psychoanalytic theorists Flashcards
what is hysteria?
symptoms that appeared to be physical, but were not
Anna O had fairy-tale fantasies dramatic mood swings, and made several suicide attempts. Breuer’s diagnosis was that she was suffering from what was then called hysteria (now called conversion disorder)
what is the conscious mind?
The conscious mind is what you are aware of at any particular moment, your present perceptions, memories, thoughts, fantasies, feelings, what have you.
what is the preconscious?
Working closely with the conscious mind is what Freud called the preconscious, what we might today call “available memory:” anything that can easily be made conscious, the memories you are not at the moment thinking about but can readily bring to mind.
(Now no-one has a problem with these two layers of mind. . Freud suggested that this and the conscious are the smallest parts)
what is the uncosncious?
The largest part by far is the unconscious. It includes all the things that are not easily available to awareness, including many things that have their origins there, such as our drives or instincts, and things that are put there because we can’t bear to look at them, such as the memories and emotions associated with trauma.
according to Freud, the unconscious is the source of our _____?
According to Freud, the unconscious is the source of our motivations, whether they be simple desires for food or sex, neurotic compulsions, or the motives of an artist or scientist. And yet, we are often driven to deny or resist becoming conscious of these motives, and they are often available to us only in disguised form.
the id, the ego, and the superego
Freudian psychological reality begins with the world, full of objects. Among them is a very special object, the organism. The organism is special in that it acts to survive and reproduce, and it is guided toward those ends by its needs – hunger, thirst, the avoidance of pain, and sex.
A part – a very important part – of the organism is the nervous system, which has as one of its characteristics a sensitivity to the organism’s needs.
The nervous system, as id, translates the organism’s needs into what forces?
At birth, that nervous system is little more than that of any other animal, an “it” or id.
The nervous system, as id, translates the organism’s needs into motivational forces called, in German, TRIEBE, which has been translated as INSTINCTS or DRIVES. Freud also called them WISHES.
what is the translation from a need to wish called?
primary process
what is the pleasure principle?
The id works in keeping with the pleasure principle, which can be understood as a demand to take care of needs immediately.
The infant, in the Freudian view, is pure what?
The infant, in the Freudian view, is pure, or nearly pure id. And the id is nothing if not the psychic representative of biology.
ex: Just picture the hungry infant, screaming itself blue. It doesn’t “know” what it wants in any adult sense; it just knows that it wants it and it wants it now.
why does the wish or drive break into consciousness?
Unfortunately, although a wish for food, such as the image of a juicy steak, might be enough to satisfy the id, it isn’t enough to satisfy the organism. The need only gets stronger, and the wishes just keep coming. You may have noticed that, when you haven’t satisfied some need, such as the need for food, it begins to demand more and more of your attention, until there comes a point where you can’t think of anything else. This is the wish or drive breaking into consciousness.
what is ego? what is this provem-solving activity called?
Luckily for the organism, there is that small portion of the mind we discussed before, the conscious, that is hooked up to the world through the senses. Around this little bit of consciousness, during the first year of a child’s life, some of the “it” becomes “I,” some of the id becomes ego.
The ego relates the organism to reality by means of its consciousness, and it searches for objects to satisfy the wishes that id creates to represent the organisms needs.
This problem-solving activity is called the secondary process.
the ego, unlike the id, functions with what principle?
The ego, unlike the id, functions according to the reality principle, which says “take care of a need as soon as an appropriate object is found.” It represents reality and, to a considerable extent, reason.
what is superego?
However, as the ego struggles to keep the id (and, ultimately, the organism) happy, it meets with obstacles in the world. It occasionally meets with objects that actually assist it in attaining its goals. And it keeps a record of these obstacles and aides. In particular, it keeps track of the rewards and punishments meted out by two of the most influential objects in the world of the child – mom and dad. This record of things to avoid and strategies to take becomes the superego.
It is not completed until about seven years of age. In some people, it never is completed.
two aspects of superego
conscience: which is an internalization of punishments and warnings.
ego ideal: t derives from rewards and positive models presented to the child.
