Personality 1

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Personality
Psychodynamic
Approaches
Common Components
• Psychodynamic theories emphasize
personality as a dynamic process
representing the conflict of various
multidirectional sources of psychic energy
that motivate an individual to behave in a
particular way.
Conflict
Biology and Adaptation
• Because an individual cannot satisfy all
these multidirectional sources of psychic
energy at one time, conflict naturally
ensues.
• Biological drives (particularly sexual ones)
play a major role in the psychodynamic
theories as one source of conflict that
individuals must resolve in adapting to their
environment.
• Because adaptive demands change as we
age, psychodynamic theories place
considerable emphasis on the influence of
early childhood experiences on our
resulting adulthood personality.
The Unconscious
• Determinism, or the idea that we have little
control over the forces that rule our
behavior, is another feature of
psychodynamic theories.
• The neo-Freudians, or theorists that
followed in Freud's wake, de-emphasized
determinism, choosing instead to
emphasize more control over one's actions.
• The influence of unconscious forces on
behavior is also stressed in some form or
fashion by psychodynamic theories.
• Keep in mind that t Freud and other
psychodynamic theorists were clinicians, as
are many psychodynamic theorists today.
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• Consequently, their data is obtained from
clinical observations of patients seeking
treatment, a selective sample under
uncontrolled conditions, which will have
implications when evaluating this approach.
Sigmund Freud:
Psychoanalysis
• The structure of personality
• Defense mechanisms
• The stages of development.
The Structure Of Personality
• For Freud, the mind had two basic levels:
unconscious thought and conscious
thought.
• Freud usually added d a pre-conscious level l
too, which acted as a kind of storage buffer
for items currently out of awareness that
could easily be brought into conscious
thought.
• Freud also divided the mind into three
structures operating within these levels of
consciousness: the id, the ego, and the
super ego.
• The id and super ego are largely
unconscious, while the ego was mostly
consciousness.
The Id
• the id is the unconscious personality
structure which represents the instinctive,
and irrational source of primitive impulses.
• It functions via a primary-process thought. ht
• That form of thought is irrational, driven by
instincts, and not in touch with reality.
The Id
• Infants are capable only of primary-process
thought.
• Adults mainly experience it in dreams or in
slips of the tongue because adult conscious
thought will not accept it.
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The Id
• For example, Freud believed that dreaming
represented two forms of content: manifest
content and latent content.
• Manifest content t consists of the actual
dream imagery, and latent content is the
symbolic interpretation of manifest content.
The Id
• Latent content’s function is to protect the
person from primary-process thought
because of its unacceptability to the
conscious mind.
• Sometimes, multiple latent content items
can be represented together in an image.
Freud termed the dreaming of such images
condensation.
The Id
• Freudian theory states that dreams also
function in wish fulfillment.
• Thus, the id's impulses that are
unacceptable in reality could be released
safely in dreams.
• The id is governed by the pleasure
principle, or the notion of pursuing
immediate gratification, regardless of
external realities.
The Ego
• The second structure of the personality, the
ego, is the surface of the personality, the
part you show the world.
• The ego is governed by the reality principle,
i in which it responds to the world as it is,
and not as a person may want or believe it
should be.
The Ego
• The ego uses secondary-process thought,
which is rational and grounded in reality.
• The ego, then is the mind’s interface with
the world and it mediates between the id’s
desires and the world's constraints,
constantly seeking acceptable
compromises for both.
The Superego
• The third structure of Freud's personality
structure is a superego. The superego
represents the personal unconscious
representation of society's s values and
norms.
• It develops later than the ego, primarily
through interaction with others, especially
parents are caretakers.
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The Superego
• As such, much of the superego consists of
a personal replica of parental superegos.
• The idealistic principle governs the
superego. That principle i mostly reflects
personal conceptions of morality, not
reality. Consequently, the superego, as
well as the id, is irrational.
The Superego
• The superego is subdivided into two parts:
the conscience and the ego-ideal.
• The conscience develops from the
experience with punishments and rewards,
and thus it is represented by the familiar
metaphor of an angel and the devil on each
shoulder. The conscience decides what
course of action one should take.
