Chapter 8 The Psychoanalytic Perspective Flashcards
Psychoanalysis
- sees behavior as determined partly by inner forces that are outside your awareness and control
- Originated by Sigmund Freud
- Many people think of Freud as the father of personality psychology
Psychodynamic
*personality is a set of processes that are always in motion
*Forces emerge that can be channeled, modified, or transformed
*Personality is not one process but several, which sometimes work against each other-competing or wrestling for control over the person’s behavior
Pressures within the personality can conflict with each other
*Whatever most threatens you, your defensive processes keep it from overpowering you.
*Human experience is suffered with qualities of lust and aggression, sexuality and death.
*Rely on multiple metaphors
-Life and death- dual processes of metabolic functioning
-Compared mind to sociopolitical system
-Physics- treating personality as an energy system or the competition among forces as hydraulic systems
*Human behavior itself is highly symbolic- symbolize other more hidden qualities
Topographical model
- Conscious: the part of the mind that holds what you’re now aware of
- Preconscious: the part of the mind representing ordinary memory
- Can be brought to awareness easily
- Ex: think of your phone number or last movie you saw
- Unconscious: part of the mind that’s not directly accessible to awareness
- Source of desires and as a repository for urges, feelings, and ideas that are tied to anxiety, conflict, or pain
- Despite being stored away in the unconscious, these things aren’t gone
- Continuing influence on later actions and conscious experience
- Core operations of personality take place
- Material passes easily from conscious to preconscious and back
- Material from both of these can slip into the unconscious
- Unconscious material can’t be brought voluntarily to awareness because of forces that keep it hidden
Structural model
- personality as having three aspects- interact to create the complexity of behavior
- Aren’t physical entities but are perhaps best thought of as labels for three aspects of functioning
Id
- original component of personality, present at birth
- All the inherited, instinctive, primitive aspects of personality
- Functions entirely in the unconscious
- Closely tied to basic biological processes- underlie life
- All psychic energy comes through it
- “Engine” of personality
- Follows the pleasure principle
- Satisfies needs via the primary process, mostly through wish fulfillment
Pleasure principle
- all needs should be satisfied immediately
* Unsatisfied needs -> aversive tension states
Primary processes
*forming an unconscious mental image of an object or event that would satisfy the need
Wish fulfillment
*the experience of having image of an object or event that would satisfy the need
Ego
- evolves from the id and harnesses part of the id’s energy for its own use
- Tries to make sure the id’s impulses are expressed effectively, by taking into account the external world
- Most ego functioning is in the conscious and preconscious
- It also functions in the unconscious to ties to the id
- Follows the reality principle
- Delay the discharge of the id’s tension until an appropriate object or context is found
- Uses the secondary process
- Using the reality principle and secondary process thought- the source of intellectual processes and problem solving
- “Executive” role in personality- mediates between the desires of the id and the constraints of the external world
- Positive force- exercises restraint over the id
- No moral sense
- Pragmatic, focused on getting by
- Mature personality
- Delay is easiest when children distract themselves, shifting attention away from the desired reward
- Children who are better able to delay -> achievement and social responsibility, well-defined ego
- Among boys, it’s closely related to the ability to control emotional impulses, to concentrate, and to be deliberate in action.
- Among girls, is more related to intelligence, resourcefulness, and competence -> recognize delay as being the situationally appropriate response
Reality principle
*taking into account external reality along with internal needs and urges
Secondary process
*matching the unconscious image of a tension-reducing object to a real object
Reality testing
*form plans of action to satisfy needs and test the plans mentally to see whether they will work
Superego
- Develops while the person resolves a particular conflict during development
- Embodiment of parental and societal values, which are incorporated into the self via introjection
- Stem mostly from the values of your parents
- Divided into two parts: Ego ideal, Conscience
- Has three interrelated goals
- Tries to prevent (not just postpone) any id impulse that would be frowned on by one’s parents
- Tries to force the ego to act morally, rather than rationally
- Tries to guide the person toward perfection in thought, word and need
Introjection
- process of “taking in” or incorporating the values of the parents
- To obtain parents’ love -> do what its parents think is right
- To avoid pain, punishments, and rejection -> avoids what its parents think is wrong
Ego ideal
*Comprises rules for good behavior or standards of excellence
Conscience
- comprises rules about what behaviors the parents disapprove of and punish
- Causes the conscience to punish you with feelings of guilt
- Ego reflects things you strive for, and the conscience reflects things to avoid
Ego strength
- Person’s ability to balance the desire of the Id, the moral dictates of the superego, and the constraints of reality
- the ego’s ability to be effective despite them (conflict)
- With little ego strength, the person is torn among competing pressures.
