Psychoanalysis, Gestalt, Humanism, & Cognitive Revolution Flashcards
What is Psychoanalysis?
-Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian neurologist born in what is currently known as Czech Republic
-health Issues: depression & cancer (inspired him)
-drug use: cocaine and nicotine (inspired him)
-the couch: hypnosis (laying down on a couch in therapy relaxes and comforts you; can talk about things easily)
-Free association: speak whatever comes to mind
-interests were patients suffering from hysteria and neurosis
-symbolic representation of symptoms - traumatic experiences becomes unconscious - not consciously available - repressed (you have an experience, there’s a symbolic representation that becomes your unconscious)
–couch tries to bring it to awareness/consciousness
-the role of your sex life - unconscious motivation (knowledge on how unconscious affects behaviour)
Who was Sigmund Freud?
-hysteria was a condition related to women with physical and emotional symptoms with no apparent physical cause
-theory - many of his patients’ problems came from the unconscious mind.
-access to unconscious through dream analysis - first words that came to mind - slip of the tongue
-Psychoanalytic theory - the role of the unconscious and childhood experiences (clinical psychology) (behaviourism is objective, observe behaviour; psychoanalysis looks at unconscious, childhood experiences - past - and how it influences you now; none is better, they both inform us)
What are the 2 forces of conflict in our personality and the 3 systems of our mind?
-our personality develops from a conflict between 2 forces: our biological aggressive and pleasure seeking drives versus internal control over these drives
-we have 3 interactive systems within our mind that help balance these two competing forces
-Id: our most primitive drives and urges - from birth
-Superego: the moral compass that tells us how we are to behave - this is developed as a child socializes and learns from others
-Ego: rational part of our personality, this is what others see, balance the demands of the id and superego
According to Freud, what is Neurosis and the purpose of defense mechanisms?
-Neurosis: tendency to experience negative emotions
-purpose of defense mechanisms: self-preservation, psyche trying to protect yourself (mind) can also be to protect our inner child
Who was Carl Jung?
-born in Swiss village of Kesswil
-studied medicine
-used word association test to study people struggling with psychosis in hopes to discover the nature of their unconscious thought process
-he tried Freud’s ideas on dream interpretation in his practice, he found them effective
-became concerned about Freud’s emphasis on sexual motivation (libido) (then influenced him to come up with his own ideas - analytical psychology)
What is Analytical Psychology and Collective unconscious (Jung)?
-Analytical psychology: works on balancing opposing forces of conscious and unconscious thoughts and experiences within one’s personality
–a technique used to gain more information on a person
-continuous learning process mainly in the 2nd half of life - becoming aware of unconscious elements and integrating them into consciousness
-Collective unconscious: a universal version of the personal unconscious (Freud) - hold mental patterns or memory traces which are common to all
What are Archetypes and our attitudes toward life (Jung)?
-Archetypes: represented by universal themes in various cultures - through biology, we are handed these themes and the same type of symbols
-task of integrating unconscious archetypal aspects of the self is part of the self-realization process
-Self-actualization and orientation toward the future
-2 attitudes toward life: extroversion and introversion
-Persona: a mask that we adopt (conscious experience and collective unconscious)
-compromise between who we really are (true self) and what society expects us to be
What are the criticisms Jung received?
-embraced spiritualism and mysticism
-some saw him as unscientific or even antiscientific - used symbols in art and fantasy to develop his theory
-unclear, inconsistent
-his theory remains popular in psychology
-influence in personality measures - introversion and extroversion
Who was Alfred Adler?
-born in Vienna
-remembered his childhood as miserable - sickly and didn’t think positively of himself
-went to medical school - intrigued by Freud’s work
-moved to the US
-they had disagreements and went their separate ways
-first major theorist to break away from Freud
What was Adler’s description of Creative self and Individual psychology?
-Creative self: we are free to arrange what biology and environment provide in any way (there is hope for someone to be better; useful in therapy)
-Founded individual psychology: focuses on our drive to compensate for feelings of inferiority
-Inferiority complex: a person’s feelings that they lack worth and don’t measure up to the standards of others or society
-feelings of inferiority in childhood are what drive people to attempt to gain superiority and the striving is what is behind our thoughts, emotions and behaviours
What were Adler’s views on social connections and birth orders?
-social connection are important rather than Freud’s sexual stages
-Social tasks: occupational tasks (careers), societal tasks (friendship), and love tasks (finding an intimate partner for long term relationship).
-emphasized conscious versus unconscious
-our birth orders shape our personality
-older siblings - overachievers
-middle child - opportunity of minimize negative dynamics of oldest and youngest
Who was Gestalt?
-Max Wetheimer (1880-1943), Kurt Koffka (1886-1941), Wolfgang Kohler (1887-1967)
-three German psychologists immigrated to the USA to escape Nazi Germany
introduced US psychologists to Gestalt (whole) principles
-Gestalt in German is configuration or form
-against the structuralism and behaviourist approach to psychology - molecular approach
-Molar approach instead: focus on phenomenological experiences - experience a phenomena as is without further evaluation
-Phenomenology:study of that which naturally appears in consciousness
-sensory experiences can be broken down into individual parts but the way those parts relate as a whole is what people respond to
What is Gestalt’s Top-Down Analysis and Five Pinciples?
Top-Down Analysis
-organized brain activity dominates our perceptions not the stimuli that enters that activity - the whole is more important than the parts
-start from the wholes to the parts instead from the parts to the wholes
Five Principles
-Principles of continuity: intrinsic togetherness, imminent necessity and good continuation
-Principle of proximity: when stimuli are close together they tend to be grouped together as a perceptual unity
-Principle of similarity: objects that are similar in some way tend to form perceptual units
-Principle of closure: incomplete figures in the physical world are perceived as complete ones
-Principle of connectedness: when we see connections in disjointed objects
What is Humanism?
-Third-force psychology - they claimed the other two forces were behaviourism and psychoanalysis which neglected a number of different attributes
-Behaviourism - lowered people to animals or computing machines (takes out subjectivity)
-Psychoanalysis - focused on emotionally disturbed people and trying to make “abnormal people normal”
-what was missing - information that would help already healthy people become healthier
–that’s why humanism became the third force
–prevention(before) intervention(during; harder to manage)
-cause of behaviour is subjective reality
–how are we interpreting what is going on
-Phenomenology: lived experience of human beings
-Narrative Therapy: people are the experts of their own lives (narrating your life story)
-Existentialism as therapy: inherent life conflicts are confronted
-Human dilemma: subjective and objective at the same time
Who was Abraham Maslow?
-led psychologists on the third force of psychology
-from Brooklyn, NY
-Jewish immigrants from Russia
-had issues with his parents
-he attended Law school at night
-left Law school to study at Cornell and was taught by Titchener