The Superego
• The eco-ideal is an idealized view of one's
self and, therefore, reflects societal and
moral ideal behavior (e.g., "good children
do not hit their siblings")
).
• Comparisons are made between the egoideal
and one's actual behavior. Both parts
of the superego develop with experience
with others, or via social interactions.
Defense Mechanisms
• Because the demands of the id and the
superego are often diametrically opposed,
the ego needs some form of protection
from these urges. Freud proposed the idea
of defense mechanisms to address this
issue. Defense mechanisms are
unconscious methods used to protect the
ego from the simultaneous pleasure urges
of the id and the moral demands of the
superego.
Defense Mechanisms
• The main defense mechanisms are denial,
repression, projection, displacement,
sublimation, reaction formation,
rationalization, and regression.
Denial
• A reality that causes anxiety is simply not
perceived. One fails to acknowledge
possible negative consequences of their
behavior.
• For example, partying the night before final
exams would be denial, or driving under the
influence of alcohol is denying the effects of
alcohol on the body and mind.
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Denial
• Similarly, a mother may unconsciously
refuse to see your son's true character
because it is too anxiety-arousing.
• The use of denial may lead to abrupt
intrusion of reality into one's life.
• The mother, for example, may receive the
news that her son has been arrested for
armed robbery.
Repression
• Repression is when highly anxiety-arousing
items are involuntarily stored deep in the
unconscious, where they will not affect
conscious activities.
• Repressed items, however, may
symbolically manifest themselves in
dreams or in slips of the tongue.
Repression
• A repressed item is not readily available for
recall. Instead it may spontaneously
appear later, unexpectedly, yet supposedly
when the individual may be better prepared
to deal with the anxiety of the event.
• For example, a young woman started to
experience extreme panic when her
daughter turned three years old. She was
extremely vigilant and protective of her
daughter.
Repression
• When examining this change in her
behavior under therapy, she recalled
having been sexually molested herself
when she was three years of age and this
event has been repressed for over two
decades.
Projection
• Projection is attributing one's thoughts,
desires, or feelings to someone or
something else.
• One partner may say to another, "you want
to date other people," when in reality these
are the desires of that person.
Displacement
• Displacement is a redirection of energy
from the source that caused it to a safer
substitute.
• A professional athlete t may throw his glove
on the field when in reality he is angry at
his coach or the umpire.
• Similarly, a young child may punch a wall
or throw her toys after being reprimanded
by a parent.
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Sublimation
• Sublimation also redirects energy to a more
socially acceptable one as in displacement,
but this redirection is usually more
productive than is seen in displacement.
• For example, attraction to a married person
may be redirected into exercising after
seeing this person. Aggressive instincts
may also be sublimated, as when after a
huge argument, you may clean your house
or car.
Reaction Formation
• Reaction formation is showing the exact
opposite of one's true motivation or
intentions.
• Saying "I hate you" may indicate love
instead. Or believing that you love to teach
may be necessary after you've spent years
preparing and then found out that the only
job you could obtain was in a horrible
school with violent students.
Rationalization
• The choice is to admit you wasted your
time and energy preparing for such a job or
to believe that you enjoy it.
• Rationalization is realizing that one's
motives are not always pure or publicly
acceptable and substituting appropriate
explanations for these motives.
• For example, failing to study because one
was "exhausted" rather than "lazy" is an
example. Being lazy is not seen as a
socially acceptable motivation.
Regression
• Similarly, an alcoholic may claim the
drinking helps "calm me down" or "allows
me to be more sociable."
• Regression occurs when the coping
behaviors of an earlier developmental
stage reappear.
• For example, crying or throwing a tantrum t
may be used to cope with a stressful event.
• Typically, we view such behaviors as
inappropriate for adults and further, as
holdovers from an earlier time (childhood)
when such behaviors were more
acceptable.
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Regression
• Consequently, it is not uncommon for an
older sibling to start wetting the bed or
sucking his or her thumb when a baby is
added to the family.
