reaction Formation

Answer 15

A defense mechanism by which the ego unconsciously switches acceptable and unacceptable thoughts into their opposites.

Question 16

Projection

Answer 16

A defense mechanism by which people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.

Question 17

Rationalization

Answer 17

A defense mechanism that offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions.

Question 18

Displacement

Answer 18

A defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, as when redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.

Question 19

Collective Unconscious

Answer 19

Carl Jung’s concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species’ history.

Question 20

Projective Test

Answer 20

A personality test, such as the Rorschach or TAT, that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projections of one’s inner dynamics.

Question 21

Thematic Appreciation Test

Answer 21

A projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes.

Question 22

Rorschach Inkblot Test

Answer 22

The most widely used projective test, a set of 10 Inkblots, designed by Herman Rorschach; seeks to identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots.