Psychodynamic & Motivation

Question 1

Id

Answer 1

Guided by the pleasure principle, the Id reflects all of our deepest, darkest desires. It will try to get you into trouble!

Question 2

Ego

Answer 2

Develops in response to emerging reality the individual find themselves in.

Guided by the reality principle, the ego manages the continual power struggle between the Id and the Superego

Question 3

Superego

Answer 3

Guided by the morality principle, the superego directs us to behave in ethical ways. Its your conscience telling you that you know you shouldn’t be doing something

According to Freud its always in polar opposite to the Id, and Ego will mediate the contention between them (helps compromise in conxtext)

Question 4

Conscious

Answer 4

These are our thoughts, feelings and motivations that we are aware of and can control

Question 5

Preconscious

Answer 5

These are the thoughts, feelings and motivations that we aren’t immediately aware of but we can become aware of them quickly if the need arises.

E.g. if the room started to get too hot, this would start to become more conscious of the temperature, before hand it would have been in the preconscious

Question 6

Unconscious

Answer 6

This is where our inaccessible thoughts, feelings, drives and motivations reside. We can’t control them, but they might control us!

Freud also suggested that we would push thing we don’t want to remember and bad experiences we wish to forget here.

Question 7

Psychosexual

Answer 7

Refers to the psychological components of sexual pleasure or sexual impulses

Question 8

Psychosexual stages:

Oral

Answer 8

• Spans the first two years of life
• Infant achieves gratification through oral activities such as feeding, thumb sucking and babbling

If they couldn’t satisfy this stage satisfactorily they would develop an oral personality or an oral fixation

“the oral stage, and is characterised by a desire to use the mouth (e.g. drink, chew, babble). Fixation at this stage might result in behaviours that involve the mouth such as overeating, smoking, or verbosity (excessive talking) ”

Question 9

Psychosexual Stages: Anal

Answer 9

• Spans ages 2- 3 years old
• The child learns to respond to some of the demands of society (such as bowel and bladder control)

Anal fixation can result in an obsession with cleanliness, perfectionism, and control (analy retentive) - Parents being very punitive when potty training child

People that are analy expulsive were likely to become very messy or disorganised adults

“anal stage and is characterised by a desire to gain control over bladder and bowel movements. Fixation at this stage might lead to a tendency to be over-controlled, perfectionist, and obsessively clean. In contrast, Freud believed it might also lead to being an excessively untidy and disorganised person.”

Question 10

Psychosexual stages:

Phallic

Answer 10

3-7 Years of age

The child learns to realize the difference between males and females and becomes aware sexually

At this stage, focal point of pleasure is the genitals

Freud believed at this stage that boys develop an unconscious sexual desire for their mother, and start to see their father as a rival for the affections of their mother. And that boys develop a fear that their father is going to punish them for having these feelings of affection towards their mother, and the fear that the punishment will be means of castration. (Oedipus complex)

Reciprocal for females, referred to as the Electra complex. (found by later analysis’s, Freud disagreed with this)

Out of fear of punishment from their father, boys will come to the realisation that their fathers are a strong rival and they will start to identify with them, will start to develop masculine characteristics and identify as a male, and then represses sexual feelings towards mother.

Freud thought fixation at this stage would result in sexual deviancies’ or perhaps weak or confused sexual identity.

“he phallic stage and is characterised by an emerging awareness of sexuality. This is the stage where the Oedipus complex and castration anxiety come into play (the Electra complex was added at a later stage). Fixation at this stage results in weak or confused sexual identity, and sexual deviancy.”

Question 11

Psychosexual stages:

Latency

Answer 11

7-11 Years of age

The child continues his or her development but sexual urges are relatively quiet.

“his is the latency stage where Freud believed there was little going on by way of personality development. As such, he proposed no consequences of fixation at this stage. ”

Question 12

Psychosexual stages:

Genital

Answer 12

11 - Adult Age

The growing adolescent shakes off old dependencies and learns to deal maturely with opposite sex

Focus of pleasure back on the genitals

Child starts to experience normal sexual urges, that are age appropriate and on the opposite sex peers. (This fails to account for sexual orientation other than heterosexual)

“the genital stage and the focus of this stage is (not surprisingly) the genitals. This is the where age appropriate attraction to the opposite sex occurs. Freud didn’t clarify what fixation at this stage might mean for personality, but given his theory is strongly heterosexual in nature it might be inferred that he intended fixation to represent the same sorts of issues as the phallic stage. ”

Question 13

Defence Mechanisms:

Denial

Answer 13

• A refusal to accept the reality of the situation in a bid to block troubling external events from your conscious awareness.
• If a situation is too hard to handle a person might respond by refusing to accept it as real or just simply denying that the situation exists at all. And for most people this strategy might work for a short period of time, but nobody has the luxury of being able to disregard reality. So it tends to not be a very successful defence mechanism for very long.

Question 14

Defence Mechanisms:

Projection

Answer 14

• Projection is where a person attributes unwanted thoughts or feelings or desires or motivations onto another person.
• Usually whatever makes the person feel anxious or guilty, and were often thoughts that were aggressive or sexual in nature.

