Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalysis

• Freud's understanding of human personality based on experiences with patients, self-analysis, and readings in various sciences and humanities
• Used case study approach, not quantifying data
• Oldest child, close to mother; learned hypnotic technique from Jean Martin Charcot and catharsis from Josef Breuer

Levels of Mental Life

• Conscious: relatively minor role, mental elements in awareness at any given point in time
  • Perceptual conscious: outer world acts as a medium for perceiving external stimuli
• Preconscious: contains elements that are not conscious but can become conscious with ease
• Unconscious: contains drives, urges, or instincts beyond awareness, motivating most words, feelings, and actions

Provinces of the Mind

• Id (das es): serves as the pleasure principle, completely unconscious
  • Primary process: blindly seeks to satisfy the id, depends on the development of a secondary process
• Ego (das Ich): governed by reality principle, tries to substitute for the pleasure principle of the id (decision-making branch)
• Superego (Uber Ich): guided by moralistic and idealistic principles
  • Conscience: results from experience with punishments, tells us what not to do
  • Ego ideal: rewards proper behavior, tells us what to do

Dynamics of Personality

• Drives: stimulus within the individual, operates as a constant motivational force
  • Impetus: amount of force it exerts
  • Source: region of the body in tension
  • Aim: seeks pleasure by removing tension
  • Object: person or thing where the aim is satisfied
• Sex (libido)
  • Erogenous zones: genitals, mouth, and anus capable of producing sexual pleasure
  • Sadism and masochism: reception of sexual pleasure from inflicting or experiencing pain
• Aggression: destructive instinct aims to return to an inorganic state
• Anxiety: unpleasant state accompanied by physical sensation
  • Neurotic anxiety: apprehension about unknown danger, stems from ego's relation with the id
  • Moral anxiety: similar to guilt, results from ego's relation with the superego
  • Realistic anxiety: similar to fear, produced by ego's relation with the real world

Defense Mechanisms

• Repression: represses undesirable impulses, forces threatening feelings into the unconscious
• Reaction formation: repression of one impulse and pretentious expression of its opposite
• Displacement: redirecting unacceptable urges and feelings onto people and objects
• Fixation: remaining at a comfortable psychological stage
• Regression: reverting to earlier, more infantile modes of behavior
• Projection: seeing unacceptable feelings or behaviors in others
• Introjection: incorporating positive qualities of another person
• Sublimation: repressing genital aim of Eros by substituting a cultural or social aim

Stages of Development

• Infantile stage: most crucial for personality formation, ages 4-5
• Latency period: little or no sexual growth, ages 5-7
• Genital stage: reawakening of genital aim of Eros, continues into maturity

Alfred Adler: Individual Psychology

• Presents an optimistic view of people, resting on the notion of social interest
• Striving for success and superiority: the one dynamic force behind people's behavior
• Final goal: success or superiority, unifies personality and makes behavior meaningful
• Striving force as compensation: overcoming inferiority feelings through natural tendency to move toward completion
• Striving for personal superiority: goals are personal, motivated by exaggerated feelings of personal inferiority
• Striving for success: psychologically healthy people strive for success of all humankind without losing personal identity

Style of Life

• Self-consistent personality structure develops into a person's style of life
• Includes flavor of a person's life, goal, self-concept, feelings of others, and attitude toward the world
• Creative power: places people in control of their own lives, responsible for final goal and method of striving for that goal

Abnormal Development

• Underdeveloped social interest: most important factor in abnormal development
• Exaggerated physical deficiencies: may contribute to abnormal development by generating subjective and exaggerated feelings of inferiority
• Pampered and neglected style of life: develop low levels of social interest, drive to establish permanent parasitic relationship with mother or mother substitute

Safeguarding Tendencies

• Means of protecting inflated self-esteem against public disgrace and maintaining current style of life
• Excuses: frequently takes the form of "Yes, but" or "If only"
• Aggression: behaving aggressively toward self or others
• Withdrawal: escaping life's problems by running away or maintaining distance

Carl Jung: Analytical Psychology

• Assumption that occult phenomena influence people's lives
• Each person motivated by repressed experiences and the collective unconscious

Levels of the Psyche

• Conscious: images sensed by the ego
• Personal unconscious: repressed, forgotten, or subliminally perceived experiences of one particular individual
• Collective unconscious: beyond personal experiences, originates from repeated experiences of ancestors
• Archetypes: contents of the collective unconscious, originate through repeated experiences of ancestors

