Freudian Psychology Flashcards
Personality
An individual’s characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors persisting over time and across situations
Develops from the efforts of our ego to resolve tension btwn our id and superego
Psychodynamic View on Personality
Behavior, as well as human emotions / personality, develop in a dynamic interplay btwn un/conscious processes, including various motives / inner conflicts
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Grew up in a poor, Victorian household
Intelligent, brilliant; knew many languages
Identified that many powerful mental processes operate in the unconscious
Founded psychoanalyses
Psychoanalysis
Founded by Freud
Method of discovering and pursuing human personality / development
Includes free association, identification of freudian slips
Free Association
Technique used in psychoanalyses
Encouragement of the patient to speak his mind so that the therapist can verbally flow / lead a flow of thoughts into the past / unconscious
Freud’s Personality / Mind Iceberg
Id: largely makes up the submerged body / entire iceberg
Ego: constitutes most of the visible tip
Superego: constitutes some of the visible tip and some of the submerged body
Personality development follows this order
Ego
Operates on the reality principle
Seeks to gratify the id’s impulses in realistic ways that bring long-term pleasure
Superego
Operates on the morality principle
Our conscience that forces the ego to consider the ideal, producing pride / guilt; focuses on how we should behave
Id
Operates on the pleasure principle
Unconscious psychic energy that constantly strives to satisfy basic drives (hunger / sex); seeks intimate gratification based on needs of the erogenous zones
Freud’s Unconscious
A reservoir of thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories that are hidden from awareness b/c they feel unacceptable
Freud’s Psychosexual Stages
(0-18mon) Oral: sucking, biting, chewing (18-36mon) Anal: bowel / bladder elimination, copes w/ demands for control (3-6yr) Phallic: genitalia, incest (6-pub) Latency: dormant sexual feelings (pub+) Genital: SEX
Freud on the Oedipus Complex
Freud believed that boys in their phallic stages develop unconscious sexual feelings for their mother / rivalry towards their father; the resolution is that boys identify w/ their fathers
Regression
Freudian defense against anxiety
Retreating to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated
eg. oral comfort of thumb sucking
Reaction Formation
Freudian defense against anxiety
Switching unacceptable impulses into their opposites
eg. displaying exaggerated friendliness to repress anger
Projection
Freudian defense against anxiety
Disguising one’s own threatening impulses by attributing them to others
eg. thief thinks everybody else is a thief