Question 15

Defence Mechanisms:

Repression

Answer 15

• The unconscious effort to keep disturbing or threatening thoughts locked away in your unconscious
• Like denial repression is usually aimed at keeping distressing thoughts that might elicit some feeling of anxiety or perhaps encourage your super ego to try to make you feel terribly guilty
• The idea of repression is that its an unconscious process, and that’s seperate to suppression which is conscious (deliberately doing something to distract yourself from thoughts you don’t want)
• Ultimately repression is not a very successful defence mechanism either, because all of those disturbing wishes/desires/drives/memories that you’re forcing down into your unconscious, are the fodder of the Id.
• They cause anxiety cause they are still lurking around down there, and making you feel bad, even if you don’t know why you’re feeling bad. This anxiety will have to be dealt with eventually, perhaps with another defence mechanism.
• Anna Freud said that repressed memories can resurface in altered forms such as dreams or slips of the tongue (Freudian slip)

Question 16

Defence Mechanisms:

Displacement

Answer 16

• Displacement is the redirection of an impulse, usually an aggressive impulse, often into a powerless substitute, this could be a person, it could be an object or something that even is symbolic
• Displacement occurs when the Id wants you to do something bad, but the Ego says no, so its the discharge of the Id’s wishes really, which is something that Freud called Psychic Energy.

Question 17

Defence Mechanisms:

Sublimation

Answer 17

Similar to displacement but it takes place when we manage to displace our socially and perhaps legally unacceptable and destructive emotions/desire/thoughts/wishes into behaviours that are positive and constructive, and usually socially acceptable.

Sport is a good example

Question 18

Defence Mechanisms:

Humour

Answer 18

Used to release feelings of tension and anxiety in difficult situations.

Very much a double edged sword: The use of humor in tragic or really trying situations can potentially make the situation worse if it’s poorly executed, or the recipients aren’t able to see any lightness in the situation at that point.

Not uncommon in particularly high stress occupations.

E.G. Police Force, Emergency Wards, Paramedics (people who deal with a lot of stress strain and anxiety, usually as a way to disempower the subject of the joke i.e paramedics joking about death, so it has less power)

Question 19

What is the Neo-analytic approach and how does it differ from Freuds theory

Answer 19

Freud’s body of work was huge, but some of his original ideas were heavily criticised for a number of reasons. One is the fairly obvious reliance on attributing psychosexual drives to childhood development, but it was also criticised for not taking cultural considerations into account, and being quite sexist in its approach. Jung (pronounced ‘yung’) and Horney (pronounced ‘horn-eye’) are two neo-Freudian theorists who revised many of Freud’s ideas to make them more palatable for modern sensibilities. The modern approach to Freud’s psychoanalytic approach is called the neo-analytic approach.

Question 20

Carl Jung - Analytic approach compared to Freud

Answer 20

Ego

(pretty similar to Freud’s understanding)

Personal Unconscious

(Wasn’t hugely different from Freud’s idea of the unconscious insofar as it was a place for repressed memories to reside, believed that is also contained just temporarily forgotten information, claimed that the personal unconscious was found far nearer the surface of consciousness, less emphasis on the contents in his approach to psychoanalytic therapy)

Collective Unconscious

(Biggest difference in comparison to Freud. Shared level of unconsciousness that all humans have, made up of latent memories from ancestral and evolutionary past as a type of inherited memory)

“The form of the world into which a person is born is already inborn in him, as a virtual image”

Disagreed with Freuds though on psychosexual theory, suggested that this was just psychic energy in general, not sexual energy.

Thought that our future just as much shaped our mind as our origins.

Question 21

Karen Horney - Analytic approach compared to Freud

Answer 21

Mostly followed the same path of Freudian psychology, but greatly disagreed with Freud’s views on female psychology, and rejected his concept of penis envy, declaring it as both inaccurate and demeaning to women.

In contrast and perhaps in retaliation she proposed the concept of Womb envy. Where men experience feeling of inequality and inadequacy because they can not give birth to children.

“Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work work in every field precisely due to ther feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?”

Redefined Freud’s theory of neurosis, and said that is was the psychic disturbance brought by fears and defences against these fears and by attempts to find compromise and solutions for conflicting tendencies.

Still maintains Freudian ideas that we maintain internal battles with our fears and the strategies we use to manage them, but it doesn’t rely on the premise that these things happen somewhat out of our control with no outside forces contributing to it. She also took the pathology angle out of the equation, by saying that neurosis was more of a coping mechanism, and that it was a large part of normal life.

Question 22

BIS & BAS

Answer 22

Question 23

Mastery Goals

Answer 23

aimed at attaining a standard of competence defined by self-improvement or skill development. Individuals who hold mastery goals either seek task-related self-improvement or strive to gain task mastery.

Question 24

Performance-approach goals

Answer 24

focused on the demonstration of competence relative to others (Elliot and McGregor, 2001). When students have performance-approach goals, they do not necessarily care about mastering the task. There is an emphasis on doing better than other students.

Question 25

Performance-avoidance goals

Answer 25

Concerned with avoiding failure in front of others. They are extrinsically motivated by a fear of poor performance. An example of a performance-avoidance item is: “My goal in this class is to avoid performing poorly.”