- With more ego strength, the person can manage the pressures.
- The healthiest personality is one in which the influences of all three aspects are integrated and balanced.
Drive “Instincts”
- biological need and its psychological representation
- Ex: a lack of sufficient water in the body’s cells is a need that creates a psychological state of thirst -> drive to drink water
- Pressure builds until drive is satisfied- hydraulic model
- Two classes of drives
- Life instinct-eros, libido
- Death instinct- thantos
- Catharsis- release of tension
Hydraulic model
- if a drive isn’t expressed, its pressure continues to build
- Trying to prevent a drive from being expressed only creates more pressure toward its expression
Life or sexual instincts (Eros)
- set of drives that deal with survival, reproduction, and pleasure
- Not all life instincts deal with erotic urges per se
- Hunger and pain avoidance, sex
Libido
the energy of the life instincts
Death instincts (Thanatos)
- Life leads naturally to death and that people desire unconsciously to return to nothingness
- Effects of the death instincts is usually held back by the life instincts -> effects of death instincts aren’t always visible.
- Death drive has received less attention than Eros
- Aspect of the death instinct has received attention from psychologists concerns aggression.
- Aggression: not a basic drive but stems from thwarting of the death drive
- If eros block expression of the death drive, tension remains.
- Acts of aggression express self-destructive urges but turned outward onto others.
Apoptosis
- Today’s biology assumes a death instinct in human physiology
- Apoptosis: an active gene-directed suicide process; occurs in human cells in certain circumstances; critical in development; involved in the body’s defense against cancer
- Cell-death function is coded in your cells
- Death is an ultimate goal for parts of the body
- Perhaps extends more broadly into personality
Catharsis
- the release of emotional tension in such an experience
- Engaging in aggression should reduce tension, because the aggressive urge is no longer being bottled up
- This act dissipates the urge’s energy, the person should be less likely to be aggressive again in the near future
- Megargee: people with strong inhibition against aggressing rarely blow off steam, even when provoked. Over time, their feelings build until their restraints can no longer hold -> brutal aggression -> trivial final provocation
- Overcontrolled aggressors-> revert to their overcontrolled, passive ways
- Mixed evidence- some said aggression make them feel better
- Aggression can help dissipate arousal, but it’s less clear why. Some of the evidence suggests that actual retaliation produces this effect, but not symbolic or fantasy retaliation.
- Catharsis effects, the effects occur only under very specific circumstances
- The evidence doesn’t support this aspect of psychoanalytic theory very well.
Anxiety
- Freud (1936/1926): didn’t view anxiety as a drive per se but as a warning signal to the ego that something bad is about to happen. Nonetheless, people seek to avoid or escape anxiety.
- If your ego did its job perfectly, you would never feel anxiety
- Id impulses would be released at appropriate times and places, preventing neurotic anxiety.
- You would never let yourself do anything (or even want to do anything) that your superego prohibited, preventing moral anxiety
- No one’s ego works this well
Reality Anxiety
*arises from a danger in the world; rooted in reality; we deal with it by fixing, avoiding, or escaping from the situation that creates the feeling
Neurotic Anxiety
- unconscious fear that your id impulses will get out of control and make you do something that will get you punished
- Not a fear of expressing the id impulses but a fear of the punishment that will result from expressing them
- Has a kind of basis in reality
- The danger is rooted inside, in the urges of the id
- Harder to deal with than reality anxiety
Moral Anxiety
*fear people have when they have violated (or are about to violate) their moral code
*Felt as guilt or shame
Its source is internal, in your conscience
*You can’t escape your id, your can’t run away from your conscience
Defense mechanisms
- tactics it develops to help avoid the other kinds of anxiety
- When defenses work well, they keep anxiety away
- Operate unconsciously
- Distort or transform reality in one way or another
Repression
*central mechanism of defense
*A certain amount of energy available to the ego is used to keep unacceptable impulses out of consciousness
*Can be done consciously
*Anna Freud called suppression
Person tries to force something out of awareness
*Block from awareness not only id impulses but also information that’s painful or upsetting- sometimes this is the memory or impulses you already expressed
*Repression need not be total
*Simply avoid retrieving it- you haven’t forgotten it
*If reminded of it, you’re still aware it’s here. But you’d just as soon not be reminded of it. This would be a partial repression.