Dynamics of Personality

• Causality: present events originate from previous experiences
• Teleology: present events motivated by goals and aspirations for the future
• Progression: adaptation to the outside world involves the forward flow of psychic energy
• Regression: relies on the backward flow of psychic energy

Psychological Types

• Attitudes: predisposition to act or react in a characteristic direction
• Introversion: turning inward of psychic energy, oriented toward the subjective
• Extraversion: outward psychic energy, oriented toward the objective
• Thinking: logical intellectual activity
• Feeling: evaluating an idea or event
• Sensation: receiving physical stimuli and transmitting to perceptual consciousness
• Intuition: perception beyond the workings of consciousness

Development of Personality

• Emphasis on the second half of life
• Middle and old age as times for psychological rebirth, self-realization, and preparation for death
• Self-realization/individuation: process of becoming an individual or whole person

Methods of Investigation

• Word association test: to uncover complexes embedded in the personal unconscious
• Dream analysis: dreams may have both a cause and a purpose, useful in explaining past events and making decisions about the future### Object Relations Theory
• The term "object" refers to any person or part of a person that infants introject, or take into their psychic structure and then later project onto other people.
• Infants have an active, unconscious phantasy life, with images of the "good" breast and the "bad" breast.
• Drives have an object, such as hunger (good breast) and sex (sexual organ).
• Infants organize their experience into positions, such as:
  • Paranoid-Schizoid Position (0-3/4 months): a way of organizing experiences that includes both paranoid feelings of being persecuted and a splitting of internal and external objects into the good and the bad.
  • Depressive Position (4-6 months): feelings of anxiety over losing a loved object coupled with a sense of guilt for wanting to destroy that object.

Psychic Defense Mechanisms

• Introjection: fantasizing taking into their body those perceptions and experiences that they have had with the external object (e.g. mother's breast).
• Projection: the fantasy that one's own feelings and impulses actually reside in another person and not within one's own body.
• Splitting: managing the good and bad aspects of themselves and of external objects in order to keep those incompatible impulses apart.

Internalizations

• Ego: internalizations are supported by the early ego's ability to feel anxiety, to use defense mechanisms, and to form object relations in both phantasy and reality.
• Superego: preceded the Oedipus complex, and is seen as harsh and cruel.

Later Views of Object Relations

• Margaret Mahler's Views:
  • Normal autism (0-3/4 weeks): a period of absolute primary narcissism in which an infant is unaware of any other person.
  • Normal symbiosis (4-5 weeks): when infants behave as if they and their mother were an all-powerful, interdependent unit.
  • Separation-individuation (4 months to 3 years): a time when children are becoming psychologically separated from their mothers and achieving individuation, or a sense of personal identity.
• Heinz Kohut's View: the parents' behaviors and attitudes eventually help children form a sense of self that gives unity and consistency to their experiences.
• John Bowlby's attachment theory: discusses the three stages of separation anxiety.

Karen Horney: Psychoanalytic Theory

• Criticisms of Freudian theory:
  • Its rigidity toward new ideas.
  • Its skewed view of feminine psychology.
  • Its overemphasis on biology and the pleasure principle.
• The importance of childhood experiences:
  • Lack of genuine love leads to neurotic needs.
  • Basic hostility and basic anxiety.
• Neurotic needs:
  • For affection and approval.
  • For a powerful partner.
  • To restrict one's life within narrow borders.
  • For power, prestige, or possession.

Erik Erikson: Post-Freudian Theory

• Extended Freud's infantile developmental stages into adolescence, adulthood, and old age.
• The ego is the center of personality and is responsible for a unified sense of self.
• Society's influence: society shapes the ego.
• Pseudospecies: a fictional notion that they are superior to other cultures.
• Epigenetic Principle: a term borrowed from embryology that develops or should develop according to a predetermined rather and in a fixed sequence.
• Stages of psychosocial development:
  • Infancy: Trust vs. Mistrust.
  • Early Childhood: Autonomy vs. Shame & Doubt.
  • Play Age: Initiative vs. Guilt.
  • School Age: Industry vs. Inferiority.
  • Adolescence: Identity vs. Identity Confusion.
  • Young Adulthood: Intimacy vs. Isolation.
  • Adulthood: Generativity vs. Stagnation.
  • Old Age: Integrity vs. Despair.

