1 The Psychoanalytic Perspective Module 33 Your conscious life, in short, is nothing but an elaborate post-hoc rationalization of things you really do for other reasons. Ramachandran in A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness

2 Personality The Psychoanalytic Perspective Overview  Exploring the Unconscious  The Neo-Freudian and Psychodynamic Theories  Assessing Unconscious Processes  Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective

3 Personality An individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. Each dwarf has a distinct personality.

4 Psychodynamic Perspective Freud’s clinical experience led him to develop the first comprehensive theory of personality, which included the unconscious mind, psychosexual stages, and defense mechanisms. Sigmund Freud ( )

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6 Exploring the Unconscious A reservoir (unconscious mind) of thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories of which we are unaware.

“There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me” –Pink Floyd, Brain Damage “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.” -Carl Jung

8 Figure 2.38 Try this! Myers: Psychology, Eighth Edition Copyright © 2007 by Worth Publishers

Brain energy use… Deep concentration causes the energy consumption in your brain to go up by only about 1 percent. “No matter what you are doing with your conscious mind, it is your unconscious that dominates your mental activity….”

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“So the ball travels too rapidly for batters to be consciously aware of it.” »Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, By David Eagleman

12 Psychoanalysis The process of free association (chain of thoughts) leads to painful, embarrassing unconscious memories. Once these memories are retrieved and released the patient feels better. He called this treatment Psychoanalysis

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14 Dream Analysis Another method to analyze the unconscious mind is through interpreting manifest and latent contents of dreams.

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17 Model of Mind The mind is like an iceberg. It is mostly hidden, and below the surface lies the unconscious mind

18 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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21 Id, Ego and Superego The Id unconsciously strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives, operating on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification. The ego functions as the “executive” and mediates the demands of the id and superego. The superego provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations.

22 Personality Development Freud believed that personality formed during the first few years of life divided into psychosexual stages. During these stages the id’s pleasure- seeking energies focus on pleasure sensitive body areas called erogenous zones.

23 Psychosexual Stages Freud divided the development of personality into five psychosexual stages.

24 Oedipus Complex A boy’s sexual desire for his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father. A girl’s desire for her father is called the Electra complex.

25 Little Hans Five-year-old Hans was afraid to leave his house because of an irrational fear that a horse would bite him. Hans developed the fear after having seen a horse fall down in the street. Freud believed that the real target of Hans’ fear was something else; through displacement Hans’s unconscious anxiety had merely been redirected from its original source onto horses. Freud suggested that Hans was actually afraid of his erotic feelings toward his mother and aggressive wishes toward his father. (Bolt)

26 Identification Children cope with threatening feelings by repressing them and by identifying with the rival parent. Through this process of identification their superego gains strength that incorporates their parents’ values. From the K. Vandervelde private collection

27 Defense Mechanisms: The ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality. 1.Repression/sublimation banishes anxiety- arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness. Basis for all other defense mechanisms Repressed urges slip out in dream symbols Freudian slips “With the telescope, the details of the distant landscape were easy to....make out The lid won’t stay on regardless of how much I.. screw it

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2.Regression leads an individual faced with anxiety to retreat to a more infantile psychosexual stage. 31

32 Defense Mechanisms 3.Reaction Formation causes the ego to unconsciously switch unacceptable impulses into their opposites. People may express feelings of purity when they may be suffering anxiety from unconscious feelings about sex. 4.Projection leads people to disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.

33 Defense Mechanisms 5.Rationalization offers self-justifying explanations to hide from ourselves the real reasons for our actions. 6.Displacement shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.

34 The Neo-Freudians Like Freud, Adler believed in childhood tensions. However, these tensions were social in nature and not sexual. A child struggles with an inferiority complex (infantile feelings of helplessness) Alfred Adler ( ) National Library of Medicine

35 The Neo-Freudians Like Adler, Horney believed in the social aspects of childhood growth and development. She countered Freud’s assumption that women have weak superegos and suffer from “penis envy.” Karen Horney ( ) The Bettmann Archive/ Corbis

36 The Neo-Freudians Jung believed in the collective unconscious, which contained a common reservoir of images derived from our species’ universal experiences. Carl Jung ( ) Archive of the History of American Psychology/ University of Akron

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38 Assessing Unconscious Processes Evaluating personality from an unconscious mind’s perspective would require a psychological instrument (projective tests) that would reveal the hidden unconscious mind.

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40 Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) Developed by Henry Murray, the 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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42 Rorschach Inkblot Test The most widely used projective test uses a set of 10 inkblots and was designed by Hermann Rorschach. Lew Merrim/ Photo Researcher, Inc.

45 Projective Tests: Criticisms Critics argue that projective tests lack both reliability (consistency of results) and validity (predicting what it is supposed to). 1.When evaluating the same patient, even trained raters come up with different interpretations (reliability). 2.Projective tests may misdiagnose a normal individual as pathological (validity).

46 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

47 Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective 4.There may be other reasons for dreams besides wish fulfillment. 5.Verbal slips can be explained on the basis of cognitive processing of verbal choices. 6.Freud said suppressed sexuality leads to psychological disorders. Sexual inhibition has decreased, but psychological disorders have not. Modern Research

48 Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective Freud's psychoanalytic theory rests on the repression of painful experiences into the unconscious mind. The majority of abused children, death camp survivors, and battle-scarred veterans are unable to repress painful experiences into their unconscious mind.

49 The Modern Unconscious Mind Modern research shows the existence of non-conscious information processing…not a seething cauldron of passions and repression. Research shows that information processing is going on without our awareness.

50 Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective The scientific merits of Freud’s theory have been criticized. Psychoanalysis is meagerly testable. Its most serious problem is that it offers the after-the-fact explanation, and fails to predict behaviors & traits. “What is original about Freud is not good and what is good is not original” (Crews) “When we stand on Freud's shoulders we discover we are looking further in the wrong direction” (Kihlstrom 1997)