The conscience and ego ideal communicate their requirements to the ego with feelings like pride, shame, and guilt.
what is life instincts? these instincts perpetuate what?
Freud saw all human behavior as motivated by the drives or instincts, which in turn are the neurological representations of physical needs. At first, he referred to them as the life instincts.
These instincts perpetuate (a) the life of the individual, by motivating him or her to seek food and water, and (b) the life of the species, by motivating him or her to have sex.
what is libido?
he motivational energy of these life instincts, the “oomph” that powers our psyches, he called libido, from the Latin word for “I desire.”
or the sex drive
freud’s view with sex
Freud’s clinical experience led him to view sex as much more important in the dynamics of the psyche than other needs. We are, after all, social creatures, and sex is the most social of needs. Plus, we have to remember that Freud included much more than intercourse in the term sex!
what is death instinct?
every person has an uncosncious wish to die
Later in his life, Freud began to believe that the life instincts didn’t tell the whole story. Libido is a lively thing; the pleasure principle keeps us in perpetual motion. And yet the goal of all this motion is to be still, to be satisfied, to be at peace, to have no more needs. The goal of life, you might say, is death! Freud began to believe that “under” and “beside” the life instincts there was a death instinct.
what is the nirvana principle?
It refers to non-existence, nothingness, the void, which is the goal of all life in Buddhist philosophy.
what is freud’s theory about the death instinct and its nirvana principle?
The day-to-day evidence of the death instinct and its nirvana principle is in our desire for peace, for escape from stimulation, our attraction to alcohol and narcotics, our penchant for escapist activity, such as losing ourselves in books or movies, our craving for rest and sleep. Sometimes it presents itself openly as suicide and suicidal wishes.
And, Freud theorized, sometimes we direct it out away from ourselves, in the form of aggression, cruelty, murder, and destructiveness.
what is anxiety according to freud?
The ego – the “I” – sits at the center of some pretty powerful forces: reality; society, as represented by the superego; biology, as represented by the id. When these make conflicting demands upon the poor ego, it is understandable if it – if you – feel threatened, feel overwhelmed, feel as if it were about to collapse under the weight of it all. This feeling is called anxiety, and it serves as a signal to the ego that its survival, and with it the survival of the whole organism, is in jeopardy.
what are the three different kind of anxieties?
1) realistic anxiety: fear
2) moral anxiety: this is what we feel when the threat comes not from the outer, physical world, but from the internalized social world of the superego. (basically another word for feelings like shame and guily and the fear of punishment)
3) neurotic anxiety: this is the fear of being overwhelmed by impulses from the id. (or nervous anxiety)
give examples of the 3 kinds of anxieties
realistic anxiety: if I throw you into a pit of poisonous snakes, you mi ght experience realistic anxiety.
neurotic anxiety: If you have ever felt like you were about to “lose it,” lose control, your temper, your rationality, or even your mind, you have felt neurotic anxiety. Neurotic is actually the Latin word for nervous, so this is nervous anxiety. It is this kind of anxiety that intrigued Freud most, and we usually just call it anxiety, plain and simple.
the defense mechanisms
The ego deals with the demands of reality, the id, and the superego as best as it can. But when the anxiety becomes overwhelming, the ego must defend itself. It does so by unconsciously blocking the impulses or distorting them into a more acceptable, less threatening form.
The techniques are called the ego defense mechanisms,
to be a true example of a defense it should function ______?
unconsciously.
what is denial? and denial in fantasy?
Denial involves blocking external events from awareness.
If some situation is just too much to handle, the person just refuses to experience it. As you might imagine, this is a primitive and dangerous defense – no one disregards reality and gets away with it for long! It can operate by itself or, more commonly, in combination with other, more subtle mechanisms that support it.
denial in fantasy: This is when children, in their imaginations, transform an “evil” father into a loving teddy bear, or a helpless child into a powerful superhero.
repression
Repression, which Anna Freud also called “motivated forgetting,” is just that: not being able to recall a threatening situation, person, or event. This, too, is dangerous, and is a part of most other defenses.
