Personal and Social Identity: Personality and Self Flashcards
The purple booklet (p. 6-13)
Rorschach’s Inkblot Tests
Utilises klecksography, which is the practice of making pictures out of inkblots, to determine how patients project their personal associations onto random shapes.
Personality Theory
Psychologists’ attempts to study your distinctive and enduring characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.
They do this by trying to understand differences in specific characteristics and looking at how they mesh as whole.
The Unconscious
Freud’s theory of a vast reservoir of often unacceptable and frequently hard-to-tolerate thoughts, feeling, desire and memories.
Freud’s Psychoanalytic Perspective
Freud believed that our personalities are largely shaped by the enduring conflict between our impulses and restraint to control these urges.
He split our minds into three interacting parts: id, ego and superego.
Id
Your unconscious energy
The unconscious, primitive and instinctive self that acts as the pleasure principle of immediate gratification.
Ego
Mostly conscious and charged with dealing with reality by getting what the id wants in a reasonable way.
Superego
Our internalised ideals.
“It represents not just the real, but also the ideal.”
Defence Mechanisms (7)
The ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.
It does this through repression, regression, reaction formation, projection, rationalisation, displacement and denial.
Freud’s Psychosexual Stages (5)
The childhood stages of development during which id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones.
- Oral
- Anal
- Phallic
- Latency
- Genital
Karen Horney
Rejected Freud’s belief that personalities are based on sex and aggression.
Encouraged patients towards self-help and analysis.
Jung’s Collective Unconscious Theory
Jung, like Freud, believed in the unconscious but believed that sexual drive was only part of the equation, and that we have a collective unconscious, which is a group of shared archetypes that ae universal to all humans.
Alder’s Inferiority Complex
Alder, like Freud, believed that childhood was a key period, but emphasised ongoing social tensions that were the main influence of personality.
The inferiority complex is where adult behaviour is linked to childhood struggles with being inferior.
Maslow’s Self Actualisation
A humanist theory of personality.
Maslow believed that we are motivated by a hierarchy of needs where basic needs must be met before higher. The hierarchy from bottom to top is physiological, safety and security, belongingness and love