Question 26

Maslow’s hierarchy of Needs

Answer 26

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a motivational theory in psychology comprising a five-tier model of human needs, often depicted as hierarchical levels within a pyramid.

From the bottom of the hierarchy upwards, the needs are: physiological (food and clothing), safety (job security), love and belonging needs (friendship), esteem, and self-actualization.

Needs lower down in the hierarchy must be satisfied before individuals can attend to needs higher up.

Question 27

What is the difference between Need and Drive?

Answer 27

• Need is a requirement that has to be fulfilled.
• It is our needs that create a state of arousal called drive.
• Drive keeps us motivated and working to fulfill the need.
• If we are driven by our need for achievement (money, fame, property), we keep working to fulfill this need.
• Needs are biological, emotional and social.
• Drive reduction theory was proposed by Clark Hull, to explain our behavior and motivation.

Question 28

Implicit motivations

Answer 28

• defined as unconscious motivational dispositions that are activated through affectively charged incentives influencing spontaneous behavior (McClelland, 1985; Schultheiss, 2008).
  *

Question 29

Explicit Motivation

Answer 29

• Explicit motives involve controlled or conscious information processing and propositional reasoning, while implicit motives concern automatic or non-conscious information processing (McClelland et al., 1989)

Question 30

Henry Murray

Answer 30

According to Murray, human needs are psychogenic in origin, function on an unconscious level, and can play a major role in defining personality. Frustration of these psychogenic needs plays a central role in the origin of psychological pain. … A need may be a purely internal state, but more often it is evoked by a press.

Question 31

Henry Murray: Primary needs

Answer 31

Primary needs are defined by Murray^[1] as needs involving some biological process and arise in response to certain stimuli or events that drive the body towards a certain outcome (‘positive’ or ‘negative’).

For example, dehydration would trigger a “need for water,” which in turn drives a person to seek out and intake water. The first six primary needs (air, water, food, sentience, sex, and lactation) are considered ‘positive’ needs, as they drive a person towards a certain object or action. The remaining seven (expiration, urination, defecation, and the four avoidance needs) are considered to be ‘negative’ needs as they drive a person away from an object (or in some cases towards the expulsion of an object).

Question 32

Henry Murray: Secondary Needs

Answer 32

Secondary needs are generally psychological, such as the need for nurturing, independance, and achievement. While these needs might not be fundamental for basic survival, they are essential for psychological well-being.

Secondary needs emerge from or are influenced by primary needs. Murray identified 17 secondary needs, each belonging to one of eight need domains: ambition, materialism, status, power, sadomasochism, social-conformance, affection, and information. Needs in each domain have similar themes underpinning them; for instance, the ambition domain contains all those needs which relate to achievement and recognition.

Question 33

Henry Murray: Motivations

Answer 33

Power Motivation

(the need for power refers to a desire or need to impact on other people, or to control other people or being in a position of control or a position of influence in any situation. So people who have a higher need for motivation, might pursue careers that involve that kind of behaviour and that could be things like teachers or psychologists journalists and supervisors.)

Achievement Motivation

(Typically concerned a lot of the time about meeting obligations/completing tasks/goals that they’ve set, and maybe that have had been set for them perhaps in a worker context/private life. Are more focused on their own personal or internal sense of satisfaction/reward that they might have for achieving a task/meeting/obligation or something rather than being motivated or rewarded externally. So need for achievement person is more likely to drive a sense of achievement, for from things, like, maybe feeling good about themselves. Maybe having a sense of personal intelligence that having achieved something personal accomplishment, more so far more so than than recognitional, praise that they might get for achieving a goal.)

Affiliation Motivation

(The need for affiliation has long history of research, particularly in social psychology research. Studies showed that those people often have a larger social circle than people with a lower or less lead for affiliation and they tend to spend a lot more time interacting with other people via all sorts of different modalities. i.e messaging, writing letters, more likely as well to be members of social groups or social clubs.)

So people with a high need for affiliation, are also more likely to get lonely more often or maybe feel more feel lonely, more intensely. Suggests that their need for affiliation may be related to their sense of self and who they are and their need for other people to add stimulation to their life.

Question 34

TAT (Thematic apperception test)

Answer 34

Test is a series of ambiguous things like this one that you can see and it’s usually involves one or two people in the scene.

Client will be asked to explain the story that they see when looking at the ambiguous scene and they asked to include what’s going on in the scene right now. The thoughts and the feelings of the people in the scene perhaps in what led up to that scene and what the outcome of scene is or what’s going to happen next in scene.

They have to come up with a really detailed story about what’s going on in this ambiguous picture. And the idea behind it is that the client will project their own implicit motivations onto one of the characters in the scene, and that’s based on the assumption that people aren’t aware that they’re talking about themselves when they’re creating these stories about the pictures.

Is it a reliable measure of personality? Almost certainly not as we understand personality currently. And that’s dominated by the trait theory. So it’s almost certainly not going to tell you anything about anybody’s traits, but it could be very helpful in helping people to reflect on their unconscious drives or biases or beliefs or attitudes and certainly experimental research.