The Freudian understanding of this phobia is pretty simple: I repressed a traumatic event – the shed incident – but seeing spiders aroused the anxiety of the event without arousing the memory.
Other examples abound. Anna Freud provides one that now strikes us as quaint: A young girl, guilty about her rather strong sexual desires, tends to forget her boy- friend’s name, even when trying to introduce him to her relations! Or an alcoholic can’t remember his suicide attempt, claiming he must have “blacked out.” Or when someone almost drowns as a child, but can’t remember the event even when people try to remind him – but he does have this fear of open water!
asceticism and restriction of ego
renunciation of needs,
most people haven’t heard of, but it has become relevant again today with the emergence of the disorder called anorexia.
adolescents, when they feel threatened by their emerging sexual desires, may unconsciously try to protect themselves by denying, not only their sexual desires, but all desires. They get involved in some kind of ascetic (monk-like) lifestyle wherein they renounce their interest in what other people enjoy.
Anna Freud also discusses a milder version of this called restriction of ego. Here, a person loses interest in some aspect of life and focuses it elsewhere, in order to avoid facing reality. A young girl who has been rejected by the object of her affections may turn away from feminine things and become a “sex-less intellectual,” or a boy who is afraid that he may be humiliated on the football team may unaccountably become deeply interested in poetry.
isolation
Isolation (sometimes called intellectualization) involves stripping the emotion from a difficult memory or threatening impulse.
A person may, in a very cavalier manner, acknowledge that they had been abused as a child, or may show a purely intellectual curiosity in their newly discovered sexual orientation. Something that should be a big deal is treated as if it were not.
displacement
Displacement is the redirection of an impulse onto a substitute target. If the impulse, the desire, is okay with you, but the person you direct that desire towards is too threatening, you can displace to someone or something that can serve as a symbolic substitute.
ex: Someone who hates his or her mother may repress that hatred, but direct it instead towards, say, women in general. Someone who has not had the chance to love someone may substitute cats or dogs for human beings. Someone who feels uncomfortable with their sexual desire for a real person may substitute a fetish. Someone who is frustrated by his or her superiors may go home and kick the dog, beat up a family member, or engage in cross-burnings.
turning against the self
Turning against the self is a very special form of displacement, where the person becomes their own substitute target. It is normally used in reference to hatred, anger, and aggression, rather than more positive impulses, and it is the Freudian explanation for many of our feelings of inferiority, guilt, and depression. The idea that depression is often the result of the anger we refuse to acknowledge is accepted by many people, Freudians and non-Freudians alike.
projection
Projection, which Anna Freud also called displacement outward, is almost the complete opposite of turning against the self. It involves the tendency to see your own unacceptable desires in other people. In other words, the desires are still there, but they’re not your desires anymore. I confess that whenever I hear someone going on and on about how aggressive everybody is, or how perverted they all are, I tend to wonder if this person doesn’t have an aggressive or sexual streak in themselves that they’d rather not acknowledge.
altruistic surrender
is a form of projection that at first glance looks like its opposite: Here, the person attempts to fulfill his or her own needs vicariously, through other people.
A common example of this is the friend (we’ve all had one) who, while not seeking any relationship himself, is constantly pushing other people into them, and is particularly curious as to “what happened last night” and “how are things going?” The extreme example of altruistic surrender is the person who lives their whole life for and through another.
reaction formation
Reaction formation, which Anna Freud called “believing the opposite,” is changing an unacceptable impulse into its opposite. So a child, angry at his or her mother, may become overly concerned with her and rather dramatically shower her with affection. An abused child may run to the abusing parent. Or someone who can’t accept a homosexual impulse may claim to despise homosexuals.
Perhaps the most common and clearest example of reaction formation is found in children between seven and eleven or so: Most boys will tell you in no uncertain terms how disgusting girls are, and girls will tell you with equal vigor how gross boys are. Adults watching their interactions, however, can tell quite what their true feelings are!
undoing
nvolves “magical” gestures or rituals that are meant to cancel out unpleasant thoughts or feelings after they’ve already occurred. Anna Freud mentions, for example, a boy who would recite the alphabet backwards whenever he had a sexual thought, or turn around and spit whenever meeting another boy who shared his passion for masturbation.
