Transcript EXPLORING PSYCHOLOGY (7th Edition in Modules) David Myers

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
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Personality
The Psychoanalytic Perspective
Overview
 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’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
(1856-1939)
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Exploring the Unconscious
A reservoir (unconscious mind) of thoughts,
wishes, feelings, and memories of which we are
unaware.
http://www.english.upenn.edu
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“In each of us there is another
whom we do not know.”
-Carl
Jung in my
• “There’s
someone
head, but it’s not me”
– Pink Floyd, Brain Damage
Figure 2.38 Try this!
Myers: Psychology, Eighth Edition
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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
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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Dream Analysis
Another method to analyze the unconscious
mind is through interpreting manifest and
latent contents of dreams.
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Model of Mind
The mind is like an iceberg. It is mostly hidden,
and below the surface lies the unconscious
mind
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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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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
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conscience) and for future aspirations.
Personality Development
Freud believed that personality formed
during the first few years of life divided
into psychosexual stages.
During these stages the id’s pleasureseeking energies focus on pleasure
sensitive body areas called erogenous
zones.
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Psychosexual Stages
Freud divided the development of personality
into five psychosexual stages.
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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.
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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)
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Identification
From the K. Vandervelde private collection
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.
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Defense Mechanisms: The ego’s
protective methods of reducing anxiety
by unconsciously distorting reality.
1. Repression/sublimation banishes anxietyarousing 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 26. .
screw it
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• 2. Regression leads an individual faced
with anxiety to retreat to a more infantile
psychosexual stage.
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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.
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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.
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The Neo-Freudians
Like Freud, Adler
believed in childhood
tensions. However, these
tensions were social in
nature and not sexual.
National Library of Medicine
A child struggles with an
inferiority complex
(infantile feelings of
helplessness)
Alfred Adler (1870-1937)
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The Neo-Freudians
Like Adler, Horney
believed in the social
aspects of childhood
growth and
development.
The Bettmann Archive/ Corbis
She countered Freud’s
assumption that
women have weak
superegos and suffer
from “penis envy.”
Karen Horney (1885-1952)
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The Neo-Freudians
Archive of the History of American Psychology/ University of Akron
Jung believed in the
collective
unconscious, which
contained a common
reservoir of images
derived from our
species’ universal
experiences.
Carl Jung (1875-1961)
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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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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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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.
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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).
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Evaluating the Psychoanalytic
Perspective
Modern Research
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.
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Evaluating the Psychoanalytic
Perspective
Modern Research
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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1997)
EXPLORING
PSYCHOLOGY
(7th Edition in Modules)
David Myers
PowerPoint Slides
Aneeq Ahmad
Henderson State University
Worth Publishers, © 2008
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