Chapter 9 Psychosocial Theories Flashcards
Psychosocial Theories
- Roots partly in the psychoanalytic perspective
- Differed from Freud in important ways
- Focused on the idea that people’s primary tasks in life concern relationships
- Started by examining how infants interact with and are affected by other people
- Grew to carry that theme onward to the rest of life viewing adult personality as a reflection of the same forces that are critical in infancy
Neoanlytic theories
Focus on Ego rather than Id
- Robert White: Effectance Motivation and Competence Motivation
- Alfred Adler: Feelings of Inferiority
- Ego Contol
- Ego Resiliency
- Object Relations Theory
Object Relations Theory
- group of theories that have diverse origins and terminologies but strikingly similar
- Object= person
- Focus on one person’s relations to others
- Core derives from Freud’s idea
- Ego develops bonds to external objects to release id energies effectively
- Focus on these bonds but only for people as objects
- -The point isn’t to satisfy the id
- -The bond is a basic ego function
- -Personality’s main focus
- -Emphasis on the ego rather than the id
- Themes:
- -Emphasize that a person’s pattern of relating to others is laid down in early childhood
- -Assume that the patterns tend to recur over and over throughout life
Margaret Mahler
- newborns begin life in a state of psychological fusion with others
- Personality development is a process of breaking down this fusion, of becoming an individual who’s separate and distinct
- Age 3, stable mental representation of its mother
- Mother with child all the time symbolically
- Object relation is internalized
- View its mother through this image and will generalize it to other people
- Child will act toward others as though they were its mother (and father)
- Stress from a sense of rejection from parent or too much smothering fusion -> stresses are carried by child’s internal object representation into later life -> distortion
Symbiosis
period when the infant is fused with its mother
Separation-Individuation
- at around 6 months, the child starts to become aware of its separate existence; gradual exploration away from mother
- Built-in conflict between two pressures
- A wish to be taken care of by mother and united with her
- A fear of being overwhelmed in a merger with her and a desire to establish one’s own selfhood
- Mother’s behavior is important to the child’s later adjustment
- She should combine emotional availability with a gentle nudge toward independence.
- If too present in child’s experience -> won’t establish separation
- If pushes too much toward individuation -> sense of rejection and loss = separation anxiety
Effectance motivation
- Robert White (1959, 1963)
- Effectance motivation: motive to have an effect or an impact on your surroundings
- Basic motive
- During early childhood, it’s the major outlet for the ego’s energies
- Evolves into competence motivation: motive to be effective in dealing with the environment
- Underlies adaptive ego functioning
- Exercised endlessly
- Moves the person toward ever-new challenges and masteries
Feelings of inferiority
- Alfred Adler (1927, 1929, 1931)
- People strive for greater competence, but for different reasons.
- Feelings of inferiority: any sense of inadequacy
- A compensatory process is activated and the person strives for superiority
- Inferiority feelings and superiority strivings continue to cycle with each other constantly
- People keep working to get better, more proficient at what they do
- Viewed the struggle for increased competence to be an important part of healthy ego functioning, calling it the “great upward drive”
- Healthy people continue to function this way throughout life
Ego control
- Jeanne H. Block and Jack Block: learning to restrain impulses -> better command of your transactions with the world and avoid trouble from acting impulsively
- Undercontrol-can’t delay gratification in one extreme
- Overcontrol- delay gratification endlessly in another extreme
Ego resiliency
- being flexible in dealing with the world -> knowing when to restrain yourself and when to behave more freely
- Modify your usual level of ego control- in either direction- to adapt to a given situation
- Low in ego resiliency-> can’t break out of their usual way of relating to the world
- Ego resilient are resourceful and adapt well to changing circumstances
Self Psychology
*Heinz Kohut- *Neoanalyst
*relationships form the structure of the self
*Focuses on experiences that others termed object relations
*People have an essential narcissism
*Self objects
*Parents engage in mirroring
*The child’s sense of self is grandiosed at first
-Illusion of all importance must be sustained to some degree throughout development -> sense of self-importance to adulthood
*Tempered -> deal with difficulties and frustrations in later life
In a healthy personality, the grandiosity is modified and channeled into realistic activities.
-Ambition and self-esteem
*The parent must give the child enough mirroring to nurture development but not too much.
-Similar to Mahler’s separation-individuation and fusion with the other
*Transference
Narcissism
a pattern of self-centered needs that must be satisfied through others
Self objects
- someone who helps satisfy your needs
- Childhood- parents
- Later- any person as he or she is experienced within the structure of the self
- Exists from the self’s point of view and to serve the self’s needs
Mirroring
- giving support to the child and responding in an empathic, accepting way
- Gratifies the child’s narcissistic needs, because it makes the child temporarily the center of the universe
Transference
- Later mirroring involves transference from parents to other selfobjects
- You transfer the orientation you’ve developed to your parents to other people, using it as a frame of reference for them.
