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The Psychoanalytic Perspective
Module 44
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Personality
The Psychoanalytic Perspective Exploring the Unconscious
The Neo-Freudian and Psychodynamic Theories
Assessing Unconscious Processes
Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective
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Personality
An individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.
Each dwarf has a distinct personality.
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Psychodynamic Perspective
Freud encountered patients suffering
from nervous disorders whose complaints could
not be explained in terms of purely
physical causes.
Sigmund Freud(1856-1939)
Culver Pictures
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Personality
• Freud proposed that excessive anxiety might be due to:
• Lack of sexual gratification• Masturbation (all of his patients who
suffered from nervous exhaustion had masturbated!)
• Traumatic sexual experiences from early childhood
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Personality
“Seduction hypothesis” – based on supposed sexual abuse in childhood from patients’ dream reports, slips of the tongue, and other indirect evidence.– Some patients had no recollections of
such events, but Freud still believed this
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Personality
– Freud abandoned the seduction hypothesis, claiming that his patients had “misled” him
– He then claimed that his patients had sexual fantasies as young children and had guilt over those fantasies.
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Exploring the Unconscious
A reservoir (unconscious mind) of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings and memories. Freud asked patients to say whatever came to their mind (free association) to tap the unconscious.
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Dream Analysis
Another method to analyze the unconscious mind is through interpreting the manifest
and latent contents of dreams.
The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli (1791)
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Psychoanalysis
The process of free association (chain of
thoughts) led to painful, embarrassing
unconscious memories. Once these
memories were retrieved and released
(treatment: psychoanalysis) the patient felt better.
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Id, Ego and SuperegoId unconsciously strives to satisfy
basic sexual and aggressive drives operating on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate
gratification.
Largely conscious, ego functions as the “executive” and mediates the demands of
id and superego.
Superego provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations.
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Model of MindThe mind is like an iceberg. Mostly
hidden and below the surface lies the unconscious mind. The preconscious,
stores temporary memories.
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Personality Structure
Personality develops as a result of our efforts to resolve conflicts between our biological
impulses (id) and social restraints (superego).
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Defense Mechanisms the ego’s protective methods of
reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality
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The ego, or “rational I,” has numerous ways of defending itself against anxiety
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Defense Mechanisms
Ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.
1. Repression banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.
2. Regression leads an individual faced with anxiety to retreat to a more infantile psychosexual stage.
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Defense Mechanisms3. Reaction Formation causes the ego to
unconsciously switch unacceptable impulses into their opposites.
“The lady doth protest too much, me thinks.”
-- (W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III Scene ii)
4. Projection leads people to disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.
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Defense Mechanisms
5. Rationalization offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions.
6. Displacement shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or persons… redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.
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Concept Check:
Name that defense mechanism!
Your ex-spouse, who cheated on you, writes a best-selling non-fiction book arguing that human beings are not naturally monogamous and have an instinctive need for multiple partners.
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Concept Check:
Name that defense mechanism!
You are in love with your best friend’s new flame. The friendship is an old one and very valuable to you. You tell everybody that your friend’s new love interest is a terrible human being and you don’t understand the attraction at all.
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Concept Check:
Name that defense mechanism!
Your boss yells at you. You come home and yell at your spouse. Your spouse yells at your child. Your child goes out to the yard and yells at the dog.
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Freud also developed a framework to explain the development of personality
Psychosexual Stagesthe childhood stages of development during which the id’s pleasure-seeking energies (libido) focus on distinct erogenous zones
Fixation a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, where conflicts were unresolved
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Stages of Personality Development• Oral stage - first year of life in which the
mouth is the erogenous zone and weaning is the primary conflict. Id dominated.
Menu
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• Anal stage - second stage - about 2 years of age, the anus is the erogenous zone and toilet training is the source of conflict. Ego develops.– Anal expulsive personality - a person
fixated in the anal stage who is messy, destructive, and hostile.
– Anal retentive personality - a person fixated in the anal stage who is neat, fussy, stingy, and stubborn.
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Freud’s Theory: Stages of Personality Development
• Phallic stage - third stage occurring from about 3 to 6 years of age, in which the child discovers sexual feelings. Superego develops.
