The Psychoanalytic Perspective: What is going to be coveredExploring the UnconsciousThe Neo-Freudian and Psychodynamic Theories (founder of clinical psych)Assessing Unconscious ProcessesEvaluating the Psychoanalytic PerspectivePersonalityAn individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.Different situations and different people bring out different aspects of your personalityFreudPsychoanalytic Theory: childhood sexuality and unconscious motivations influence personalityPsychodynamic Perspective:In his clinical practice, Freud encountered patients suffering from nervous disorders. Their complaints could not be explained in terms of purely physical causes.Freud’s clinical experience led him to develop the first comprehensive theory of personality, which included the unconscious mind, psychosexual stages, and defense mechanisms.Exploring the UnconsciousA reservoir (unconscious mind) of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. Freud asked patients to say whatever came to their minds (free association) in order to tap the unconscious.Dream AnalysisAnother method to analyze the unconscious mind is through interpreting manifest and latent contents of dreams.PsychoanalysisThe process of free association (chain of thoughts) leads to painful, embarrassing unconscious memories. Once these memories are retrieved and released (treatment: psychoanalysis) the patient feels better.Model of MindThe mind is like an iceberg. It is mostly hidden, and below the surface lies the unconscious mind. The preconscious stores temporary memories.Personality StructurePersonality develops as a result of our efforts to resolve conflicts between our biological impulses (id) and social restraints (superego).Id, Ego and SuperegoThe Id unconsciously strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives, operating on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification.The ego functions as the “executive” and mediates the demands of the id and superego.The superego provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations.Personality DevelopmentFreud believed that personality formed during the first few years of life divided into psychosexual stages. During these stages the id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on pleasure sensitive body areas called erogenous zones.Psychosexual StagesFreud divided the development of personality into five psychosexual stages.Oral (0-18m):Pleasure centers on the mouth; sucking, biting, chewingAnal (18-36m):pleasure focuses on bowel and bladder elimination; coping with demands for controlPhallic (3-6yrs):Pleasure zone is the genitals; coping with incestuous sexual feelingsLatency (6-puberty):Dormant sexual feelingsGenital (puberty on): Maturation of sexual interestsOedipus ComplexA boy’s sexual desire for his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father. A girl’s desire for her father is called the Electra complex.IdentificationChildren cope with threatening feelings by repressing them and by identifying with the rival parent. Through this process of identification, their superego gains strength that incorporates their parents’ values.Defense Mechanisms: The ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.Repression banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.Regression leads an individual faced with anxiety to retreat to a more infantile psychosexual stage.Reaction Formation causes the ego to unconsciously switch unacceptable impulses into their opposites. People may express feelings of purity when they may be suffering anxiety from unconscious feelings about sex.Projection leads people to disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.Rationalization offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions.Displacement shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.Neo-FreudiansLike Freud, Adler believed in childhood tensions. However, these tensions were social in nature and not sexual. A child struggles with an inferiority complex during growth and strives for superiority and power.Like Adler, Horney believed in the social aspects of childhood growth and development. She countered Freud’s assumption that women have weak superegos and suffer from “penis envy.”Jung believed in the collective unconscious, which contained a common reservoir of images derived from our species’ past. This is why many cultures share certain myths and images such as the mother being a symbol of nurturanceAssessing Unconscious ProcessesEvaluating personality from an unconscious mind’s perspective would require a psychological instrument (projective tests) that would reveal the hidden unconscious mind.Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): Developed by Henry Murray, the TAT is a projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes.Rorschach Inkblot Test: The most widely used projective test uses a set of 10 inkblots and was designed by Hermann Rorschach. It seeks to identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots.Projective Tests: CriticismsCritics argue that projective tests lack both reliability (consistency of results) and validity (predicting what it is supposed to).When evaluating the same patient, even trained raters come up with different interpretations (reliability).Projective tests may misdiagnose a normal individual as pathological (validity).Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective: Modern ResearchPersonality develops throughout life and is not fixed in childhood.Freud underemphasized peer influence on the individual, which may be as powerful as parental influence.Gender identity may develop before 5-6 years of age.There may be other reasons for dreams besides wish fulfillment.Verbal slips can be explained on the basis of cognitive processing of verbal choices.Suppressed sexuality leads to psychological disorders. Sexual inhibition has decreased, but psychological disorders have not.Freud's psychoanalytic theory rests on the repression of painful experiences into the unconscious mind.The majority of children, death camp survivors, and battle-scarred veterans are unable to repress painful experiences into their unconscious mind.The Modern