- Other people become parent substitutes
- You expect them to mirror you as parents did
- Is like Mahler’s idea that the internal object relation corresponding to a parent is used in forming later relationships
Attachment
- an emotional connection.
- Need for such a connection is a basic part of the human experience.
- John Bowlby: the clinging and following of the infant serve an important biological purpose: they keep the infant close to the mother -> increases the infant’s chances of survival.
- Mothers (and others) who are responsive to the infant create a secure base for the child.
- The major person in his or her life is dependable- is there when needed.
- Place of comfort (safe haven) when the child is threatened
- A base from which to explore the world
- Temporary dependence on the caregiver fuels future exploration
- Child builds mental “working models” of the self, others, and the nature of relationships
- -“Working models” are later used to relate to the world
- -Resembles Mahler’s beliefs about object representations and Hobut’s beliefs about self objects
Strange situation
- assess infant attachment (Mary Ainworth et al., 1978)
- Comprises a series of events involving the infant’s mother and a stranger
- Two times when the infant is left alone with the stranger and then the mother returns.
- Observe the infant throughout, paying special attention to its responses to the mother’s return
- Secure attachment: normal distress when the mother left and happy enthusiasm when she returned.
- Insecure attachment
- Ambivalent resistant: -clingy and became very upset when the mother left
- Response to the mother’s return mixed approach with rejection and anger
- Sought contact with the mother but then angrily resisted all efforts to be soothed.
- Avoidant: stayed calm when the mother left and responded to her return by ignoring her- expected to be abandoned and was retaliating in kind
- Mother of securely attached infants responded quickly to their infants’ crying and returned their smiles
- Synchronous behavior: making replies to a variety of infant actions
- Spoke to their children using richer language than they used when speaking with a stranger
- Mother of ambivalent babies: inconsistent
- Sometimes responsive and sometimes not
- Mothers of avoidant babies: distant
- Radiating a kind of emotional unavailability and sometimes being outright rejecting or neglectful
- Mothers of secure and avoidant infants don’t differ in how much total time they spend holding their babies
- Mothers of avoidant babies: less likely to hold their babies when the babies signal they want to be held.
Attachment Style in Adults
- Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver (1987)
- Participants classified themselves (from descriptions) as being secure, ambivalent, or avoidant
- They described the most important romance of their life (past or current) on several scales
Secure adults
- more happy, friendly and trusting
- Relationships had last longer
- love is real and when it comes, it stays
- most interdependence, commitment, and trust
- Breakup-> turn to family and friends as safe havens
Avoidant adults
- less likely than the others to report accepting their lovers’ imperfections.
- cynical, saying love doesn’t last
- least likely to report being in love in the present or in the past
- Least interested in knowing their partners’ intimate thoughts and feelings
- Least comfortable with sex
- Most likely to cope in self-reliant ways after a breakup
Ambivalent adults
- experienced love as an obsessive preoccupation, with a desire for reciprocation and union, extreme emotional highs and lows, and extreme of both attraction and jealousy
- More likely than others to report that a relationship had been “love at first sight”
- falling in love is easy and happens often, but they also agreed that love doesn’t last
- Ambivalent college students -> obsessive and dependent love relationships
- Obsessive reassurance seeking leads to greater conflict and stress in their relationships
- Most obsessive about lost loves
2 dimensions of attachment
- Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991)
- Avoidance- attitudes toward others (others are trustworthy or not)
- Anxiety- attitudes toward self (the self is lovable or not)
- Secure= positive of other + positive of self
- Ambivalent (preoccupied)= positive of other + negative of self
- Avoidants
- Dismissive= negative of others + positive of self
- Fearful= negative of others + negative of self
- Sense that a significant other can be available, unpredictable, or unavailable
Adult Attachment Interview (AAI)
- Asks people to talk about their early experiences with caregivers
- Whether people either lack childhood memories or idealize their caregivers (both of which are taken as signs of avoidance) and whether people seem preoccupied by unresolved loss or abuse (taken as a sign of anxious attachment)
- People who score as secure on a self-report are only barely more likely to score as secure on the AAI than other people
- Self-report -> Implicit
Links to people’s orientations to work
- Hazan and Shaver (1990)
- Ambivalents reported unhappiness with the recognition they got at work and their degree of job security
- Most likely to say their work was motivated by a desire for others’ approval
- Avoidants reported a desire to keep busy with work, and they socialized less during leisure time
- Avoidants use work as a way to escape from their lack of relationships