Erich Fromm: Humanistic Psychoanalysis

• Assumes that humanity's separation from the natural world has produced feelings of loneliness and isolation, a condition called basic anxiety.
• Human needs/existential needs:
  • Relatedness: the drive for union with another person.
  • Transcendence: the urge to rise above a passive and accidental existence and into the realm of purposefulness and freedom.
• Fixation: a nonproductive strategy that moves beyond the protective security provided by one's mother.
• Sense of identity: the capacity to be aware of ourselves as a separate entity.
• Frame of orientation: a road map which we find our way through the world.

Abraham Maslow: Holistic-Dynamic Theory

• Assumes that the whole person is constantly being motivated by one need or another and that people have the potential to grow toward psychological health.
• Hierarchy of needs:
  • Physiological needs (food, water, oxygen, etc.).
  • Safety needs (physical security, stability, dependency, etc.).
  • Love and belongingness needs (friendship, the wish for a mate and children, etc.).
  • Esteem needs (self-respect, confidence, competence, etc.).
  • Self-actualization needs (self-fulfillment, the realization of all one's potential, etc.).### Aesthetic Needs
• Aesthetic needs are not universal but are present in every culture
• Desire for beauty and aesthetically pleasing experiences

Cognitive Needs

• Desire to know, solve mysteries, understand, and be curious

Neurotic Needs

• Desire to dominate, inflict pain, or submit to another's will, leading to stagnation and pathology

###Expressive and Coping Behavior

• Expressive behavior:
  • Often serves no other purpose than being an end in itself
  • Frequently unconscious and natural, with little effort required
• Coping behavior:
  • Conscious and learned
  • Determined by the external environment

Deprivation of Needs

• Leads to pathology of some sort
• Metapathology: absence of values, lack of fulfillment, and loss of meaning in life

Instinctoid Nature of Needs

• Innately determined needs that can be modified by learning

Higher and Lower Needs

• Higher-level needs (love, esteem, self-actualization):
  • Later on the evolutionary scale
  • Produce more genuine happiness and peak experiences
• Lower-level needs:
  • Physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem

Self-Actualization

• Ultimate level of psychological health
• Criteria for self-actualization:
  • Free from psychopathology
  • Satisfaction of each of the four lower-level needs
  • Full realization of one's potential for growth
  • Acceptance of B-values (being values)

Values of Self-Actualizers

• B-values:
  • Truth, goodness, beauty, wholeness, aliveness, uniqueness, perfection, completion, justice, order, simplicity, richness
  • Indicators of psychological health, opposed to deficiency needs

Characteristics of Self-Actualizing People

• More efficient perception of reality
• Acceptance of self, others, and nature
• Spontaneity, simplicity, and naturalness
• Problem-centering
• Need for privacy
• Autonomy
• Continued freshness of appreciation
• Peak experiences
• Social interest
• Profound interpersonal relations
• Democratic character structure
• Discrimination between means and ends
• Philosophical sense of humor
• Creativeness
• Resistance to enculturation

Love, Sex, and Self-Actualization

• Self-actualizing people are capable of both giving and receiving love
• Capable of B-love (being love)

Maslow's Psychology and Philosophy of Science

• Desacralization: lack of joy, emotion, wonder, and awe in science
• Resacralization: instilling human values, emotion, and ritual in psychology
• Taoistic attitude: non-interfering, passive, and receptive approach to psychology

Measuring Self-Actualization

• The Personal Orientation Inventory (POI) is a widely used measure of self-actualization

The Jonah Complex

• Fear of being or doing one's best, a condition present to some extent in everyone

Carl Rogers: Person-Centered Theory

Basic Assumptions

• Formative tendency: all matter evolves from simpler to more complex forms
• Actualizing tendency: all living things tend to move toward completion or fulfillment of potentials
• Maintenance: tendency to resist change and seek the status quo
• Enhancement: willingness to learn and grow

The Self and Self-Actualization

• Sense of self established during infancy allows for self-actualization
• Self-concept: aspects of one's identity perceived in awareness
• Ideal self: one's view of self as one wishes to be
• Incongruence: gap between self-concept and ideal self, leading to psychopathology

Awareness

• People are aware of both their self-concept and ideal self
• Three levels of awareness:
  • Events experienced below the threshold of awareness
  • Events accurately symbolized and freely admitted to the self-structure
  • Events perceived in a distorted form

Becoming a Person

• Positive regard: developing a need to be loved, liked, or accepted by another person
• Positive self-regard: experiencing self-prizing or self-valuing