*Concerning your faults/weakness (Self Enhancement Theory)
*Concerning your inevitable death (Terror Management Theory)
*Conflict with moral standards (Cognitive Dissonance Theory)
Suppression
- Dan Wegner: conducted a program of *studies on thought suppression
- Trying not to think about something can actually make that thought become more likely later on, especially if the thought is an emotionally arousing one
- Wegner’s White Bear experiment
- By lowering your defenses -> reduce the pressure of unwanted thought -> it will go away on its own
Denial
- refusal to believe an event took place or a condition exists
- Denial resembles repression in many ways
- Both keep from awareness what the person feels unable to cope with
- Differ in the source of the threat
- Repression deals with threats that originate within the dynamics of the mind.
- Denial deals with threats with other sources.
- They save you from pain or anxiety
- Create problems in the long run
- Take up energy that could be used in other ways
- Other defenses develop and operate in combination with repression
- Free up some of the energy, while keeping unacceptable impulses, thoughts, or feelings from registering in your consciousness
Projection
- reduce anxiety by ascribing your own unacceptable qualities to someone else
- Project traits, impulses, desires, or even goals onto another person
- Allows expression of fear- so releases tension, unlike denial or repression
- Ex: “Amanda is so fake” (Maybe the person saying this is fake)
- Provides a way to hide your knowledge of a disliked aspect of yourself while still expressing that quality, though in a highly distorted form
- Helps to get true desires into the open in one form or another, releasing some of the energy required to repress them
- The desire emerges in such a way that the ego and superego don’t recognize it as belonging to you. Thus, the threat is sidestepped.
Rationalization
- reduce anxiety by finding a rational explanation (or excuse) for a behavior that you’re really did for unacceptable reasons, wrong for morally correct reasons
- Protects against other kinds of threats
- In responses to success and failure
- Take credit for good performances and blame bad performances on forces outside their control
Intellectualization
- tendency to think about threats in cold, analytical, and emotionally detached terms
- Allows people to dissociate their thoughts from their feelings
- Separates and isolates the threatening event from the feeling that normally would accompany it
- Ex: By focusing on the disease intellectually and compartmentalizing that information, she shields herself from distress
Displacement
- shifting an impulse from one target to another
- When intended target is threatening
- Substituting a less threatening target for the original one reduces anxiety
Sublimination
- lets impulses be expressed, by transforming them to an acceptable form.
- Anxiety goes down when a transformed impulse is expressed, instead of the initial one.
- Reflect maturity- Freud
- Keeps problems from occurring, rather than functioning after anxiety is aroused.
Psychosexual Development
- Freud believed that early experiences are critical in determining adult personality
- Freud viewed personality development as movement through a series of stages
- Each is associated with an erogenous zone
Erogenous zone
an area of the body that’s the focus of sexual energy in that period
Fixation
- if the conflict isn’t well resolved, too much energy gets permanently invested in that stage
- Can occur for two reasons
- A person who’s overindulged in a stage may be reluctant to leave it and move on, and a person whose needs are deeply frustrated in a stage can’t move on until the needs are met
- Personality stuck at this stage
- The stronger the fixation, the more libido is invested in it
- In a very strong fixation, the person is so preoccupied- albeit unconsciously- that little energy is left for anything else
Oral Stage
- from birth to roughly 18 months
- Interaction occurs through the mouth and lips, and gratification focuses in that area
- The mouth is the source of tension reduction (eating) and pleasurable sensations (tasting, licking, and sucking)
- Completely dependent on others for their survival
- Children are under increasing pressure to let go of their mother and become less reliant on her
- First Substage (6 months)
- Oral incorporative phase: more or less limited to taking things in
- Several traits develop here, depending on what the infant was exposed to
- If exposed to a benign world -> optimism and trust
- Less supportive world -> pessimism and mistrust
- Too helpful world -> strong dependency on others
- Second Substage
- Starts with teething
- Oral sadistic phase
- Sexual pleasure comes from biting and chewing (even inflicting pain- thus sadistic)
- Weaned from the bottle or breast and begins to bite and chew food
- Determine who will be verbally aggressive later on and who will use “biting” sarcasm
- Oral individuals should relate to the world orally
- More preoccupied than others with food and drink
- When stressed -> more likely to smoke, drink, or bite their nails
- When angry -> verbally aggressive
- Concerned with getting support from others
- Do things to ease interactions with people
- Joseph: tests of oral imagery relate to both obesity and alcoholism
- Orality -> measures of interpersonal interest and social skills
- Oral imagery -> need to nurture others and to interpersonal effectiveness
- People high in oral imagery -> volunteer readily for interpersonal tasks and rely on other people’s judgments during ambiguous tasks
- People who display oral imagery seem highly motivated to gain closeness and support from others and are sensitive to others’ reactions
- React physically to social isolation and to cues of rejection
- Use more physical contact during social interaction and are more self-disclosing
Anal Stage
18 months and continues *into the third year
- The anus is the key erogenous zone
- Pleasure comes from defecation
- Toilet training- first time that external constraints are systematically imposed on their satisfaction of internal urges
- When toilet training starts, children can no longer relieve themselves whenever and wherever they want. They must learn that there’s an appropriate time and place for everything.