In “normal” people, the undoing is, of course, more conscious, and we might engage in an act of atonement for some behavior, or formally ask for forgiveness. But in some people, the act of atonement isn’t conscious at all
introjection
sometimes called identification, involves taking into your own personality characteristics of someone else, because doing so solves some emotional difficulty.
For example, a child who is left alone frequently, may in some way try to become “mom” in order to lessen his or her fears. You can sometimes catch them telling their dolls or animals not to be afraid. And we find the older child or teenager imitating his or her favorite star, musician, or sports hero in an effort to establish an identity.
Identification is very important to Freudian theory as the mechanism by which we develop our superegos.
identification with the aggressor
a version of introjection that focuses on the adoption, not of general or positive traits, but of negative or feared traits. If you are afraid of someone, you can partially conquer that fear by becoming more like them.
ex: stockholm syndrome
regression
Regression is a movement back in psychological time when one is faced with stress. When we are troubled or frightened, our behaviors often become more childish or primitive. A child may begin to suck their thumb again or wet the bed when they need to spend some time in the hospital. Teenagers may giggle uncontrollably when introduced into a social situation involving the opposite sex. A freshman college student may need to bring an old toy from home. A gathering of civilized people may become a violent mob when they are led to believe their livelihoods are at stake. Or an older man, after spending twenty years at a company and now finding himself laid off, may retire to his recliner and become childishly dependent on his wife.
rationalization
Rationalization is the cognitive distortion of “the facts” to make an event or an impulse less threatening. We do it often enough on a fairly conscious level when we provide ourselves with excuses. But for many people, with sensitive egos, making excuses comes so easy that they never are truly aware of it. In other words, many of us are quite prepared to believe our lies.
sublimation
Sublimation is the transforming of an unacceptable impulse, whether it be sex, anger, fear, or whatever, into a socially acceptable, even productive form. So someone with a great deal of hostility may become a hunter, a butcher, a football player, or a mercenary. Someone suffering from a great deal of anxiety in a confusing world may become an organizer, a businessperson, or a scientist. Someone with powerful sexual desires may become an artist, a photographer, or a novelist, and so on. For Freud, in fact, all positive, creative activities were sublimations, and predominantly of the sex drive.
defense mechanisms
All defenses are, of course, lies, even if we are not conscious of making them. But that doesn’t make them less dangerous – in fact it makes them more so.
And yet Freud saw defenses as necessary. You can hardly expect a person, especially a child, to take the pain and sorrow of life full on! While some of his followers suggested that all of the defenses could be used positively, Freud himself suggested that there was one positive defense, which he called sublimation.
the stages
As I said earlier, for Freud, the sex drive is the most important motivating force. In fact, Freud felt it was the primary motivating force not only for adults but for children and even infants.
It is true that the capacity for orgasm is there neurologically from birth. But Freud was not just talking about orgasm. Sexuality meant not only intercourse, but all pleasurable sensation from the skin. It is clear even to the most prudish among us that babies, children, and, of course, adults, enjoy tactile experiences such as caresses, kisses, and so on.
what are erogenus zones
Freud noted that, at different times in our lives, different parts of our skin give us greatest pleasure. Later theorists would call these areas erogenous zones. It appeared to Freud that the infant found its greatest pleasure in sucking, especially at the breast.
what is the psychosexual stage theory?
The oral stage lasts from birth to about 18 months. The focus of pleasure is, of course, the mouth. Sucking and biting are favorite activities.
The anal stage lasts from about 18 months to three or four years old. The focus of pleasure is the anus. Holding it in and letting it go are greatly enjoyed.
The phallic stage lasts from three or four to five, six, or seven years old. The focus of pleasure is the genitalia. Masturbation is common.
The latent stage lasts from five, six, or seven to puberty, that is, somewhere around 12 years old. During this stage, Freud believed that the sexual impulse was suppressed in the service of learning. I must note that, while most children seem to be fairly calm, sexually, during their grammar school years, perhaps up to a quarter of them are quite busy masturbating and playing “doctor.” In Freud’s repressive era, these children were, at least, quieter than their modern counterparts.
