Psychoanalytical perspective Flashcards
According to Freud, a large part of personality is unconscious. Yet we operate in the conscious world. Use Freud’s model of the structure of personality to explain how this is possible.
Freud saw us as a cooperation of three different but interconnected parts, The Id, Ego and super Ego
The Id:
is our lizard brain making us eat, drink, have sex and throw big rocks onto lakes to see if it will break
The Super Ego:
is our understanding of the social or cultural setting we are in. walk around with your clothes on, don’t throw rocks onto lakes if there are people on the lake and so forth
The Ego:
is our last system and the closest to “us” that you can find in this model. The ego exists in the world and is the problem solver, the doer of things. However whetever it does is always manipulated and motivated by the Id or the super ego.
if those sometimes opposing forces would create an impossible scenario we experience anxiety
Explain the concept of anxiety as described by Freud and the elaborate the role of defense mechanisms in dealing with anxiety.
In short, Anxiety is what we experience when the Ego can not satisfy the Id or the Super ego
When that happens we can protect ourselves with defense mechanism by distorting our conscious reality in different ways.
What are Freud’s Defense mechanisms and what do they do?
regression - act like a child when we feal save, leave all responsibility to others
repression - Completely repress a memory of a traumatic event, a person is afraid of dogs without knowing why, that’s because they blanked out the memory of them being near a very aggressive dog in their childhood.
Denial - refusing to acknowledge anxiety provoking stimulus - smoking causes cancer, naaaaa nerd No pics no proof
Reaction formation- the formation of a reaction to something… you are gay, but that’s hard to cope with so instead you start throwing out the F-word like nobodies business because you convince yourself that you hate “the gays”, in short - homophobes are gays
Projection - putting your stuff on others to help you. lets say you are lazy and that clashes with some Super ego work ethic. now you start pointing out that other people are lazy and not doing any work.
Displacement - You are angry at your job but you cant really do anything about that, instead you beat up your wife. you displace the anger onto her
Sublimation - you are angry at your job but you cant really do anything about that, instead you channel all that energy into running. making something good out of something bad
Rationalization - you convince yourself that there was a logical reason to how you acted in hindsight.
Explain why, despite lack of scientific support, Freud’s theory is considered a turning point in our understanding of personality.
four core aspects came away from Freuds work
Linking mental and physical problems:
while his method was not quite like the one today he was the first one to start looking at things through what we could consider almost a Psychosomatic/Somatopsychic perspective.
Early Childhood experiences:
Freud was on to that our early childhood was incredibly important for the people we grow up to become
The Unconscious:
The Unconscious was also fascinating and inspired a lot of people to follow in his footsteps. Both to extrapolate his theories and build on them but also to look at psychology with more scientific eyes and build it into the “hard science” it is today.
Sex and aggression:
He was early to use Sex and aggression as a motivation for behavior and personality.
Differentiate between the concepts of personal unconscious and collective unconscious as explained by Jung.
The personal unconscious is the part of our mind that contains thoughts and feelings that are not currently in use/ in conscious awareness
The collective unconscious is a collection of knowledge and imagery that every person is born with and is shared by all human beings due to ancestral experience.
its code geass with extra steps.
Personal - plant a bomb in this pizza
Collective - unite against zero
Explain the concept of an ‘archetype’ and describe how it can be helpful in understanding personality.
They are the “exhibits” in the gallery that is the collective unconscious.
they can be helpful in understanding personality since they are frameworks common to everyone that everyone somewhat unconsciously follows
Buzzfeed test galore
Alfred Adler and Karen Horney both built their theories on the concept that children are helpless. Explain how they elaborated on different consequences of the same phenomenon.
Adler:
Kids are useless and that is their main driving force to evolve, “natural inferiority” - republican dog
Karen Horney:
children’s helplessness and dependency can develop into anxiety
Adler is a republican and wants children to pull themselves up by their bootstraps while Karen horney is horny and so are alt girls and they are left so horny karen wants to help children and understands the consequences of not doing so
Describe Erikson’s lifespan approach and how it differs from Freud’s basic assumptions.
In short, Eriksson looks at personality development as a life long journey with crisis along the way to define yourself with environmental and cultural factors while Freud thinks its all about those early years and the biological drive
all in all Erikson’s model is optimistic and all about growth while Freud is pissy and pathology focused