- Urging the child to eliminate at a desired time and place and praising the child for success.
- Provides a basis for adult productivity and creativity
- Rather than praise for a job well done, the emphasis is on punishment, ridicule, and shame for failure.
- If the child adopts an active pattern of rebellion, eliminating forcefully when the parents least want it, a set of anal expulsive traits develop.
- Tendencies to be messy, cruel, destructive, and overtly hostile.
- Anal retentive
Anal retentive
*if the child tries to get even by withholding feces and urine
Rigid, obsessive style
Anal triad: stinginess, obstinacy, and orderliness
Stinginess reflects the desire to retain feces
Obstinacy: the struggle of wills over toilet training
Orderliness: reaction against the messiness of defecating
Phallic Stage
*begins during the third year and continues through the fifth year
*Focus shifts to the genital organs
*Most children begin to masturbate, as they become aware of the pleasure that results
*Autoerotic awakening sexual desires
*Self-stimulation -> sexual pleasure
Libido shifts toward the opposite-sex parent
*Fixation result in personalities that reflect the Oedipal conflicts
-Men: Seduce as many women/ father many children; assert their masculinity through expressing symbolically by great career success- fail sexually and professionally because of guilt the feel over competing with their father for their mother’s love
-Women: Relating to men in a way that’s seductive and flirtatious but with a denial of the sexuality; excites men with her seductive behavior and is then surprised when they want sex with her
*Holds great turmoil: love, hate, guilt, jealousy and fear
*Determines their attitudes toward sexuality, interpersonal competitiveness, and personal adequacy
Oedipus Complex
- boys’ desire to possess their mothers and replace their fathers
- Electra complex: for girls
- Boys
- His love for his mother transforms into sexual desire and his feelings for his father shift toward hostility and hatred- rival for his mother’s affection
- Over time, jealousy and competitiveness toward father may become extreme -> guilt
- Girls
- Abandon their love relationship with their mother for a new one with their father- when the girl realizes she has no penis
- Withdraw affection from her mother and blame her for her castrated condition because her mother has no penis either
- Affection is drawn to her father because he has a penis
- Penis envy
- Female counterpart of castration anxiety in boys
- Resolve conflicts through identification- by becoming more like her mother
Castration anxiety
- the boy also fears that his father will retaliate against him; fears that his father will castrate him to eliminate the source of his lust
- Repress his desire for his mother
- Identify with his father
Identification
- tendency to develop feelings of similarity to and connectedness with someone else
- Gives the boy a kind of “protective coloration”- being like his father makes it seem less likely that his father will harm him
- By identifying with the father, the boy reduces his ambivalence toward him
- Paves the way for development of the superego, as the boy introjects his father’s values
- By identifying with the father, the boy gains vicarious expression of his sexual urges toward his mother- gain symbolic access to his mother through his father
- The more the boy resembles the father, the more easily he can fantasize himself in his father’s place
Penis envy
- wish that her father would share his penis with her through sex or that he would provide her with the symbolic equivalent of a penis- a baby
- Female counterpart of castration anxiety in boys
- Resolve conflicts through identification- by becoming more like her mother
Latency period
- age 6 to the early teens
- Sexual and aggressive drives are less active results partly from the emergence of ego and superego
- Children turn their attention to other pursuits- often intellectual or social in nature
- Onset of puberty, sexual and aggressive urges again intensify- toward end of latency period
- Adolescents- adult sexual desires but sexual intercourse isn’t socially sanctioned for them- ego’s coping skills are severely tested
The Genital Stage
- later adolescence and adulthood
- If earliers stages have been negotiated well, the person enters this stage with libido still organized around the genitals and it remains focused there throughout life.
- A desire develops to share mutual sexual gratification with someone
- Capable of loving others not just for selfish reasons
- Ability to share with others in a warm, caring way and to be concerned with their welfare
- Freud believed that people don’t enter the genital stage automatically and that this transition is rarely achieved in its entirety.