The genital stage begins at puberty, and represents the resurgence of the sex drive in adolescence, and the more specific focusing of pleasure in sexual intercourse.
Freud felt that masturbation, oral sex, homosexuality, and many other things we find acceptable in adulthood today, were immature.
This is a true stage theory, meaning that Freudians believe that we all go through these stages, in this order, and pretty close to these ages.
the oedipal crisis
Each stage has certain difficult tasks associated with it where problems are more likely to arise. For the oral stage, this is weaning. For the anal stage, it’s potty training. For the phallic stage, it is the Oedipal crisis, named after the ancient Greek story of king Oedipus, who inadvertently killed his father and married his mother.
how does the oedipal crisis work?
The first love-object for all of us is our mother. We want her attention, we want her affection, we want her caresses, we want her, in a broadly sexual way. The young boy, however, has a rival for his mother’s charms: his father! His father is bigger, stronger, smarter, and he gets to sleep with mother, while junior pines away in his lonely little bed. Dad is the enemy.
About the time the little boy recognizes this archetypal situation, he has become aware of some of the more subtle differences between boys and girls, the ones other than hair length and clothing styles. From his naive perspective, the difference is that he has a penis, and girls do not. At this point in life, it seems to the child that having something is infinitely better than not having something, and so he is pleased with this state of affairs.
what is castration anxiety?
But the question arises: where is the girl’s penis? Perhaps she has lost it somehow. Perhaps it was cut off. Perhaps this could happen to him! This is the beginning of castration anxiety, a slight misnomer for the fear of losing one’s penis.
penis envy
To return to the story, the boy, recognizing his father’s superiority and fearing for his penis, engages some of his ego defenses: He displaces his sexual impulses from his mother to girls and, later, women; And he identifies with the aggressor, dad, and attempts to become more and more like him, that is to say, a man. After a few years of latency, he enters adolescence and the world of mature heterosexuality.
The girl also begins her life in love with her mother, so we have the problem of getting her to switch her affections to her father before the Oedipal process can take place. Freud accomplishes this with the idea of penis envy: The young girl, too, has noticed the difference between boys and girls and feels that she, somehow, doesn’t measure up. She would like to have one, too, and all the power associated with it. At very least, she would like a penis substitute, such as a baby. As every child knows, you need a father as well as a mother to have a baby, so the young girl sets her sights on dad.
character
Your experiences as you grow up contribute to your personality, or character, as an adult. Freud felt that traumatic experiences had an especially strong effect. Of course, each specific trauma would have its own unique impact on a person, which can only be explored and understood on an individual basis. But traumas associated with stage development, since we all have to go through them, should have more consistency.
fixation
Fixation gives each problem at each stage a long-term effect in terms of our personality or character.
If you have difficulties in any of the tasks associated with the stages – weaning, potty training, or finding your sexual identity – you will tend to retain certain infantile or childish habits.
oral-passive character
If you, in the first eight months of your life, are often frustrated in your need to suckle, perhaps because mother is uncomfortable or even rough with you, or tries to wean you too early, then you may develop an oral-passive character. An oral- passive personality tends to be rather dependent on others. They often retain an interest in “oral gratifications” such as eating, drinking, and smoking. It is as if they were seeking the pleasures they missed in infancy.
oral-aggressive personality
When we are between five and eight months old, we begin teething. One satisfying thing to do when you are teething is to bite on something, like mommy’s nipple. If this causes a great deal of upset and precipitates an early weaning, you may develop an oral-aggressive personality. These people retain a life-long desire to bite on things, such as pencils, gum, and other people. They have a tendency to be verbally aggressive, argumentative, sarcastic, and so on.
what is anal expulsive?
In the anal stage, we are fascinated with our “bodily functions.” At first, we can go whenever and wherever we like. Then, out of the blue and for no reason you can understand, the powers that be want you to do it only at certain times and in certain places. And parents seem to actually value the end product of all this effort!
