WEEK 8 Flashcards
Who is Sigmund Freud?
- Founder of Psychoanalytic Theory
- Talk therapy
What is Talk Therapy?
- Freud’s idea: Helps to talk about problems
- Talking allows the conscious, rational mind deal with them
- Solid scientific ground here (though Freud never knew)
- Various forms of psychotherapy (Freudian and non-Freudian) improve mental health
Issue with Talk Therapy?
People don’t always remember problem causes
* Problems at the unconscious level
What is Freud’s Iceberg Model?
3 Levels:
- Conscious level - what we’re currently thinking about
- Thoughts & perceptions - Preconscious Level - what we can bring from memory to think about
- Memories & stored knowledge - Unconscious Level - source of deep troubles according to Freud (The source of mental disease)
- Fears, Violent motives, immoral urges, shameful experiences etc
How can you learn about the unconscious according to Freud?
- Ego censors the unconscious
- Need to bypass the ego’s censorship
Can bypass ego through:
* Dreams
* Drugs
* Slips (when you’re thinking one thing but say a mother opps I mean another)
* Motivated Forgetting (intentionally forgetting painful experiences)
What is Psychic Determinism (Teleology)?
Frued believes nothing is an accident! (everything has meaning behind it)
e.g.
* Spilled water. Guess you’re ready to leave
* Forgot their birthday. Guess you hate them.
* Crashed your car. Secret death wish.
- Teleology: explaining things by their purpose
Where does the unconscious come from according to Freud?
According to Freud: : Life history, especially childhood
* Getting psychologically stuck at a developmental stage
- Defence against past traumas
What are some Defence Mechanisms used for the unconscious?
- Denial
* I don’t believe it! Can’t have happened! - Repression
* Motivated forgetting - Reaction formation - believe the opposite to who you are to deny who you really are:
* Hypocrisy: Homophobic gay man - Rationalization
* I have to be mean to be fair (really I like being mean) - Projection
* Everyone else is mad (really I’m mad) - Intellectualization
* Using jargon to obscure unpleasant thoughts (lifeguards: code brown = someone pooped in the pool) - Displacement
* Anger at work taken out elsewhere…on the family - Sublimation
* Become lawyer because you like arguing
What are Freud’s 4 Developmental stages?
- Oral (infant stage = when breast feeding)
* Dependent on caretakers for all needs
* Too much or too little care: stuck looking for help as adult - Anal (when potty training and learning to use bodies)
* Learning to control self, obey authorities
* Too much or too little authority: obsessed with control or avoid self-control - Phallic
* Develop identity, learn differences between boys and girls
* Stuck: overly rigid morality or amorality - Genital
* Healthy Adult: Generate children and legacy—Love and Work
What is Id, Ego, Superego?
Id: motivation for pleasure
* Ice Cream!
Superego: internalized rules to follow
* No! Eat Healthy!
Ego: decides how to bridge the id and superego
* OK, maybe just a little…
Are Freud’s ideas supported in modern psychology?
Talk therapy (sort of)
* Modern psychotherapy is varied
Defence mechanisms (sort of)
* Not always motivated, but people project and rationalize, etc.
Developmental stages (sort of)
* Piaget
The unconscious (sort of)
Self control struggle (sort of)
* Conflict between motivations
* Resembles modularity hypothesis in evolutionary psychology, global workspace theory of consciousness
Motivations (sort of)
* Sex drive, sure; death drive, no
Aggressive motive - NO
* Catharsis—idea that if you just spend your aggression energy you’ll be less aggressive later
* TOTALLY WRONG —aggression seems to precipitate more aggression
Where did Frued go wrong?
- Freud thinks everything happens for a reason—no accidents
- Freud is overly confident in untested hypotheses
- Freud thinks everything is about sex
- Oedipus Complex.
- Freud thinks women are inferior versions of men. (Penis envy)
- Unconscious may be overstated
- Case Studies Method Only
- Wealthy Victorian women
- No experiments or statistics
- No operational definitions
- Scientific theories must be falsifiable
- Must be possible for evidence to prove it wrong
What is the Psychoanalytic perspective of consciousness?
- Conscious awareness helps you solve problems stemming from the unconscious
What is the Behaviorist perspective of consciousness?
- Consciousness is a needless assumption
- Environment determines behaviour
What is automaticity?
Automatic influences on behaviour
e.g.
* Reflexes
* Muscle memory
* Impulsivity
* Implicit learning (conditioning)
- Higher order processes, too?
- Decision-making
- Judgments
- Controlling behaviour
