Freud again Flashcards
Life instinct
The LIFE INSTINCTS serve the purpose of survival of the individual and the species by seeking to satisfy the needs for food, water, air and sex. The life instincts are oriented toward growth and development. The psychic energy manifested by the life instincts is called the LIBIDO. The libido can be attached to or invested in objects a concept Freud called CATHEXIS. E.g. If you like your roommate, Freud would say that your libido is catheter to him or her. The LIFE INSTINCT Freud considered most important for the personality is sex which he defined in broad terms. He did not refer solely to the erotic but included almost all pleasurable behaviors and thoughts. He described his view as enlarging or extending the accepted concept of sexuality. Freud regarded sex as our primary motivation. Erotic wishes arise from the body’s erogenous zones: the mouth, anus and sex organs. He suggested that people are predominately pleasure-seeking beings and much of his personality theory revolves around the necessity of inhibiting or suppressing our sexual longings.
Death instinct
Freund postulated the destructive or DEATH INSTINCTS. Drawing from biology, he stated the obvious fact that all living things decay and die, returning to their original inanimate state, and he proposed that people have an unconscious wish to die. One component of the death instincts is the AGGRESSIVE DRIVE described as the wish to die turned against objects other than the self. The aggressive drive compels us to destroy, conquer and kill. Freud came to consider aggression as compelling a part of human nature as sex. Freud developed the notion of the death instincts late in life, as a reflection of his own experiences. He endured the physiological debilitations of age, his cancer and World War 1 as well as one of his daughters dying at the age of 26 leaving two young children. All these events affected him deeply and as a result death and aggression became major themes in his theory. Freud dreaded his own death, and exhibited hostility, hatred and aggressiveness toward colleagues and disciples who disputed his views and left his psychoanalytic circle.
who was freud?
CLASS NOTES FOR FREUD
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was a stage theorist who developed psychosexual theory of development. His theory, which is over one hundred years old, laid the foundation for modern day psychology. He posits that personality is formed in the first few years of life as children deal with unconscious conflicts between their inborn biological urges and the requirements of society. Freud focused the impact of sexual and aggressive drives on the individual’s psychological functioning. He proposed that conflicts occur in unvarying sequence of maturational based stages of psychosexual development in which the pleasure shifts from one body zone to another. Freud’s psychodynamic view of personality development theory were highly criticized then and even now, but they were ground breaking and thus laying the ground work for other theorists such as Erik Erikson, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler and his daughter Anna Freud.
kinds of anxiety
- Realistic Anxiety- an emotional response to threat and the perception of real danger. E g-dangerous animals, final exams. This type abates as the source of threats subsides and ensures self preservation.
- Neurotic Anxiety- an emotional response to the threat that unacceptable id impulses (sexual and aggressive) will become conscious and the fear that ego will be unable to control these raging impulses. E.g. Child knows that act on impulses may result in punishment by caregiver.
- Moral Anxiety- when the ego is threatened by punishment from the superego. When id tries to satisfy immoral thoughts/acts, the perfectionist dictates of the superego responds with feelings of guilt or self condemnation. E.g. cursing, shoplifting urges and impulses.