Some parents put themselves at the child’s mercy in the process of toilet training. They beg, they cajole, they show great joy when you do it right, they act as though their hearts were broken when you don’t. The child is the king of the house, and knows it. This child will grow up to be an anal expulsive (a.k.a. anal aggressive) personality. These people tend to be sloppy, disorganized, generous to a fault. They may be cruel, destructive, and given to vandalism and graffiti.
anal retentive personality
Other parents are strict. They may be competing with their neighbors and relatives as to who can potty train their child first (early potty training being associated in many people’s minds with great intelligence). They may use punishment or humiliation. This child will likely become constipated as he or she tries desperately to hold it in at all times, and will grow up to be an anal retentive personality. He or she will tend to be especially clean, perfectionistic, dictatorial, very stubborn, and stingy. In other words, the anal retentive is tight in all ways.
what are two phallic personalities?
If the boy is harshly rejected by his mother, and rather threatened by his very masculine father, he is likely to have a poor sense of self-worth when it comes to his sexuality. He may deal with this by either withdrawing from heterosexual interaction, perhaps becoming a book-worm, or by putting on a rather macho act and playing the ladies’ man. A girl rejected by her father and threatened by her very feminine mother is also likely to feel poorly about herself, and may become a wall-flower or a hyper-feminine “belle.”
But if a boy is not rejected by his mother, but rather favored over his weak, milquetoast father, he may develop quite an opinion of himself (which may suffer greatly when he gets into the real world, where nobody loves him like his mother did), and may appear rather effeminate. After all, he has no cause to identify with his father. Likewise, if a girl is daddy’s little princess and best buddy, and mommy has been relegated to a sort of servant role, then she may become quite vain and self-centered, or possibly rather masculine.
These various phallic characters demonstrate an important point in Freudian characterology: Extremes lead to extremes. If you are frustrated in some way or overindulged in some way, you have problems. And, although each problem tends to lead to certain characteristics, these characteristics can also easily be reversed. So an anal retentive person may suddenly become exceedingly generous, or may have some part of their life where they are terribly messy. This is frustrating to scientists, but it may reflect the reality of personality!
therapy —
Freud’s therapy has been more influential than any other, and more influential than any other part of his theory. Here are some of the major points:
relaxed atmosphere
The client must feel free to express anything. The therapy situation is in fact a unique social situation, one where you do not have to be afraid of social judgment or ostracism. In fact, in Freudian therapy, the therapist practically disappears. Add to that the physically relaxing couch, dim lights, sound- proof walls, and the stage is set.
free association
The client may talk about anything at all. The theory is that, with relaxation, the unconscious conflicts will inevitably drift to the fore. It isn’t far off to see a similarity between Freudian therapy and dreaming! However, in therapy, there is the therapist, who is trained to recognize certain clues to problems and their solutions that the client would overlook.
Resistance
One of these clues is resistance. When a client tries to change the topic, draws a complete blank, falls asleep, comes in late, or skips an appointment altogether, the therapist says “aha!” These resistances suggest that the client is nearing something in his free associations that he – unconsciously, of course – finds threatening.
dream analysis
In sleep, we are somewhat less resistant to our unconscious and we will allow a few things, in symbolic form, of course, to come to awareness. These wishes from the id provide the therapist and client with more clues. Many forms of therapy make use of the client’s dreams, but Freudian interpretation is distinct in the tendency to find sexual meanings.
parapraxes
A parapraxis is a slip of the tongue, often called a Freudian slip. Freud felt that they were also clues to unconscious conflicts. Freud was also interested in the jokes his clients told. In fact, Freud felt that almost everything meant something almost all the time – dialing a wrong number, making a wrong turn, misspelling a word, were serious objects of study for Freud. However, he himself noted, in response to a student who asked what his cigar might be a symbol for, that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Or is it?
projective tests
Other Freudians became interested in projective tests, such as the famous Rorschach or inkblot tests. The theory behind these test is that, when the stimulus is vague, the client fills it with his or her own unconscious themes. Again, these could provide the therapist with clues.