Barriers to Psychological Health

• Conditions of worth: feeling loved and accepted only when meeting others' conditions
• External evaluations: perception of others' views of oneself, hindering psychological health
• Incongruence: discrepancy between organismic experience and self-experience
• Vulnerability: lack of awareness of the discrepancy between organismic self and significant experience
• Anxiety: awareness of the incongruence, leading to threat
• Defensiveness: protection of self-concept against anxiety and threat through denial or distortion

Psychotherapy

• Six necessary conditions for effective client-centered psychotherapy:
  • Vulnerable or anxious client
  • Contact of some duration with a congruent counselor
  • Unconditional positive regard
  • Empathic listening
  • Congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathy

Rollo May: Existential Psychology

Background of Existentialism

• Søren Kierkegaard: founder of modern existentialism
• Emphasis on balance between freedom and responsibility

What is Existentialism?

• Existence takes precedence over essence
• Existentialists oppose the split between subject and object
• People search for meaning in their lives
• Each person is responsible for who they are and what they become
• Existentialists are anti-theoretical

Basic Concepts

• Being-in-the-world (Dasein): oneness of subject and object, of person and world
• Umwelt: environment around us
• Mitwelt: our world with other people
• Eigenwelt: our relationship with our self
• Nonbeing: awareness of the possibility of nonbeing or nothingness

Anxiety

• Normal anxiety: proportionate to the threat, without repression
• Neurotic anxiety: disproportionate to the threat, leading to repression and defensive behaviors

Guilt

• Arises when people deny their potentialities, fail to accurately perceive others' needs, or remain blind to their dependence on the natural world
• Both anxiety and guilt are ontological, referring to the nature of being

Intentionality

• Structure that gives meaning to experience and allows people to make decisions about the future

Care, Love, and Will

• Care: active process that suggests things matter
• Love: care, delight, and affirmation of another person's value
• Will: capacity to organize oneself to move in a certain direction or toward a certain goal

Union of Love and Will

• Forms of love:
  • Sex: biological function
  • Eros: psychological desire for procreation or creation
  • Philia: intimate nonsexual friendship
  • Agape: altruistic or spiritual love

Freedom and Destiny

• Psychologically healthy individuals are comfortable with freedom and assume responsibility for their choices
• Destiny: design of the universe speaking through the design of each individual

Gordon Allport: Psychology of the Individual

Emphasis on the Uniqueness of the Individual

• Nomothetic methods: gather data on groups
• Morphogenic methods: gather data on single individuals
• Idiographic: peculiar to a single case, does not suggest structure or pattern

Allport's Approach to Personality Theory

• What is personality?
• What is the role of conscious motivation in personality theory?
• What are the characteristics of the psychologically healthy person?

What is Personality?

• Dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine behavior and thought
• Dynamic organization: integration of various aspects of personality
• Psychophysical: emphasizes both psychological and physical aspects of personality
• Determine: individual behind the facade

What is the Role of Conscious Motivation?

• Beginning with the story of the young boy on the tram car, Allport saw conscious motive in the selection of a career in psychology

Characteristics of a Healthy Person

• Proactive behavior: conscious acting on the environment, autonomous, and flexible
• Six criteria for the mature personality:
  • Extension of the sense of self
  • Warm relating of self to others
  • Emotional security or self-acceptance
  • Realistic perception of the environment
  • Insight and humor
  • Unifying philosophy of life

Structure of Personality

• Personal dispositions: peculiar to the individual
• Common traits: general characteristics held in common by many people
• Cardinal dispositions: outstanding characteristic or ruling passion
• Central dispositions: 5-10 most outstanding characteristics
• Secondary dispositions: not central, yet occur with some regularity

Proprium

• Behaviors and characteristics regarded as warm, central, and important in one's life
• Propriate strivings: seek to maintain tension and disequilibrium
• Peripheral motives: reduce a need
• Functional autonomy: some human motives are independent from the original motive responsible for the behavior

McCrae and Costa: Five Factor Trait Theory

Comparison with Cattell

• Both used inductive methods to gather data
• Cattell used multifaceted approach, including media of observation (L, Q, and T data)
• McCrae and Costa limited their procedures to questionnaire responses (self-reports)
• Cattell distinguished source traits from trait indicators, or surface traits
• Cattell classified traits into temperament, motivation, and ability
• McCrae and Costa's five bipolar factors are limited to responses on questionnaires