Unit 10: Part 1 Flashcards
Sigmund Freud
Created psychodynamic and psychoanalysis theories of personality
Personality
An individuals characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling or acting
Psychodynamic theories
Views human personality with a focus on the unconscious and the importance of childhood memories
Psychoanalysis
Theory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts - seeks to expose and interpret unconscious tensions
Unconscious
A reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings and memories
Free association
Method to get patients to say whatever comes to their minds to tap the unconscious
Id
A reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to Freud, strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives
Ego
The largely conscious, “executive” part of personality that, according to Freud, mediated among the demands of the Id, superego, and reality
Superego
The part of personality that, according to Freud, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgements (the conscience) and for future aspirations
Psychosexual stages
The childhood stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital) during which the id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct exogenous
Oedipus Complex for males/ Electra Complex (females)
Boys develop both unconscious sexual desires for their mother and jealously and hatred for their father, whom they consider a rival
Identification
The process by which, according to Freud, children incorporate their parents’ values into their developing superegos
Fixation
In psychoanalytic theory, according to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved
Defense mechanism
The ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality
Repression
In psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banished from conscious anxiety - a rousing thoughts, feelings and memories
Reaction formation
Psychoanalytic defense mechanism by which ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites. People may express feelings opposite of their anxiety-arousing unconscious feelings
Projection
When people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others
Regression
Psychoanalytic defense mechanism in which an individual faced with anxiety retreats to a more infantine psychosexual stage, where some psychic energies remain
Rationalization
Defense mechanism that offers self-justifying explanations in the place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions
Displacement
Psychoanalytic defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, as when redirecting anger toward a safer outlet
Sublimation
Transferring of unacceptable impulses into socially valued motives
Denial
Refusing to believe or even perceive painful realities (future plans, breakups, death)
Alfred Adler
Inferiority Complex idea
Karen Horney
Said childhood anxiety triggers our desire for love and security
Carl Jung
Believed unconscious contains more than repressed memory thoughts and feelings, collective unconscious
Collective unconscious
A shared, inherited reservoir of memory traced from our species history
Projective test
A personality test that provides ambiguous images designed to trigger projection of one’s inner dynamics
Thematic apperception test (TAT)
A projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes
Rorschach inkblot test
The widely used projective test; a set of 10 inkblots, designs by Hermann Rorschach; seeks to identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots
Terror-management theory
A theory of death-related anxiety; explores peoples emotional and behavioral responses to reminders of their impending death