- Less control over their impulses than they should
- Difficulty in gratifying sexual desires in a completely satisfying and acceptable way
- Genital personality is an ideal to strive for, rather than an end point to be taken for granted
Parapraxes
*provide insights into a person’s true desires
Freudian slip: an error in speech that seems to suggest an unconscious feeling or desire
*Ex: forgetting= keep something unconsciousness- motive
*Ex: slips of the tongue= expresses all or part of the unconscious thought or wish, despite the effort to keep it hidden- related to anxiety
*Motley (1985): shock-related slips and sexual slips
Dreams
Expose will of unconscious through manifest content
Manifest content
*sensory images- what most of us think of as the dream
Latent content
- the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and wishes behind the manifest content
- Tells why a dream takes the form it does
Three sources of latent content
- Sensory stimulation that bombards us as we sleep- prompt dreams and be absorbed into them
- Current concerns: thoughts, ideas, feelings connected to waking life
- Unconscious impulses: blocked from expression while you’re awake and are often related to core conflicts; infantile in form and primitive in content; reveals the most about a person’s personality
Projective techniques
- formal ways of assessing unconscious processes
- Confront people with ambiguous stimuli
- No obvious response, responses are believed to reflect unconscious feelings, attitudes, desires, and needs
- Using the defense mechanism of projection, people perceive aspects of themselves in the stimulus. What’s projected presumably reflects the unconscious.
Rorschach inkblot test
- Hermann Rorschach (1942)
- Each inkblot is bilaterally symmetrical
- Link on five of them is all black, but the intensity is uneven (solid black to light gray)
- Two have both black and red ink
- Three have pastel colors: blue, green, yellow, pink and orange
- One person at a time in a two-stage procedure
- Views the inkblots in a predetermined order and indicates what he or she sees in them- or what the inkblot resembles or suggests
- Views all ten cards again.
- Examiner reminds the person what he or she said earlier and asks what it was about the card that made the person say that.
- Serious psychometric problems
- Data suggested that it is better at identifying depressed and psychotic persons than the MMPI-2
- Psychometric criteria are irrelevant
- Its value is in the insights it gives the examiner
- Not to be viewed as clinical aid
John Exner’s scoring
- The responses are first compared against those of people with known personalities
- Responses are examined at a progression from one card to the next
- Responses are analyzed in terms of location (where to focus), determinants (form, color, shading, or perceived movement), and content (response’s subject)
- Reveal information about person’s unconscious motivations and feelings
Origins of Problems
- Childhood experiences: overinvestment of energy in a fixation- prevents flexible adult functioning by depleting energy the ego needs
- Broad repression of basic drives and urges
- Too many urges to be buried -> person’s basic nature will be distorted and denied
- Repressed needs will be able to squeeze their way past the repression only in twisted forms
- Required to keep the needs hidden is a constant drain on energy available to ego
- Buried trauma
Free association
- the person was simply to say aloud whatever came to mind
- Enabled material hidden in the unconscious to gradually emerge
- Helped convince Freud that what emerged often wasn’t literally true
- Led him to rethink how he viewed the content of free association
- Producing something important, but it wasn’t quite what it had seemed to be
- Symbolic form: less threatening, letting it emergy
- Creates a jumble of symbols that makes no sense on the surface
- Partial context
- Uncover the conflicts and loose the restrained energy
- Allows symbolic access to the problem
- Rarely gets to the heart of the problem due to the threat in the repressed material
Resistance
*people in therapy sometimes actively fight against becoming aware of repressed conflicts and impulses
*Conscious or unconscious
*Sign that something important is nearby
*Close to revealing something sensitive
Illustration of how emotionally wrenching psychoanalytic therapy can be
*Uncover distressing truths- truths that have been buried in the unconscious precisely because they’re too painful to admit
Transference
- set of displacement
- Feelings toward other people in the patient’s life are displaced (transferred) onto the therapist
- Love or hatred
- Another defense- therapist provokes less anxiety than do the original objects of the feelings
- Help point out the significance of the feelings that are being displaced
- Its interpretation is an important part of the therapy process
Insight
- re-experiencing of the emotional reality of repressed conflicts, memories, or urges, previously unconscious parts of one’s personality
- No power to change the person
- Come in the context of an emotional catharsis, a freeing of pent-up energy
- Emotional release doesn’t help unless there is also reorganization
Criticisms
- Highly symbolic
- Metaphorical flexible
- Difficult to measure and directly test
- Heavy reliance on case studies- don’t necessarily generalize to population as a whole
- The importance and function of the unconscious