Stages Of Personality
Development
• For Freud, personality characteristics result
from the manner in which we resolve all
four stages of psychosexual conflict.
• The first stage, the oral stage, runs from
birth to age 2. In the oral stage infants and
toddlers derive pleasure primarily through
their most sensitive area, the mouth. They
also learn to use their mouth to
communicate.
Stages Of Personality
Development
• The next stage is the anal stage. In the
anal stage, from two to four years of age,
children derive pleasure from the
elimination of bodily wastes.
Stages Of Personality
Development
• The phallic stage (four to six years of age)
is probably the most controversial. In this
stage, children discover their sexual
differences as they derive pleasure from
self-stimulation.
Stages Of Personality
Development
• Per Freud, this stage can give rise to
Oedipus (for males) and Electra (for
females) conflicts, in which young children
have unconscious incestuous desires for
the opposite-sex parent (boys fall in love
with their mothers and girls fall in love with
their fathers), and fear or hate the same
sex parent.
Stages Of Personality
Development
• To reduce the anxiety of the ego in dealing
with these id desires and super ego
demands (one should love parents, not
hate them), the ego engages in several
defense mechanisms.
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Stages Of Personality
Development
• These feelings for the opposite-sex parent
are sublimated into more appropriate
activities; the child engages in reaction
formation and identifies or becomes more
like the same sex parent in order to reduce
the fear and anger toward this parent; and
the defense mechanism of repression
accounts for why no one can remember the
events of the stage.
Stages Of Personality
Development
• Those complexes lead, according to
Freudian theory, to normal differentiation of
male and female personalities.
• The phallic stage is followed by a latency
period in which little new development is
observable. In this stage, boys typically
play with boys, and girls with girls. Sexual
interest is low or nonexistent.
Stages Of Personality
Development
• The final stage, the genital stage, starts
around 12 years of age and ends with the
climax of puberty.
• Repressed sexual interest t from the phallic
stage is reawakened at this time and are
transferred into an appropriate oppositesex
age-mate (rather than the parent).
Stages Of Personality
Development
• To Freud, not all individuals adequately
resolve the psychosexual conflicts,
receiving either too little or too much
stimulation in a particular stage.
• This inadequate resolution is reflected in
fixations or a preoccupation in adulthood
with the demands of these stages.
Evaluating Freud's Theory
• Freud's theory has been criticized for
relying on qualitative case studies of his
own patients (many of them women,
referred to him because of hysterical
symptoms).
• Many feel he placed too much emphasis on
sex and aggression.
The Neo-Freudians
• Freud's influence was such that he inspired
others (much like Piaget) to learn about his
theory.
• The term Neo-Freudians (new Freudians)
often is used to describe those
psychoanalysts who proposed changes to
Freud's original theory in some way, both
before and after Freud's death.
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The Neo-Freudians
• All of the neo-Freudians accepted much of
Freud's ideas, however; they simply made
modifications in one emphasis or another,
creating their own theories within the
psychodynamic approach.
Alfred Adler: Individual
Psychology
• Adler was the first of Freud's adherents to
break with Freud and propose own
psychodynamic theory.
• He was an early student t of Freud, but then
began to disagree with many of his views.
• He disagreed with Freud over the nature of
forces within a person, arguing that they
were consistent with one another rather
than competing, as Freud proposed.
Alfred Adler: Individual
Psychology
• To Adler, they were consistent in their drive
toward superiority, which gives meaning to
our lives.
• Adler emphasized the terms of superiority
it
and inferiority and named complexes after
both.
• He actually was introducing social factors
into psychodynamic theory by arguing that
social interactions lead to such feelings.
Alfred Adler: Individual
Psychology
• His thinking also was focused on the future,
on expectations. Freud, instead, focused
on a person's past.
• Adler's future orientation ti led him to
conceptualize a strong role for future
fictions or our perceptions of reality (which
may or may not be accurate).
Alfred Adler: Individual
Psychology
• Notice it is not only how one is treated, but
how one thinks they will be treated and how
one interprets how they are treated that
influences one's drive toward superiority
(subjective perceptions).
