Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalytic Theory and Life

• Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalytic theory.
• Freud was born in Freiberg, Moravia, in 1865, to Jacob, a wool-merchant father, and Jacob's third wife.
• Freud moved to Vienna in 1860 and remained there until 1938.
• Vienna was known for opportunity and optimism and Jews were granted political rights and accepted into society in 1867.
• Freud identified as a German, assimilating into the culture.
• Around age 15, the liberal political atmosphere shifted, and anti-Semitism became prevalent.
• Freud graduated from the University of Vienna medical school with a strong interest in research.
• He married quickly and realized that private practice was needed for financial support.
• Freud published scholarly papers on neurological disorders that were well-received.
• The outbreak of World War II forced Freud to London, where he died a year later in 1939.
• Freud kept modifying his theory as he went along.
• Freud never presented a comprehensive summary of his final views.
• Freud's theory is comprehensive across numerous aspects.
• Freud's work provides a theory of motivation.
• Freud's work provides a theory of thinking, including dreaming.
• Freud's work provides a theory of personality development involving psychosexual elements.
• Freud's work provides a theory of mental structures, including the id, ego, and superego.
• Freud's work provides a theory of psychopathology and symptom formation
• Freud's work provides a theory of psychotherapy.
• Personality involves a characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.
• Freud's psychoanalytic perspective suggests childhood sexuality and unconscious motivations influence personality.
• Freud termed his theory and associated techniques psychoanalysis.
• The unconscious is considered a large area below the surface of awareness, containing thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories.
• Free association involves asking the patient to relax and say whatever comes to mind, no matter how embarrassing or trivial
• Anna O's case (Bertha Pappenheim) was the origin of Psychoanalysis.
• Hysteria involves paralysis or improper functioning of the body
• Wandering Womb (hysteria) as a concept.
• Anna O. was cured through Catharsis, also known as the Talking cure.

Levels of Mental Life

• The unconscious includes all drives, urges, or instincts beyond our awareness.
• The preconscious includes elements not conscious but can become conscious with some difficulty.
• The conscious includes all elements in awareness at any given time.

Personality structure

• The id is an unconscious reservoir of psychic energy that constantly strives to satisfy basic drives to survive, reproduce, and aggress, operating on the pleasure principle.
• The ego is the largely conscious "executive" part of personality, mediating the demands of the id, superego, and reality through the reality principle.
• The superego represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (the conscious) and future aspirations, operating on the morality principle.

Psychosexual Development Stages

• Oral Stage (0-18 months): Pleasure centers on the mouth through sucking, chewing, and biting; focus is on weaning.
• Anal Stage (18-36 months): Pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination; coping with demands for control.
• Phallic Stage (3-6 years): Pleasure zone is the genitals, coping with incestuous sexual feelings, focusing on sexual identity
• Latency Stage (6 to puberty): Little or no sexual feelings, focus on learning
• Genital Stage (puberty on): Maturation of sexual interest with a focus on genital intercourse

Psychosexual Stage Theory: Key Vocabulary

• Oedipus complex: a boy's sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father.
• Electra complex: a girl's sexual desire towards her father and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival mother.
• Castration anxiety: Fear from a boy's struggle to deal with his love for mother while knowing he cannot overcome his father physically.
• Penis envy: Desire for male-dominated advantages
• Identification: the process by which children incorporate their parents' values into their developing superegos.
• Fixation: lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, where conflicts were unresolved.
• Freudian slips: lapses of memory or mental errors due to unconscious associations also called "parapraxes".
• Free recall/free association: concept of a person having one word and freely associating any word with it.
• Anxiety is the unpleasant state accompanied by a physical sensation of uneasiness.

Anxiety According to Freud

• Neurotic Anxiety: apprehension of unknown danger.
• Moral Anxiety: fear of the retribution of one's own conscience.
• Reality Anxiety: fear of real danger.
• Defense mechanisms can reduce or redirect anxiety in various ways but always distort reality.
• Repression puts threatening thoughts into the unconscious.
• Reaction formation pushes away threatening impulses by overemphasizing the opposite in one's thoughts and words
• Denial refuses to acknowledge anxiety-provoking stimuli.
• Projection externalizes anxiety arousing impulses by placing them onto others.
• Displacement shifts the target of one's unconscious fear or desire away from true cause.
• Sublimation transforms dangerous urges into positive, socially acceptable forms.
• Regression involves a return to an earlier, safer stage of one's life to escape present threats.
• Rationalization uses after-the-fact, logical explanations for behaviors driven by internal unconscious motives.

