1. AP Psychology Feb. 6th Objective Opener
Evaluate the main personality perspectives by completing a graphic organizer.
Apply Freud’s theories to a case study (Id, Ego, Superego) and scenarios (defense mechanisms)
Share your results from your personality test webquest with your group.

2. What is Personality? Personality
How people differ at the individual level
Personality
An individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting

3. The Psychoanalytic Perspective
Freud’s Theory
Unconscious motivations influence personality

4. The Psychoanalytic Perspective
Psychoanalysis - Freud
Theory of personality that attributes our thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts
People are motivated by unacceptable passions for sex and aggression, so we repress those motivations from consciousness, causing conflict
Techniques used in treating psychological disorders that seek to expose and interpret unconscious conflicts
Based on the existence of conditions with no basis in neurology (e.g., numb hand but no nerve damage)

5. Psychoanalytic Structure of the Mind
The mind is divided into 3 parts:
Conscious mind contains things that occupy one’s current attention
Preconscious mind contains things that aren’t currently in consciousness, but can be accessed
Unconscious mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings and memories that are beyond awareness

6. Psychoanalytic Personality Structure
Freud’s “iceberg” idea of the mind’s structure
Abstract concepts for understanding the mind’s conflicts between pleasure-seeking and social restraint
Preconscious

7. Psychoanalytic Personality Structure
Personality is also divided into 3 structures:
Id: Governed by inborn instinctual drives, especially those related to sex and aggression
Obeys the pleasure principle
Superego: Motivates people to act in an ideal fashion, according to moral customs of parents and culture
Obeys the idealistic principle
Ego: Induces people to act with reason and deliberation, and to conform to the requirements of the outside world
Obeys the reality principle
Id is entirely in unconscious mind
superego and ego are divided between conscious and unconscious mind

8. Psychoanalytic Personality Structure
Id (unconscious psychic energy)
strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives
operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification (think of an infant)
Must be restrained by reality
“id-dominated” people more often use tobacco, alcohol, drugs

9. Psychoanalytic Personality Structure
Superego (conscience)
Internalized ideals (how we ought to behave)
The conscience
Idealized Self
Internalized Parent
At odds with the id

10. Psychoanalytic Personality Structure
Ego (personality executive)
the largely conscious, “executive mediator” part of personality
In charge of coping with reality by constraining our perceptions, thoughts, judgments and memories
Struggles to reconcile the id and the superego
operates on the reality principle, satisfying the id’s desires in ways that will realistically bring long-term pleasure rather than pain

11. The Cat in The Hat

12. Psychoanalytic Defense Mechanisms
Some Defense Mechanisms
Ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality
Different parts of personality are in constant conflict, especially with regard to the id
Defense mechanisms ward off the resulting anxiety from these conflicts, often through self-deception
Repression
Denial
Reaction formation
Projection
Rationalization
Displacement
Sublimation

13. Psychoanalytic Defense Mechanisms
Repression
Cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory
the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness
Incomplete repression when urges seep out in dream symbols and “Freudian slips”

14. Psychoanalytic Defense Mechanisms
Denial
defense mechanism in which an individual faced with anxiety denies the source of the anxiety

15. Psychoanalytic Defense Mechanisms
Reaction Formation
defense mechanism by which the ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites
people may express feelings that are the opposite of their anxiety-arousing unconscious feelings
e.g., if you are jealous of someone, you may try to become their friend to suppress the jealousy

16. Psychoanalytic Defense Mechanisms
Projection
defense mechanism by which people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others
You accuse your mate of cheating on you because you have been fantasizing about another person

17. Psychoanalytic Defense Mechanisms
Rationalization
defense mechanism that offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions
“It’s okay for me not to vote, because one vote doesn’t matter anyway”
Disguises “I’d rather sleep late/hang out with my friends”, “I haven’t bothered to find out where to vote or the issues or candidates on the ballot” etc.

18. Psychoanalytic Defense Mechanisms
Displacement
defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person
as when redirecting anger toward a safer outlet
You’re mad at your boss, so you punch the wall/kick the dog/yell at your friend, etc.

19. Psychoanalytic Defense Mechanisms
Sublimation
defense mechanism similar to displacement, but has positive (pro-social) consequences

20. Defense Mechanisms Application

21. Reliability v Validity

22. Assessing the Unconscious
If personality emerges from the unconscious, how can we measure it?
Projective Test
a personality test, such as the Rorschach, that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one’s inner dynamics
People interpret unstructured or ambiguous stimuli
Idea is that you “project” true thoughts, feelings into the interpretation, revealing your personality

23. Assessing the Unconscious
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

25. Assessing the Unconscious
Is the Rorschach a good test of personality?
Most scientists say no
Subjective
Not reliable (consistency of results)
Different raters may interpret a patient’s response quite differently
Not valid (do not predict accurately)
Cannot identify who is suicidal and who isn’t
However, some therapists still use these tests today

26. Problems with Freud
Extremely influential on Western culture, but not accepted by many modern psychologists
Criticisms:
Ideas are not testable, nor do they predict behavior
His observations were not scientific
Over-reliance on case studies of disturbed individuals
Biased against women
Freud attributed women’s reports of childhood sexual abuse to unconscious conflicts and a weak superego