Carl Jung: Analytical
Psychology
• Jung developed a more complex version of
psychoanalysis, introducing more terms
and constructs.
• Jung accepted Freud's division i i of the mind
into conscious and unconscious, but he
expanded on the contents of the
unconscious.
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Carl Jung: Analytical
Psychology
• For Jung, the unconscious consists of the
personal unconscious and the collective
unconscious.
• The personal unconscious stores each
individual's unique and personal
experiences, which are further organized
into complexes, or emotionally charged
thoughts and memories, which function
independently.
Carl Jung: Analytical
Psychology
• The collective unconscious contains
species-wide memories and accounts for
the commonalities of human experience: a
reservoir of inherited unconscious
memories from one's ancestors.
• Archetypes were found in the collective
unconscious, which account for why people
tend to perceive and act on the
environment in similar ways.
Carl Jung: Analytical
Psychology
• So, whereas complexes in the personal
unconscious are unique and individualized,
archetypes are shared among all of us.
• They account for mythical, legendary,
religious, and cultural commonalities.
Carl Jung: Analytical
Psychology
• Four important archetypes are the persona
(the part of ourselves that we show to the
world), the shadow (the part of ourselves
that we hide from others or ourselves), the
anima (the feminine side of a male's
personality), and the animus (the masculine
side of a female's personality).
Carl Jung: Analytical
Psychology
• Other archetypes also play important roles,
including the great mother, the wise old
man, and the hero.
• These archetypes may facilitate t or
complicate our interpersonal relationships
with each other.
• To Jung, personality is reflected in all these
various parts that the self integrates into a
coherent whole.
Karen Horney:
Psychoanalytic Theory
• Horney, too, broke with Freud's conception
of psychodynamic theory.
• She saw the Freudian version as too male-
oriented and too biological. i l She argued
that personality and gender differences
stem from cultural expectations, not from
biology.
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Karen Horney:
Psychoanalytic Theory
• Her theory emphasizes basic anxiety, or
anxiety that is generated by the competitive
nature of the modern world.
• In her view, people develop strategies t to
cope with anxiety in three ways.
Karen Horney:
Psychoanalytic Theory
• Demonstrating affection or submissiveness
moves us toward others as a way of coping
with anxiety; striving for power, prestige or
possession moves us against others in an
effort to reduce anxiety, and withdrawal
simply moves us away from others as a
mechanism for dealing with anxiety.
Object-Relations Theories
• Object-relations theory is a present-day
continuation of Freudian theory. However,
it focuses more on our relationships with
others and how we represent these
relationships.
• In this theory, objects are the mental
representations of important people and
provide the basis for the organization of the
self.
Object-Relations Theories
• Successful relations with these objects
foster emotional stability where as
unsuccessful relations foster mental
disorders.
• Additional differences separate objectrelations
theory from classical
psychodynamic theory.
Object-Relations Theories
• First, object-relations theorists delve further
into the person's past than did Freud,
viewing the attachment to the mother as
more instrumental in understanding
behavior.
• They look for attachment difficulties, for
example, or for particularly harsh marine
environments to explain later maladaptive
behaviors.
Object-Relations Theories
• Consequently, for object-relations theorists,
it is the relationship with the mother (rather
than the father as proposed by Freud)
during the attachment process (rather than
the Oedipal stage) that is critical to
understanding adult personality.
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Object-Relations Theories
• Moreover, whereas in Freud's theory
explaining female development was
problematic, just the opposite is true for
object-relations theorists, who must explain
how males separate from the attachment to
the mother to re-identify with the father.
Evaluating The
Psychodynamic Approach
• The approach has been enormously
influential without generating much
experimental support.
• Freud's version is fairly comprehensive, but
some Neo-Freudian versions have been
limited in their scope.
• Finally, the paradigm is fairly simple and
has produced a large number of treatments
and techniques.
Evaluating The
Psychodynamic Approach
• Freud is often criticized because he did not
test his theory scientifically.
• Some theorists believe psychodynamic
theory is too deterministic i ti and fatalistic ti in
its approach to human nature, but it
remains an active avenue of research
today.
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