Do Now:

• Is there one incident that happened to you before age 10 that you feel impacted your personality?

• What is your best personality trait?

Psychoanalytic Perspective

Of Personality

Personality

A person’s pattern of thinking, feeling and acting.

Freud's Personality Structure

• Ego

• Superego

• Id

Freud's Early Exploration into the Unconscious

• Used hypnosis and free association (relax and say it all) to delve into unconscious.

• Mapped out the “mental dominoes” of the patients past in a process he called psychoanalysis.

Id

• Unconscious energy that drives us to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives.

• Id operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification.

Superego

• Part of personality that represents our internalized ideals.

• Standards of judgment or our morals.

Ego

• The boss “executive” of the conscious.

• Its job is to mediate the desires of the Id and Superego.

• Called the “reality principle”.

Freud's Stages of Psychosexual Development

• Freud believed that your personality developed in your childhood.

• Mostly from unresolved problems in the early childhood.

• Believed that children pass through a series of psychosexual stages.

• The id focuses it’s libido (sexual energy) on a different erogenous zone.

Oral Stage

• 0-18 months• Pleasure center

is on the mouth.• Sucking, biting

and chewing.

Anal Stage

• 18-36 months• Pleasure focuses

on bladder and bowel control.

• Controlling ones life and independence.

• Anal retentive

Phallic Stage

• 3-6 years• Pleasure zone is

the genitals.• Coping with

incestuous feelings.

• Oedipus and Electra complexes.

Latency Stage

• 6- puberty• Dormant

sexual feeling.• Cooties stage.

Genital Stage

• Puberty to death.

• Maturation of sexual interests.

Fixation

• A lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage.

• Where conflicts were unresolved.

Orally fixated people may need to chain smoke or chew gum.Or denying the dependence by acting tough or being very sarcastic.Anally fixated people can either be anal expulsive or anal retentive.

• What the primitive instant gratification part of your personality called?

• What is the moral and rule following part of your personality called?

• What is the mediator, finds a way to gratify needs and still follow rules - called ?

• What is Freud’s Theory called?

Karen Horney

• Childhood anxiety is caused by a dependent child’s feelings of helplessness.

• This triggers our desire for love and security.

• Fought against Freud’s “penis envy” concept.

How do we assess the unconscious?

We can use hypnosis or free association.

But more often we use projective tests.

Projective Tests

• A personality test.• Provides an ambiguous stimuli

designed to trigger projection of one’s inner dynamics.

Examples Are:

TAT

Thematic Apperception Test• A projective test which people

express their inner feelings through stories they make about ambiguous scenes

TAT

Rorschach Inkblot Test

• The most widely used projective test

•A set of ten inkblots designed to identify people’s feelings when they are asked to interpret what they see in the inkblots.

Rorschach Inkblot Test

Rorschach Inkblot Test

Rorschach Inkblot Test

Rorschach Inkblot Test

Neo-Freudians

• Psychologists that took some premises from Freud and built upon them.

Alfred Adler Karen Horney Carl Jung

Alfred Adler

• Childhood is important to personality.

• But focus should be on social factors- not sexual ones.

• Our behavior is driven by our efforts to conquer inferiority and feel superior.

• Inferiority Complex

Carl Jung

• Less emphasis on social factors.

• Focused on the unconscious.

• We all have a collective unconscious: a shared/inherited well of memory traces from our species history.

Repression

• The Mac Daddy defense mechanism.

• Push or banish anxiety driven thought deep into unconscious.

Regression

• When faced with anxiety the person retreats to a more infantile stage.

• Thumb sucking on the first day of school.

Reaction Formation

• Ego switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites.

• Being mean to someone you have a crush on.

Projection

• Disguise your own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.

• Thinking that your spouse wants to cheat on you when it is you that really want to cheat.

Rationalization

• Offers self-adjusting explanations in place of real, more threatening reasons for your actions.

• You don’t get into a college and say, “I really did not want to go there it was too far away!!”

Displacement

• Shifts the unacceptable impulses towards a safer outlet.

• Instead of yelling at a teacher, you will get angry at your dog

Sublimation

• Re-channel their unacceptable impulses towards more acceptable or socially approved activities.

• Channel feelings into aggressive sports play.

Defense Mechanisms• The ego’s protective methods of

reducing anxiety by distorting reality.• Never aware they are occurring.• Seven major types.