Week 3: Personality Part 1 Flashcards
Personality
Personality refers to the enduring characteristics and behavior that comprise a person’s unique adjustment to life, including major traits, interests, drives, values, self-concept, abilities, and emotional patterns.
Psychodynamic theory
explains personality in terms of unconscious psychological processes (for example, wishes and fears of which we’re not fully aware), and contends that childhood experiences are crucial in shaping adult personality.
Core Assumptions of the Psychodynamic Perspective
Assumption 1:Primacy of the Unconscious - majority of psychological processes take place outside conscious awareness.
Assumption 2: Critical Importance of Early Experiences - early experiences set in motion personality processes that affect us years, even decades, later
Assumption 3: Psychic Causality - nothing in mental life happens by chance
The Topographic Model
A model that contends that the mind could be divided into three regions: conscious,
preconscious, and unconscious.
The conscious part of the mind holds information that you’re focusing on at this moment.
The preconscious contains material that is capable of becoming conscious but is not conscious at the moment because your attention is not being directed toward it.
You can move material from the preconscious into consciousness simply by focusing your attention on it.
The unconscious contains anxiety producing material (for example, sexual
impulses, aggressive urges) that are
deliberately repressed (held outside of
conscious awareness as a form of selfprotection because they make you
uncomfortable)
The Psychosexual Stage Model
Argued that early in life we progress through a sequence of developmental stages, each with its own unique challenge and its own mode of sexual gratification.
The stages included oral, anal, Oedipal, latency, and genital.
The Structural Model
a complementary framework to
account for normal and abnormal personality development which
posits the existence of three interacting mental structures called the id, ego, and superego.
The id is the seat of drives and instincts, whereas the ego represents the logical, reality-oriented part of the mind, and the superego is basically your conscience—the moral guidelines, rules, and prohibitions that guide your behavior
The Ego and Its Defenses
Ego defenses are basically mental strategies that we use automatically and unconsciously when we feel threatened.
They help us navigate upsetting events, but
there’s a cost as well: All ego defenses involve some distortion of reality.
Type of Ego Defenses
Projection, repression, displacement, rationalisation, regression, fantasy, isolation
Object Relations Theory
Object relations theory contends that
personality can be understood as
reflecting the mental images of significant
figures (especially the parents) that we
form early in life in response to
interactions taking place within the family
