1. Tuesday, January 9 Define personality. Describe your personality.
Today’s topic:
Personality and the Psychoanalytic Perspective of Personality
Upcoming Dates:
Homework:
Study for retest and final
Read pages
Assessments:
Retest: Thursday
Final Exam
Define personality.
Describe your personality.
What went into the development of your personality? Where did it come from and or where did you learn it?
How could you measure someone’s personality?

2. Personality
AP Psych
Unit 10 - Myers

3. Personality
an individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.
Personality Perspectives:
Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic perspectives
Humanistic perspective
Trait Perspective
Social-cognitive perspective

4. With each perspective you should know the following:
The general overview of each
The key contributors
Important terms and concepts
The type of tests used to assess your personality
Criticism and evaluation

5. Wednesday, January 10
Did something happen in your childhood that dramatically impacted your personality?
Name something that you’ve done that was affected by your voice of conscience
What went into the development of your personality? Where did it come from and or where did you learn it?
How could you measure someone’s personality?
Today’s topic:
Personality and the Psychoanalytic Perspective of Personality
Upcoming Dates:
Homework:
Study for retest and final
Assessments:
Retest: tomorrow
Final Exam

6. The Psychoanalytic Perspective
“Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.”
- Sigmund Freud

7. Sigmund Freud ( )
Medical practice with patients that complained of ailments with no biological cause  must be a psychological cause!
Psychoanalytic theory - explored ideas about the unconscious regions of the mind, psychosexual stages, and defense mechanisms for coping with anxiety

8. Iceberg Model of Consciousness
Freud's basic theory was that the mind was like an iceberg - mostly hidden beneath the surface.
conscious region - floating above the water's surface
preconscious - the water's surface, info outside of immediate awareness but can readily be accessed.
unconscious - large underwater, hidden region - a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories; according to contemporary psychologists, information processing of which we are unaware

9. Psychoanalysis
Freud believed that the unconscious mind was psychologically causing illnesses in his patients.
Psychoanalysis - Freud's theory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts
Free association - a method of exploring the unconscious in which the person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind, no matter how trivial or embarrassing.  window to the unconscious (repressed tendencies)

10. Freud’s Personality Structure
Personality = conflict between aggressive, pleasure-seeking biological impulses and the internalized restraints against them.
Id – unconscious energy that strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive tendencies (pleasure principle)
Ego - mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality (reality principle)
Superego - internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (voice of conscience)

12. Freud’s Psychosexual Stages
Freud perceived patients’ problems were coming from unresolved conflicts in early childhood.
Psychosexual stages – stages of development during childhood during which the id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones (pleasure-sensitive areas of the body).

13. Freud’s Psychosexual Stages (According to Freud…) pg. 482
Focus
Oral
0-18 months
Pleasure centers on the mouth – suckling, biting, chewing
Anal
18-36 months
Pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination – coping with demands for control (potty-training)
Phallic
3-6 years
Pleasure zone is the genitals; coping with incestuous sexual feelings
Boys develop an Oedipus complex – a boy’s sexual desires towards his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father.
Girls develop a similar Electra complex
Latency
6-puberty
Dormant sexual feelings
Children cope with threatening sexual feelings and develop identification – the process by which children incorporate their parents’ values into their developing superegos.
Identification with same-sex parents produces gender identity
Genital
Puberty +
Maturation of sexual interests

14. Fixation
At any point in the oral, anal, or phallic stages, Freud claimed that individuals could develop maladaptive behaviors and fixate on the pleasure seeking-energies of that phase.
Fixation – a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were not resolved.
Ex: a person with an oral fixation (due to early weaning) may over-eat or begin to smoke  satisfy oral gratification.

15. Wednesday, March 8 Describe the id, ego, superego dynamic.
What are the psychosexual stages of development?
What are some ways to measure a person’s personality?
Today’s topic:
Psychoanalytic Perspective of Personality and Humanistic Approach
Upcoming Dates:
Homework:
Terms
Read your assigned section and the rest of the chapter by Friday
Assessments:
Monday, March 13

16. Defense Mechanisms
The constant conflict between the id and superego leads the ego to fear losing control  unfocused anxiety.
Defense mechanisms – in psychoanalytic theory, the ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.