Alfred Adler and Individual Theory

• In 1902, Alfred Adler was invited to join Freud's Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.
• By 1910, Adler was president, but his ideas had diverged from Freud's, leading to dislike between them.
• In 1911, Adler resigned and founded the rival individual psychology movement in 1912.
• The main components of Adler's theory are the inferiority complex and the drive for superiority, the problem-solving function of dreams, social interest and the importance of birth order.

Comparison Between Adler and Freud

• Main motivations are considered biological drives in Freudian and inferiority complex in Adlerian theory.
• Focus is within the individual mind in Freudian and on interactions between people in Adlerian theory.
• Relationship with same-sex parent of primary importance in Freudian and Wider family relationships including with siblings of primary importance in Adlerian theory.
• The Oedipus complex expresses instinctive sexual and aggressive drives, and Adler sees the Oedipus complex as the result of spoiling by the opposite-sex parent.
• According to Freud, Dreams express instinctive wishes, and Dreams facilitate problem-solving according to Adlerian theory.
• Personality is considered the product of id, ego, and superego in Freudian theory and is the result of goal orientation in Adlerian theory.

Striving for Success or Superiority

• The Final Goal: The final goal of success or superiority toward which all people strive unifies personality and makes all behavior meaningful.
• The Striving Force as Compensation involves people striving for superiority or success as compensation for feelings of inferiority or weaknesses.
• Striving for Personal Superiority involves Psychologically unhealthy individuals striving for personal superiority with little concern for other people.
• Striving for Success involves Psychologically healthy people striving for the success of all humanity, but they do so without losing their personal identity.
• Adler believed that personality was formed early in life, and that positive and negative experiences can lead to lifelong personality orientations or goals.
• The inferiority complex involves a state of inferiority in infancy serves as motivator to escape this feeling.

Signs of Superiority complex

• Arrogance is linked to feeling a need to assert their superiority.
• Agoraphobia is linked to feeling too inferior to cope with the outside world.
• Domestic abuse is linked to express a need to control some aspect of the world.

Signs of Compensation

• Accomplishment in a work or artistic setting.
• Compensation for a weakness by developing a corresponding strength.

Adler's Dream Theory

• Adler viewed dreams as a mechanism for problem-solving.
• Adler believed that emotional residue guides toward correct decision.
• In his "murder dream" Adler realized it an attempt to solve the problem of sending a soldier back and decided against it.

Birth Order

• According to Adler family dynamics are important to a child's development and birth order impacts personality.
• Oldest Child: Nurturing and protective of others, good organizer with feelings of anxiety, and has exaggerated feelings of power.
• Second Child: Highly motivated, cooperative, moderately competitive, and highly competitive.
• Youngest Child: Realistically ambitious with a pampered style of life and unrealistic ambitions.
• Only Child: Socially mature with exaggerated feelings of superiority and a pampered lifestyle.

Social Interests and Style of Life

• Social interest involves the urge in human nature to adapt to the conditions of the social environment with an attitude and awareness of being part of the human community.
• Style of life is a self-consistent personality structure and Includes a person's goal, self-concept, feeling for others and attitude toward the world.
• It is the manner of a person's striving and a product of the interaction between heredity, environment and creative power.
• Adler thought that healthy people have flexible behavior and some ability to change their style of life

Creative power

• Style of life is molded by people's creative power.
• Creative power places people in control of their own lives.
• Creative power promotes Ability to freely choose a course of action.

External Factors of Maladjustment

• Exaggerated Physical Defects: Subjective and exaggerated feelings of inferiority.
• Pampered Style of Life: Weak social interest but a strong desire to perpetuate a pampered lifestyle.
• Neglected Style of Life: Feelings of being unloved; a lack of value.

Safeguarding Tendencies

• These are patterns of behavior to protect their exaggerated sense of self-esteem against public disgrace
• Excuses: People first state what they claim they would like to do and then they follow an excuse.

Aggression includes:

• Depreciation: tendency to undervalue other people's achievements and gossip.
• Accusation: tendency to blame others for one's failure and to seek revenge, like self-accusation.

Withdrawal

• Withdrawal involves safeguarding through moving backward, standing still, hesitating, and constructing obstacles.
• Moving backward involves psychologically reverting to a more secured period of life.
• Standing still mean avoidance of any action and avoiding all the responsibilities.
• Hesitating is characterized by vacillation or procrastination t o provide a person with the excuse "It's too late now".
• Constructing Obstacles involves the creation of these to gain a generates feelings of reward and an artificial sense of success and preserve self-esteem.