Personality Personality A person s characteristic way of thinking feeling and acting Theories of Personality Psychoanalytic Freudian Focuses on childhood sexuality and unconscious motivations that motivate our personalities Humanistic Focuses on our inner capacity for self growth and self fulfillment within us that determines our personality Trait People s traits or their characteristic patterns of behavior are relatively stable and they differ from individual to individual Socio Cognitive Our behavior is determined by the interactions of our traits and the social context we find ourselves in Mange is an extrovert sometimes which also means there are other times where he is not According to this theory the social context he finds himself in determines how he behaves What he does in this class may not be what he does his first day of college It is dependent on situations that affect our traits Psychoanalytic Theory Freud Begins by investigating nervous disorders which he calls neuroses and finds that there is no physical reason for them to have these so he has to figure out what is going on in their heads The first thing he tries to get into people s minds is hypnosis The preconscious is the part of of brain where if we want to we can access that information but it was not sitting in your conscious mind before you try to look for it Freud believes these neuroses come from the unconscious mind He tries to put you into an altered state of mind and tap into their unconscious He is sometimes forced to fall back on other methods so if hypnosis doesn t work he uses free association Free Association Hearing a word and saying the first thing that pops into your mind What is in your subconscious mind will be blurted out eventually When Freud says anger and someone says mother they did not consciously say that but it shows they are probably anger at their mother Psychoanalysis A way to investigate neuroses A theory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motivations and conflicts The reason his patients go to see him with these neuroses is because they have unconscious motivations going on in their brains that they are not aware of that are causing them conflict Freud s Theory of the Mind Iceberg Id Your basis desires some are needs some are wants What makes you the happiest that is what you want The lowest level the primal instincts Because that is not happening all the time there are other parts of our personality that stops that This is based off the pleasure principle Ego Our rational sense of self based on the reality principle what is reasonable to obtain Superego Our moral judge that says that is wrong that is bad don t do that Your id will say I want that your superego will say I don t want that and your ego has to mediate Freudian Slips Your unconscious slips into your consciousness you say something really wrong but it is what you really mean Nothing is accidental according to Freud everything has a meaning that is bound to come out Psychosexual Stages We pass through as children 5 psychosexual stages Each one of these stages has a different erogenous area of our body from which we derive pleasure from Every time we are in one of these stages Freud says we are being tested to determine whether we pass through this normally or abnormally And if we pass through abnormally it will negatively affect our personality And we will always seek pleasure in that place because we did it wrong the first time Oral Stage From the age of birth to 18 months babies derive the most pleasure from their mouth the oral stage He points to biting and chewing Most of us evolve normally from that stage The natural way of dealing with this is you cry when you want to be fed to stop crying they give you a bottle If we fail to deal with that if when you cry you don t get something to suck on you are never properly able to deal with getting pleasure from your mouth Someone may get an oral fixation where they get pleasure from having things in their mouth so they drink slowly That is why we call it nursing a beer Anal Stage Ages 18 months to 36 months is the anal stage the butt Toilet training and pooping if you don t evolve through that stage there will be a lot of problems The battle is between you and your parents over potty training In a perfect scenario you grow up and learn you need to use the potty on your own Freud says that your poop is something very important to you and deciding when you get rid of it is something important Proper development says that you sometimes have control over things and sometimes not Anal retentive people always need things to go their way Or you can be anal expulsive when as soon as you need to go you just go there is no waiting Therefore they always initiate confrontation etc Phallic Stage 3 6 years old is the phallic stage our genitals We are dealing with incestuous feelings for our parents We want to kill our father and marry our mother Freud terms this the Oedipus Complex The proper way to come out of this stage is to grow up to be someone like your father If you want to get someone like mom you should be like dad Girls who are strippers wanted to fall in love with their fathers but they were never there so they are trying to find a new father figure to find someone that will pay attention to them As you are going through this stage you are wrestling with these indecent feelings Latent Stage From ages 6 until puberty is the latent stage where we have no sexual feelings Genital Stage The maturation of our sexual feelings happens from puberty onwards When we hit puberty our sexual feelings mature we develop our own tastes in things what you like and don t and that is an ongoing process These things affect our personality if you learned as a little baby you cried and people bring you things that will affect who you are Defense Mechanisms Freud says anxiety is the price we pay for trying to live into society Because of this our ego tries to protect us from this anxiety and creates reality distorting ideas that protect ourselves Creates a different way for you to deal with reality that takes the anxiety away Repression We put them out of our consciousness An event so tragic happens to the point that keeping in in your mind will negatively affect you so you repress it within your memory Regression We seek to go back to the point before that memory happened After someone gets divorced they go back to live with their parents to restart their lives in
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