Chapter 14 – Personality ’16 (no spaces)
Perspectives:
- Psychoanalytic (AKA psychodynamic) – Freud background, psychoanalysis, unconscious – free association, hypnosis; repression – slips, dreams – manifest and latent
**personality structure: id, ego, superego – with eros, libido, reality principle, thanatos; iceberg and cesspool analogies, preconscious, unconscious;
**psychosexual stages of development / tasks / fixations, erogenous zones
-oral, anal with expulsive, retentive, phallic with Oedipal and Electra Complexes, penis envy, castration anxiety, latency with repression, identification, genital
**ego defense mechanisms: repression vs. suppression, regression, reaction formation, projection, rationalization, displacement, denial, sublimation
-evaluating the P.A. perspective: colleagues / critics the neoFreudians, psychodynamic: Alfred Adler – inferiority complex,
Karen Horney – childhood anxiety, learned helplessness, versus Freud’s sexism ,
Carl Jung – personal and collective unconscious, symbols, archetypes, persona, ego / self, unconscious(es), the shadow…, individuation
-PERSONALITY TYPES Myers-Briggs Type Indicator!
-(plus Erik Erikson)
-assessing the unconscious: projective tests: TAT, Rorschach and issues
-modern day research says; the modern view of the unconscious: repression, terror-management theory
2. Humanistic – Abraham Maslow – third-force perspective; hierarchy of needs, self-actualization / self-transcendence, components, peak experiences; Carl Rogers – person-centered perspective, client-centered therapy, genuineness, acceptance and empathy, unconditional positive regard, self-concept: ideal versus real self (organism)
-assessing: interviews / relationships
-evaluating: importance of, criticisms, evil…
3. Trait perspective – history – Greeks, Sheldon, Jung Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI); factor analysis (again) Eysenck divisions (f14.3, page 587), biology and personality, the stigma of introversion
-assessing: personality inventories – MMPI; empirically derived, the Big Five – stable, heritable, cultural?, predict?;person-situation controversy, self-reports versus peer reports
-evaluating: personal (“disposition”) versus situation controversy: Mischel, Rosenthal – consistency of
expressive style
4. Social-Cognitive perspective: Bandura (again); AKA reciprocal determinism – reciprocal influences, -assessing: situational tests
-evaluating: THE SELF – possible selves, spotlight effect; self-esteem and self-effficacy: benefits, excessive optimism, blindness to incompetence -- self-serving bias / too high: pride, aggression, narcissism, secure self-esteem
Chapter 14 – Personality ’16 (with spaces)
Perspectives:
1. Psychoanalytic (AKA psychodynamic) – Freud background, psychoanalysis, unconscious – free association, hypnosis; repression – slips, dreams – manifest and latent
**personality structure: id, ego, superego – with eros, libido, reality principle, thanatos; iceberg and cesspool analogies, preconscious, unconscious;
**psychosexual stages of development / tasks / fixations, erogenous zones
-oral, anal with expulsive, retentive, phallic with Oedipal and Electra Complexes, penis envy, castration anxiety, latency with repression, identification, genital
**ego defense mechanisms: repression vs. suppression, regression, reaction formation, projection, rationalization, displacement, denial, sublimation
-evaluating the P.A. perspective: colleagues / critics the neoFreudians, psychodynamic: Alfred Adler – inferiority complex,
Karen Horney – childhood anxiety, learned helplessness, versus Freud’s sexism ,
Carl Jung – personal and collective unconscious, symbols, archetypes, persona, ego / self, unconscious(es), the shadow…, individuation
-PERSONALITY TYPES Myers-Briggs Type Indicator!
-(plus Erik Erikson)
-assessing the unconscious: projective tests: TAT, Rorschach and issues
-modern day research says; the modern view of the unconscious: repression, terror-management theory
2. Humanistic – Abraham Maslow – third-force perspective; hierarchy of needs, self-actualization / self-transcendence, components, peak experiences; Carl Rogers – person-centered perspective, client-centered therapy, genuineness, acceptance and empathy, unconditional positive regard, self-concept: ideal versus real self (organism)
-assessing: interviews / relationships
-evaluating: importance of, criticisms, evil…
3. Trait perspective – history – Greeks, Sheldon, Jung Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI); factor analysis (again)
Eysenck divisions (f14.3, page 587), biology and personality, the stigma of introversion
-assessing: personality inventories – MMPI; empirically derived, the Big Five – stable, heritable, cultural?, predict?; person-situation controversy, self-reports versus peer reports
-evaluating: personal (“disposition”) versus situation controversy: Mischel, Rosenthal – consistency of
expressive style
4. Social-Cognitive perspective: Bandura (again); AKA reciprocal determinism – reciprocal influences, -assessing: situational tests
-evaluating: THE SELF – possible selves, spotlight effect; self-esteem and self-effficacy: benefits, excessive optimism, blindness to incompetence -- self-serving bias / too high: pride, aggression, narcissism, secure self-esteem
Chapter 15 –Chapter complete notes
-Personality –the characteristic pattern of someone’s actions, thought process, and feelings. If someone is very consistent between all of these aspects, they are said to have a “strong” personality.
