Freud Flashcards
Who is Sigmund Freud?
- neurologist
- 1856-1939
- lived primarily in Vienna
- created theory from personal experiences and memories
- studied with Charcot in Paris
- explored benefits of cocaine
- developed psychoanalytic practice
Freud’s Austria
- Characterized by an even more rigorous form of Victorian sexual morality than England
- Intense moral preoccupation with sexuality, particularly in women and children
- Young women were expected to be chaste before marriage
- Sexual exploration and masturbation were assiduously suppressed
What was Freud’s general theory?
- Unusual, or “perverse,” sexual desires dominate the mind
- These became unconscious, no longer under the control of a person’s self-conscious and voluntary choices
- Manifested in a person’s involuntary actions, like mistakes and slips of the tongues, as well as in mental pathologies, like obsession, paranoia, hysteria, and anxiety
What did Freud and Breuer work on together?
- studies in hysteria
- use of hypnosis in treating hysteria
- case of Anna O.
What is free association?
- under the right circumstances, patients describe previously hidden material that seemed related to the causes and cure of their hysterical symptoms
What did Freud discover about hysteria?
- Physical changes could not be observed
- Early traumatic sexual experiences were responsible for hysterical symptoms expressed by adult patients
traumatic events –> physical changes in the nervous system –> anxiety symptoms later in life
What is psychic determinism?
- Idea that unconscious forces have the power to influence behaviour
What is the topographic model?
- personality is divided into three levels of awareness
What are the 3 parts of the topographical model?
- conscious
- preconscious
- unconscious
What is the conscious?
- contains the thoughts you are currently aware of
- experiences in awareness
- limited aspect of personality
- changes constantly
- can deal with only a small percentage of all the information stored in the mind
What is the preconscious?
- large body of retrievable information
- storehouse of memories and thoughts
- can call into consciousness
What is the unconscious?
- thoughts that cannot be easily brought into awareness
- no immediate access
- except under extreme situations
- home of the instincts
- responsible for much of everyday behaviour
- majority of thoughts
What is the structural model?
- divides personality into 3 parts often not at peace with each other
What are the 3 parts of the structural model?
- id
- ego
- superego
What is the id?
- at birth
- selfish part of you
- buried in unconscious
- impulses center on themes of sexuality and aggression
- id impulses ever present, held in check by other parts of healthy adult personality
- pleasure principle: concerned only with what brings immediate personal satisfaction regardless of physical or social limitations
- wish fulfillment: if the desired object is not available, id will imagine what it wants
What is the ego?
- 2 years
- reality principle: primary job is to satisfy id impulses in a manner that takes into consideration the realities of the world and consequences of the action
- keep impulses unconscious
- moves freely between conscious, preconscious and unconscious
What is the superego?
- 5 years
- represents society’s values and standards
- internalized values
- places more restrictions on what we can do
- primary weapon is guilt
- conscience
What conflicts threaten the ego?
- reality anxiety
- neurotic anxiety
- moral anxiety
What is reality anxiety?
- tangible dangers
- threat is really there
What is neurotic anxiety?
- id vs ego
- vague feelings of anxiety sparked by the sensation that unacceptable unconscious thoughts are about to burst through the awareness barrier and express themselves in consciousness
What is moral anxiety?
- id vs superego
- superego can become too powerful and burden the ego with impossible standards of perfection
- ever present feeling of shame and guilt
What is the structural model like in a healthy individual?
- a strong ego does not allow the id or the superego to much control over the personality
- below our awareness we have an eternal state of tension between a desire for self-indulgence, a concern for reality, and the enforcement of a strict moral code
What is the Triebe?
- strong internal forces that motivate human behaviour
- drives or instincts
- propelling forces of personality
- form of energy
What are the 2 important instincts?
- libido
- thanatos
What is the libido?
- life or sexual instinct
- oriented toward survival
- most of human behaviour
- erotic content and any action aimed at receiving pleasure
What is the thanatos?
- death or aggressive instinct
- compulsion to destroy and conquer
- desire to die and return to the earth
- mostly turned outward and expressed against others
What are defense mechanisms?
- ego strategies to defend against anxiety
- techniques of ego to deal with unwanted thoughts and desires and reduce or avoid anxiety
- provoked by everyday conflicts
- denials or distortions of reality
What are the types of defense mechanisms?
- repression
- sublimation
- displacement
- denial
- reaction formation
- intellectualization
- projection
- regression
- rationalization
What is repression?
- active effort by the ego to push threatening material out of consciousness
- or keep from ever reaching consciousness
- requires constant expend of energy
- most important
What is sublimation?
- ego channels threatening unconscious impulses into socially acceptable actions
- id is allowed to express aggression and ego doesn’t have to tie up energy holding back impulses
- most successful
What is displacement?
- channelling id impulses to nonthreatening objects
- do not lead to social rewards
- many of our irrational fears are symbolic displacements
What is denial?
- refusal to accept that certain facts exist
- insist something is not true despite evidence to the contrary
- extreme form of defense
- less in touch with reality, more difficulty functioning