17. Freud’s Defense Mechanisms
Definition
Example
Repression
Banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from the conscious
Children do not remember their childhood lust for their parents.
Regression
When an individual retreats to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixed.
Facing the anxious first day of school, a child may retreat to sucking their thumb.
Homesick college students may long for the security and comfort of home.
Reaction Formation
The ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites (people express feelings that are the opposite of their anxiety-arousing unconscious feelings)
“I hate him”  “I love him”

18. Freud’s Defense Mechanisms
Definition
Example
Projection
People disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.
“He doesn’t trust me” may actually be because of the feeling “I don’t trust him” or “I don’t trust myself”
A wife who is cheating on her husband, accuses him of cheating on her
Rationalization
Offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions
An alcoholic may say they only drink when around friends.
Displacement
Shifts sexual or aggressive impulses towards a more acceptable or less threatening object or person.
A student upset over failing a test may snap at their roommate over something trivial.
A child who fears expressing anger against their parents may displace it by kicking the family pet.

19. Thursday, March 9 What is the Thematic Apperception Test?
What are some criticisms of the psychoanalytic perspective?
What are some ways to measure a person’s personality from the psychoanalytic perspective?
Today’s topic:
Psychoanalytic Perspective of Personality
Upcoming Dates:
Homework:
Terms
Complete your assigned google slides by tomorrow
Read all of chapter 10
Assessments:
Monday, March 13

20. Freud and Neo-Freudians

21. Neo-Freudians Accept Freud’s basic beliefs except…
Do not believe sexual and aggressive tendencies are prime motivators
Believe the ego has more control that Freud assumed
Alfred Adler and Karen Horney – social rather than sexual tensions in childhood influences personality
Alfred Adler
Inferiority complex
Karen Horney
“Penis envy” does not make women feel inferior
Helplessness in childhood triggered need for love and security

22. Neo-Freudians
Carl Jung suggested a collective unconscious – concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species’ history.
Some cultures have similar traditions, myths, and images (ex: symbolic image of a mother as nurturing)

23. Contemporary Psychodynamic Theorists and Therapists
Do not believe:
sexual tensions are the root of personality
refute the id-ego-superego structure
do not emphasize psychosexual stages.
Do believe:
that our mental life is largely unconscious and that we often struggle with inner conflicts among our wishes, fears, and values
that childhood experiences shape our personalities.

24. Assessing Unconscious Processes
How do you study or test the unconscious if it is impossible to consciously access?
Projective test – a personality test that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one’s inner dynamics.
The stimulus has no inherent meaning or significance, so individuals use it as a projection screen for their unconscious interests and conflicts.

26. Projective Tests
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) – a projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes.

27. Projective Tests
Rorschach inkblot test – the most widely used projective test, a set of 10 inkblots, designed by Hermann Rorschach; seeks to identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots.
Neither TAT or Rorschach seem to be reliable or valid, however are still widely used.

28. Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective
Freud’s questioning during therapy sessions could have created false memories of childhood abuse. (Is repression even real?)
Little research suggests that defense mechanisms disguise sexual or aggressive tendencies.
Children usually develop gender roles before 5/6 years old

29. The Modern Unconscious Mind
Modern psychologists agree that there is a large part of our mind and mental processes to which we have limited access  a vast amount of information processing occurs unconsciously.

30. Freud’s Legacy
Freud’s theories attempt to explain how past experiences may have influenced current behaviors or personality, but they fail to predict behavior.
Critics would argue that this is a major flaw.
Supporters claim that the psychodynamic theory never claimed to do this, so does it really matter?
While Freud is contested in the psychological community, his legacy lives on in culture.

31. Your assignment:
In groups of 6, you are going to create a google slide show to share with the other group members and me. The remaining perspectives should be included:
Humanistic perspective
Trait Perspective
Social-cognitive perspective
Groups should divide in 3 groups of 2
With each perspective you should know the following:
The general overview of each
The key contributors and important terms and concepts
The type of tests used to assess your personality
Criticism and evaluation