Perspectives:
1. Psychoanalytic (AKA psychodynamic) – Freud’s theory of personality that attributes our thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts.
FREUD:
-Background- Sigmund Freud was a brilliant young man, spent many hours studying a day, so much so that he went into debt for buying too many books. After graduating from medical school, he started a private practice office that focused on nervous disorders. He soon found things unexplainable, so he decided to try to explain this unexplainable.
-Unconscious- A reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. It is also a place where information processing that we are unaware of occurs.
-Free association- A method of retrieving unconscious information from someone’s thoughts by having them relax and say whatever comes to mind. Freud believed that free association allowed him to trace this line of thought through the unconscious, so he could then retrieve the painful unconscious memory, which was often from childhood.
-Hypnosis-Freud originally thought that this way of regaining unconscious thoughts would work, but not all patients could experience hypnosis to its full extent.
-Repression- things that we forcibly block from our consciousness because they would be too unsettling to acknowledge. For example, if someone has the desire to marry their mother, they push this feeling down into the unconscious so that they don’t have to deal with it.
-Slips- When someone says something out of context unintentionally. An example of this would be someone accidentally saying they bore you, when they really meant to say that they adore you. Freud believed that these occurrences were not accidental at all. In fact, he went so far as to think that this is really what the person wanted to say, but had repressed the thoughts into the unconscious.
- Dreams- Freud believed that this was the “royal road to the unconscious”. By analyzing people’s dreams, he could find out their hidden conflicts and tensions.
-Manifest- The remembered content of dreams.
-Latent- Desires and wishes that are concealed within a dream in various forms.
**personality structure:
-Freud believed that there is a never-ending struggle in the human personality that forces us to resolve the basic conflict between doing what we instinctively want to and doing what we think is morally acceptable.
-Id- A reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to Freud, strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. It operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification. Someone who is more of an “id dominated” person, rather than do things in the present that will benefit life in the future, will do things that satisfy their immediate instincts, such as use tobacco, drink alcohol, and consume other drugs.
-containseros(life force) and libido (sexual desire)
-Ego- This part of the unconscious seeks to satisfy the needs that are realistic and can last longer than those of the id. Without the ego, someone would be free to indulge in any sexual or aggressive behavior without restraint or regret. The ego struggles to reconcile with both the superego and the id’s needs. It is the “executive” mediating the impulsive demands of the id, and restraining demands of the superego.
-Superego-The voice of the conscience that forces the ego to reflect on not only the real but the ideal, and that focuses solely on how one ought to behave. It strives for perfection, and judges everything as positive or negative, creating either pride or guilt.
-containsthanatos – knowledge of one’s own death
-Iceberg analogy-Consciousness is the iceberg’s visible tip, and the executive mediator which is known as the ego. The id dwells below the surface, in the totally unconscious. The superego resides both below the water and above the water, operating in the unconscious and the conscious.
-Cesspool analogy-Like a cesspool, thoughts, feelings, and memories that are not wanted are placed in the unconscious pool. After a long time, these emotions descend to the bottom of the pool. As the plunger tries to push the memories further down, some pop up to the top and reveal themselves.
Repression: the plunger
**psychosexual stages of development: control, power
-Tasks-The oral stage, which is from about 0-18 months, focuses on the pleasure centers of the mouth (sucking, biting, and chewing) – fixated: mouth issues – obsessive eating, drinking, smoking, talking, sarcasm, overly demanding, narcissistic, dependent, BREASTS!
The anal stage (18-36 months) focuses on bowel and bladder elimination and coping with demands for control.
-fixated: expulsive – a messy – and overly rebellious, explosive, giving; retentive – OCD cleaning
The Phallic stage, lasting from ages 3-6, concentrates on the pleasure zone as the genitals, and has to do with coping with incestuous sexual feelings. This is the time where boys seek to fulfill their desire to essentially have sex with their mother, and kill their father.
-fixated: SEX! Porn, masturbating, promiscuity, flirting; or opposite – fear of, very Puritanical
Oedipal Complex – boy for mother, kill dad; Electra Complex – girl for dad, kill mom
-penis envy (girls’ source of anxiety / depression), castration anxiety (power struggle, boys versus dad)
MASSIVE GUILT, REPRESSION to end this period / enter latency
The latency period lasts from about 6-puberty, and deals with dormant sexual feelings; massive repression to get out of guilt of the phallic stage!
