Personality Flashcards
Personality
an individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling and acting
Psychodynamic Perspective
**Freud encountered patients suffering from nervous disorders. Their complaints could not be explained in terms of purely physical causes
**This lead Freud to develop the first comprehensive theory of personality, which included the unconscious mind, psychosexual stages, and defense mechanisms.
Core concepts
Psychic Determination: You may think you know why you chose something, but theres underlying things that arent in your awareness yet
Unconscious Motivation: dreams are correlated to our psychoanalysis
Child Development (importance of childhood): what happens in our development is key to who we are
Conflict: we are a product of dynamic tension
Exploring the Unconscious
A reservoir (unconcious mind) of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories.
*Freud asked patients to say whatever came to their minds (free association) in order to tap the unconscious
Dream Analysis
Another method to analyze the unconscious mind is through interpreting manifetr and latent contents of dreams
Instincts
** Eros (libido) —> “sex” instinct —> creation
** Thanatos —> death instinct —> aggression/destruction
Model of Mind
the mind is like an iceberg. It’s mostly hidden, and below the surface lies the unconscious mind. The preconscious stores temporary memories
Personality Structure
Personality develops as a result of our efforts to resolve conflicts between our biologival impulses ID and the constraints of the Ego & Superego
Questions for personality
**Who are we?
**How did we get that way?
Id, Ego & Superego
The Id (pleasure principle):
Unconsciously strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives, operating on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification
*EX:When someone is hungry, the id might create a mental image of food and satisfy the need by eating the food in their imagination.
The Ego (mediates between the id and superego):
Functions as the “executive” and mediates the demands of the id, the real world, and superego, according to the reality principle
The superego provides standards for judgement (the conscience) and moral reasoning
Personality Development
Freud believed that personality formed during the first several years of life divided into psychosexual stages. During these stages, the id’s pleasure seeking energies focus on pleasure sensitive body areas called EROGENOUS ZONES
Psychosexual Stages
Freud divided the devlpoment of personality into five psychosexual stages
**Oral (0-18 months) : Pleasure centers on the mouth–sucking, biting, chewing
**Anal (18-36 months): AUTONOMY VS CONTROL!!!!!
Pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination; coping w/ demands for control(Anal retention holds in, Anal expulsion lets go)
** Phallic (3-6 years): Pleasure zone is the genitals;coping w/ incestous sexual feelings
** Latency (6 to puberty): Dormant sexual feelings
** Genital (puberty on):
Maturation of sexual interests
Oedipus Complex
A boy’s sexual desire for his mother and feelings of jealous and hatred for the rival father. A girl’s desire for her father is called the Electra complex
- “sexual” desire for parent of opposite sex
- Death wish for same- sex parent
- Fear of relatiation from same-sex parent
Identification
Children cope w/ threatening feelings by repressing them & by identifying w/ the rival parent. Through this process of Identification, their superego gains strength that incorporates their parents’ values
Defense Mechanisms
The ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsiously distorting reality
- Repression banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness
- Regression leads to an individual faced w/ anxiety to retreat to a more infantile psychosexual stage
More Defense Mechanisms
- Reaction Formation causes the ego to unconsciously switch unacceptable impulses into their opposites. For example, people may express feelings of purity when they may be suffering anxiety from unconsious feelings about sex.
- Projection leads people to disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others
- Rationalization offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions
- Displacement shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person. For exmaple, redirecting anger toward a safer outlet
Assessing Unconscious Processes
Evaluating personality from an unconscious mind’s perspective would require a psychological instrument (projective tests) that would reveal the hidden unconscious mind.
Rorscach Inkblot Test
The most widely used PROJECTIVE TEST
-set of 10 inkblots designed by Hermann Rorscach—> identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
Developed by Henry Murrary, the TAT is a projective test in whcih epolpe express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes