What is Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory of Personality Development Flashcards

An individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.

Freud found that nervous disorders often made no neurological sense. While experimenting with hypnosis, Freud "discovered" the unconscious.He decided that blindness or deafness might be caused by not wanting to see or hear something that caused intense anxiety. He then turned to free association, which he believed produced a chain of thoughts leading into the patient's unconscious, thereby retrieving painful memories. He called the process psychoanalysis.

Personality develops as a result of our efforts to resolve conflicts between our biological impulses (ID) and social restraints (SUPEREGO). The superego's demands often oppose the ID's, and the ego seeks to reconcile the two.

ORAL: (0-18 mo) pleasure centers on the mouth- sucking, biting, chewing
ANAL:(18-36 mo) pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination; coping with demands for control
PHALLIC:(3-6yr) pleasure zone is the genitals; coping with incestuous sexual feelings
LATENCY:(6-Puberty) Dormant sexual feelings
GENITAL:(puberty, on) Maturation of sexual interests

Defense mechanisms reduce or redirect anxiety in various ways, but always by unconsciously distorting reality. Repression, which underlies the other defense mechanisms, banishes anxietyarousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness; regression involves retreat to an earlier, more infantile stage of development; and reaction formation makes unacceptable impulses look like their opposites. Projection attributes threatening impulses to others, rationalization offers self-justifying explanations for behavior, displacement diverts impulses to a more acceptable object or person, and denial refuses to believe painful realities.

The neo-Freudians accepted Freud’s basic ideas regarding personality structures, the importance of the unconscious, the shaping of personality in children, and the dynamics of anxiety and defense mechanisms. However, in contrast to Freud, the neo-Freudians generally placed more emphasis on the conscious mind in interpreting experience and coping with the environment, and they argued that we have more positive motives than sex and aggression. Unlike other neo-Freudians, Carl Jung agreed with Freud that the unconscious exerts a powerful influence. In addition, he suggested that the collective unconscious is a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species’ history. Contemporary psychodynamic theorists and therapists reject the notion that sex is the basis of personality but agree with Freud that much of our mental life is unconscious, that we struggle with inner conflicts, and that childhood shapes our personalities and attachment styles.

On a projective test, such as the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) and Rorschach inkblot test, people are provided with an ambiguous stimulus and then asked to describe it or tell a story. The stimulus has no inherent meaning, so whatever meaning people read into it presumably reflects their interests and conflicts. Although projective tests have questionable reliability or validity, many clinicians continue to use them.

One strategy that psychologists have used to identify fundamental traits has been to suggest traits, such as anxiety, that some theories regard as basic. A newer technique is factor analysis, a statistical procedure that identifies clusters of behaviors that tend to appear together. For example, through factor analysis, Hans and Sybil Eysenck reduced normal variations to two or three genetically influenced dimensions, including extraversion–introversion and emotional stability– instability. Brain activity scans suggest that extraverts and introverts differ in their level of arousal, 90 Unit 10 Personality with extraverts seeking stimulation because their normal brain arousal level is relatively low. Jerome Kagan maintains that, by influencing autonomic nervous system arousal, heredity also affects our temperament and behavioral style, which help define our personality.

Researchers have isolated five distinct personality dimensions, dubbed the Big Five: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism (emotional stability versus instability), openness, and extraversion. These traits appear to be stable in adulthood, about 50 percent heritable, descriptive of others around the world, and predictive of other personal attributes. Locating an individual on these five dimensions provides a comprehensive picture of personality

The social-cognitive perspective applies principles of learning, cognition, and social behavior to the understanding of personality. Reciprocal determinism refers to the interacting influences between personality and environmental factors. Interactions between individuals and environments occur when different people choose different environments, when our personalities shape how we interpret and react to events, and when our personalities help create situations to which we react.

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In Freuds view, maladaptive adult behavior results from conflicts unresolved during the oral, anal, and phallic stages. At any point, the conflict can lock, or fixate, the person's pleasure-seeking energies in that stage.