Personality Flashcards
Personality
Is the distinctive and relatively enduring ways of thinking, feeling and acting that characterise a person’s responses to life situations
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory
Freud divide personality into three separate but interacting structures; id, ego and supergo
The ID
Is the innermost core of the personality, is the only structure that is present at birth and the source of all psychic energy. It is totally within the unconscious mind and has no direct contact with reality and functions in a totally irrational manner. It operates accroding to hte pleasure principle. It also cannot directly satisfy itself by obtaining what it needs from the environment because it has no contact with the outer world.
Pleasure principle
It seeks immediate gratification or releasem regardless of rational considerations and environmental realities. The ego trues to postpone instinctual gratification until the conditions are safe and appropriate.
The ego
Has direct contact with reality and functions primarily at a conscous level. It operates according to the reality principle
Reality Principle
Testing reality to decide when and under what conditions the id can safetly discharge its impulses and satisfy its needs.
Preconscious
Available to awarness (e.g. names of friends, home address)
Unconscious
Unavailable to awareness (infantile memories, repressed wishes and conflicts)
Conscious
Immediate awareness of current environment
The superego
Is the moral arm of the personality. It contains the traditional values and ideals of family and society. The superego similar to the ego strives to control the instincts of the id. In particular sexual and agressive impulses that are condemned by society. It tries to block gratification permentaly.
Defence mechanisms
Unconscious mental operations that deny or distort reality. Some defence mechanisms permit the release of impulses of the id in disguised forms that will not conflict the forces in the external world or with the prohibitions of the superego.
Repression
The ego uses some of its energy to prevent anxiety-arousal memories, feelins and impuses from entering consciousness
Sublimation
Taboo impulses may even be channelled into socially desirable and admirable behaviours, completely masking the sinister underlying impulses
Psychosexual stages
Children pass through psychosexual stages during which the id’s pleasure-seeking tendencies are focused on specific pleasure-sensitive areas of the body - the erogenous zones.
Fixation
Is a state of arrested psychosexual development in which instincts are focues on a particular psychic theme
Regression
A psychological retreat to an earlier psychosexual stage
Oral stage (psychosexual stages)
Occurs during infancy during which the infant gains primary stastifaction from taking food and sucking on a breast, a thumb or some other object. Freud proposed that either excessive gratification or frustration of oral needs can result in fixation on oral themes of self-indulgences or dependency as an adult
Anal stage (psychosexual stage)
2-3rd year of life. Pleasure becomes focused on the process of elimination. During toilet training the child is faced with society’s first attmept to control a biological urge. According to Freud, harsh toilet training can produce compulsions, overemphasis on cleanliness, obessive concerns with orderlineness and insistence on rigid rules and rituals. He also speculated that extremely lax toilet training resulted in a messy, negative and dominant adult personality.
Phallic stage
Begins at 4 to 5 years old. Time when children begin to derive pleasure from their sexual organs. Freud believed that during this stage of early sexual awakenings the male experiences erotic feelings towards his mother
Weaknesses of Freud’s theory
The theory didn;t have a lot of experimental evidence and it is incredibly hard to test
Neoanalytic theorists
Were psychologists who disagreed with certain aspects of Freud’s thinking and developed their own theories.
Alfred Adler
Insisted that humans are inherently social beings who are motivated by social interest, the desire to advance the welfare of others rather than Freud who seemed to view people as savage animals caged behind the bars of civilisation. He also postulated a general motive of striving for superiority which drives people to compensate for real or imagined defects in themselves (inferiority complex) and to strive to be ever more competent in life.
Carl Jung
He believed that humans possess not only a personal unconscious but also a collective unconscious
Personal unconscious
Based on a persons life experiences
Collective unconscious
Consists of memories accumulated throughout the entire history of the human race represent by archetypes
Archetypes
Inherited tendencies to interpre experiences in certain ways. They find expression in symbols, myth and beliefs that appear across many cultures such as the image of a god, good and evil
Object relation theories
Focus on images or mental representations that people form of themselves and other people as a result of early experiences with caregivers. Whether these are realistic of distorted, these internal representations of important adults become lenses or working models through which later social interactions are viewed and these relational themes are exert on unconscious influence on a person’s relationship thorughout life.
Weaknesses of the Psychodynamic approach
It is hard to test
It doesn’t explain enough but at the same time it explains too much to allow clear behavioural predictions
Specific prospositions have not held up under the scruntiny of research
George Kelly’s personal construct theory
Personal constructs are cognitive categories into which they sort the people and events in their lives. Kelly’s personal construct system was the primary basis for individual differences in personality
Personal construct theory
People are intuitive scientists driven to understand their world/reality and find personal meaning. The way people construct and interpret their world/reality is by their individual system of personal constructs
Constructs
Categories of knowledge people collect over time. Constructs are developed by identifying patterns/irregularities in our social world
Rep test (Role Construct Repertory Test
Is used to assess individuals’ personal construct system
Rep test (Role Construct Repertory Test)
Is used to assess individuals’ personal construct system. It tests the basic dimensions of similarity and differences that people use to categories people and events and other aspects of a persons construct system such as the number of different constructs that people use.
Fixed role Therapy
Kelly got his patients to follow a role description and behavioural script that differed from their typical views of themselves hoping that through trying out this new role the client might gain firsthand appreciation for the ways in which different constructions and behaviours could lead to more satisfying life outcomes.
Carl Rogerson theory of self
Believed that forces that direct human behaviour are within them and when they are not disorted or blocked by our environment they can be trust to lead humans toward slef-actualisation
Self-actualisation
Is the highest realisation of human potential
The self
Is an organised, consistent set of perceptions of and beliefs about oneself. The self has two facets: it is an object of perception (the self-concept) and an internal entity that directs behaviour
Development of the self
At the start of children lives they cannot distinguish between themselves and the environment and as they interact with the world, children begin to distinguish between ‘me’ and the ‘not-me’. It continues to develop in response to our life experiences and remains quite stable over time
Self-concept
Once the self-concept is established there is a tendency to maintain it as it helps people understand their relationship with the world around them
Self-consistency
An abscence of conflict among self-perceptions
Congruence
Consistency between self-perceptions and experiences
What theory is John Bowlby’s attachment theory closely related to?
Object relations theory