-fixated: gay – overidentification with one’s own sex
The genital stage lasts from puberty to death and it applies to the maturation of sexual interests.
-healthy hetero, balanced, according to Freud
-Fixations- A lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, where conflicts were unresolved. A person who shows the inability to cope with certain aspects of life is the result of the unresolved conflicts in childhood.
-Erogenous zones- pleasure-sensitive areas of the body, which are oral, anal, and genital areas.
**ego defense mechanisms:
-In psychoanalytic theory, the ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.
-Repression- the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness. Because repression is often incomplete, Freud believed that the repressed urges seep out in dream symbols and slips of the tongue.
-rationalization: the conscious version: making excuses
-suppression: the preconscious version; can be consciously accessible
-Regression- the defense mechanism that causes one to retreat to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated. For example, when someone feels stressed, they may retreat to doing something they did as a child, such as thumb sucking.
-Reaction Formation- another defense mechanism. This mechanism makes certain feelings seem the opposite. For example, if a person hated another, it would seem to everyone else that they loved them.
-Projection- A defense mechanism where someone disguises threatening impulses by attributing them to others. An example of this is thinking you don’t trust other people, when really, you don’t trust yourself, or suspecting that everyone else is a thief, when you are a thief.
-Rationalization- Creating a reason for doing things so that we can hide ourselves from the real reasons. If a student fails to study, they may say that studying makes a person dull.
-Displacement- Channeling undesired feelings into something or someone that has nothing to do with the problem. For example, if someone felt angry because they lost their job, they might go home and hit the wall. The wall was not the source of the problem, but it helped the person to get their feelings out that way.
Sublimation – Channeling the undesired or unacceptable desires into something socially accepted. No down side!
Evaluating the P.A. perspective:
Colleagues / critics “Neo-Freudian (“psychodynamic”): People who accepted Freud’s basic ideas: the personality structures of the id, ego, and superego; the importance of the unconsciousness; the shaping of personality in childhood; and the dynamics of anxiety and the defense mechanisms. They placed more emphasis on the role of consciousness, and doubted that sex and aggression were all-consuming motivations.
-Alfred Adler– inferiority complex-He believed that much of our behavior is driven by efforts to conquer childhood feelings of inferiority, feelings that trigger our striving for superiority and power.
-Karen Horney – childhood anxiety, versus Freud’s sexism- She explained that childhood anxiety, caused by the dependent child’s sense of helplessness, triggers our desire for love and security. She countered Freud’s assumptions that women have weak superegos and suffer “penis envy”, and she attempted to balance the bias she detected in this masculine view of psychology.
-Carl Jung – persona, ego / self, personal and collective unconscious - To Jung, the unconscious was not just a place where our repressed thoughts and feelings resided. He felt it was also a place where images derived from our species’ universal experiences.
Carl Jung used to follow Freud than changed his view. He believed that the unconscious had more thoughts than just repressed feelings and thoughts.
Persona: one’s social presentation of self
Ego/self: actual self; should be in line with social and unconscious parts of self
Collective unconsciousness- Carl Jung concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our specie’s history. Filled with symbols / archetypes of all the race. The collective unconscious is in contrast to our personal unconscious – our own life memories. Both are the source of fears and inspirations, but the fears we put into The Shadow. To become whole, we must bring these out into the light (ie, our awareness)
Assessing the unconscious:
Projective tests: a personality test that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one’s inner dynamics.
-TAT- Thematic Apperception Test, which is a projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes.
-Rorschach and issues-The Rorschach inkblot test is 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. The problem with this test is whether or not it is reliable and valid. There is not universally accepted system for scoring and interpreting the test. Even though it is used throughout society, it seems unjust because even normal adults can be seen as pathological because of this test.
-modern day research says: Although many people critique Freud on many of his ideas, most realize the importance of what he came up with. Recent research contradicts many of his specific ideas. His ideas about gender identity and conscience are questionable because many people become strongly masculine or feminine without the same-sex parent present. His questioning also may have created false memories. New ideas about why we dream dispute Freud’s belief that dreams disguise and fulfill wishes.
The Modern Unconscious Mind:Modern perspective-Cognitive science reveals that, more than most of us realize, our lives are guided by off-screen, out-of-sight, nonconscious information processing. The unconscious mind is huge.
-Terror-management theory- An idea that faith in one’s worldview and the pursuit of self-esteem provide protection against deeply rooted fear of death.
Assessing Unconscious Processes
Tests are used to assess personality.
A projective test is a test such as the Rorschach (inkblot) or TAT that provided ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one’s inner dynamics.
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) - people express inner feelings and interests through stories that are made up about ambiguous scenes.
Rorschach inkblot test- most widely used projective test. Identifies people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots. Oftentimes used as an icebreaker between client and doctor or psychologist.