Chapter 3 Psychodynamic Theory Flashcards
Anal stage
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In the second stage of development, the anal stage (ages 2 and 3), there is excitation in the anus and in the movement of feces through the anal passageway. The pleasure related to this erogenous zone involves the organism in conflict. There is conflict between elimination and retention, between the pleasure in release and the pleasure in retention, and between the wish for pleasure in evacuation and the demands of the external world for delay. This last‐named conflict rep- resents the first crucial conflict between the individual and society. Here, the environment requires the child to violate the pleasure principle or be punished.
Anxiety
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In psychoanalytic theory, anxiety is a painful emotional experience representing a threat or danger to the person. In a state of “free‐floating” anxiety, individuals are unable to relate their state of tension to a specific danger; in contrast, in a state of fear, the source of threat is known. According to the theory, anxiety represents a painful emotion that acts as a signal of impending danger to the ego; that is, anxiety, an ego function, alerts the ego to danger so that it can act.
The psychoanalytic theory of anxiety states that at some point, the person experiences a trauma, an incident of harm or injury.
Castration anxiety
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In the phallic stage (ages 4 and 5), excitation and tension are focused on the genitals. The biological differentiation between the sexes leads to psycho- logical differentiation. The male child develops erections, and the new excitations in this area lead to increased interest in the genitals and the realization that the female lacks the penis. This leads to the fear that he may lose his penis—castration anxiety.
Catharsis
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Catharsis refers to a release and freeing of emotions by talking about one’s problems.
Conscious
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According to psychoanalytic theory, there are substantial variations in the degree to which we are aware of mental phenomena. Freud proposed three levels of awareness. The conscious level, as noted, includes thoughts of which we are aware at any given moment.
Death instinct
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The death instinct is the very opposite of the life instinct. It involves the aim of the organism to die or return to an inorganic state. The death instinct remains one of the most controversial and least accepted parts of psychoanalytic theory.
Defence mechanisms
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People develop defense mechanisms against anxiety. We develop ways to distort reality and exclude feelings from awareness so that we do not feel anxious.
Denial
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Freud distinguished among a number of distinct defense mechanisms. Some of them are relatively simple, or psychologically primitive, whereas oth- ers are more complex. A particularly simple defense mechanism is denial. People may, in their conscious thoughts, deny the existence of a traumatic or otherwise socially unacceptable fact; the fact is so “terrible” that they deny that it is “true,”
Ego
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The third psychoanalytic structure is the ego. The ego seeks reality. The ego’s function is to express and satisfy the desires of the id in accordance with two things: opportunities and constraints that exist in the real world and the demands of the superego.
Energy system
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As we noted, to Freud, the body is a mechanistic energy system. It follows, then, that the mind, being part of the body, also is a mechanistic energy system. The mind gets mental energies from the overall physical energies of the body.
Erogenous zones
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Once again, Freud’s answer is thoroughly biological. He theorized, first, that instinctual drives tend to center on particular regions of the body, which he called erogenous zones. He then suggested that the particular erogenous zone that is most important to biological gratification at a given point in time changes systematically across the course of development.
Free association
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In the free‐association technique, the person being analyzed allows all of his or her thoughts to come forth without inhibition or falsification of any kind. By letting thoughts flow freely, one may discover hidden associations among ideas. For Freud, the free‐ association technique was both a therapy and a scientific method; it provided the primary evidence for his theory of personality.
Genital stage
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The onset of puberty, with the reawakening of the sexual urges and Oedipal feelings, marks the beginning of the genital stage. Dependency feelings and Oedipal strivings that were not fully resolved during the pregenital stages of development now come back to rear their ugly heads.
Id
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The id is the original source of all drive energy—the “great reservoir”of mental energies. The psychological functions toward which the id directs these energies are very simple. The id seeks the release of excitation or tension. It carries out a mental function described previously: the reduction of tension in order to return to a quiet internal state.
Identification
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As part of the resolution of the Oedipus complex, the child identifies with the parent of the same sex. The child now gains the parent of the opposite sex through identification with, rather than defeat of, the parent of the same sex. The development of an identification with the parent of the same sex is a criti- cal issue during the phallic stage and, more generally, is a critical concept in developmental psychology. In identification, individuals take on themselves the qualities of another person and integrate them into their functioning. In identifying with their parents, children assume many of the same values and morals.
Isolation
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In addition to denial and projection, another way to deal with anxiety and threat is to isolate events in memory or to isolate emotion from the content of a memory or impulse. In isolation, the impulse, thought, or act is not denied access to consciousness, but it is denied the normal accompanying emotion. For example, a woman may experience the thought or fantasy of strangling her child without any associated feelings of anger.