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Oedipus Complex
A boy’s sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for
the rival father. Also Electra complex for the girl’s desire for the father.
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Identification
Through identification their
superego gains strength
incorporating parents’ values.
From the K
. Vandervelde private collection
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Freud’s Theory: Stages of Personality Development
• Latency - fourth stage occurring during the school years, in which the sexual feelings of the child are repressed while the child develops in other ways.
• Genital – sexual feelings reawaken with appropriate targets.
Menu
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When a student asked him what was the significance of his cigar, Freud replied “sometimes
a cigar is just a cigar.”
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The Neo-FreudiansJung believed in the
collective unconscious which contained a
common reservoir of images derived from
our species’ past.
Archetypes - powerful, emotionally charged, universal images or concepts
Carl Jung (1875-1961)
Archive of the H
istory of Am
erican Psychology/ University of A
kron
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Jung’s archetypes
Other popular Jungian archetypes and examples from our culture are:
• “The hero” – as seen in figures like Batman, Luke Skywalker, Neo, Beowulf, Jesus;
• “The Warrior” – as seen in historical figures such as Gladiators, samurai, Ninja, Vikings, and Knights;
• “The Trickster” – as seen in figures such as: Bugs Bunny, The Tramp (Charlie Chaplin), the devil, and Bart Simpson;
• “The Wise Old Man” – as seen in popular figures such as Merlin, Yoda, Gandalf, Chef from South Park, The Owl from Winnie the Pooh, and Dumbledore from Harry Potter;
• “The Anima” – as seen in the PlayStation2 video game Final Fantasy X, Rush’s song “Animate” from the album Counterparts, and Joni Mitchell’s song “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow”.
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The Neo-Freudians
Like Freud, Adler believed in social
childhood tensions. A child struggles
with the inferiority complex during
growth and strives for superiority and
power. Alfred Adler (1870-1937)
National L
ibrary of Medicine
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The Neo-Freudians
Like Adler, Horney believed in the
social aspects of childhood growth and development.
Karen Horney (1885-1952)
The B
ettmann A
rchive/ Corbis
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Assessing Unconscious Processes
Evaluating personality from an unconscious mind perspective would require a psychological instrument (projective tests) that would reveal
the hidden unconscious mind.
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Thematic Apperception Test(TAT)
Developed by Henry Murray, TAT is a projective test in which people express their
inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes.
Lew
Merrim
/ Photo Researcher, Inc.
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Rorschach Inkblot Test
10 inkblots - designed by Hermann Rorschach. It seeks to identify people’s
inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots.
Lew
Merrim
/ Photo Researcher, Inc.
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Projective Tests: Criticisms
Critics argue that projective test lack both reliability (consistency of results) and
validity (predicting what it is supposed to).
1. Even trained raters evaluating the same patient come up with different interpretations (reliability).
2. And projective tests may misdiagnose a normal individual as pathological (validity).
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Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective
1. Personality develops throughout life and is not fixed in childhood.
2. Freud underemphasized peer influence on the individual which may be as powerful as parental influence.
3. Gender identity may develop before 5-6 years of age.
Modern Research
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Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective
4. There may be other reasons for dreams to arise than wish fulfillment.
5. Verbal slips can be explained on basis of cognitive processing of verbal choices.
6. Suppressed sexuality leads to psychological disorders. Sexual inhibition has decreased, but psychological disorders have not.
Modern Research
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Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective
Freud's psychoanalytic theory rests on repression of painful experiences into the
unconscious mind.
Majority of children, death camp survivors, battle-scared veterans are unable to repress painful experiences
into their unconscious mind.
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Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective
Freud was right about the unconscious mind (but not the way he explained it). Modern research
shows the existence of non-conscious information processing.
1. Schemas that automatically control perceptions and interpretations.
2. Parallel processing during vision and thinking.
3. Implicit memories.
4. Emotions activate instantly without consciousness.
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Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective
Freud’s theory has been criticized on scientific merits. Psychoanalysis is basically untestable. Most of its concepts arise out of
clinical practice which are after-the-fact explanations.
