Study Guide Ch 7 8 for Exam 2 NOTE Exams may contain material not included on this guide Material on guide is not guaranteed to be on exams Use this information as a GUIDE for your studying but do not treat it as a map that will show you everything This information comes from the textbook AND the lectures Previous quiz questions the featured readings and the summaries at the end of textbook chapters should also guide your studying Chapters 7 Motives and Goals What Do We Want in Life What are drives What basic drives did Freud think we have What s the difference Book Definition At the heart of the psychoanalytic view of personality is Freud s theory of motivation The theory can be boiled down to four basic propositions I call them the principles of 1 determinism 2 drive 3 conflict and 4 the unconscious First forces over which we have little control determine all human behavior and experience We are not the masters of our fate Freud insisted We are more like pawns in life s chess game Somebody else is making the moves Second these powerful forces exist within us for the most part and they can typically be traced back to primitive drives or instincts Most important are our drives for sexuality and aggression What do people want According to Freud we want sexual satisfaction and suitable outlets for aggression Third the forces that determine all of our behavior and experience are in perpetual conflict with one another which causes us anxiety There is no avoiding conflict and anxiety in life conflict between our primitive urges and societal constraints certainly but also conflicts deep within ourselves We want too much that we can never have we are destined therefore to be miserable Fourth and arguably worst we do not even know what those forces that determine our behavior and those conflicts that precipitate our anxiety are in other words the most important determinants of and conflicts in our lives are outside of our consciousness They are unconscious to us We are unconscious to them We have virtually no control over our lives We are conflicted and anxious And we do not know why For Freud sexuality and aggression are the ultimate wellsprings of human motivation They provide the motive force the drive the thrust for all of our behavior Quite literally as Freud saw it sexuality and aggression serve as the primal energy sources for psychological life Influenced by 19th century models of energy mechanisms Freud conceived of the human mind as a machine that uses energy and he believed that this psychic energy was drawn from biological instincts Freud eventually settled on the idea that there exist two sets of instincts or drives 1 sexuality and all other life instincts this group of instincts is sometimes termed Eros and 2 aggression and all other death instincts sometimes grouped under the name of Thanatos Life and death instincts are usually expressed in indirect and complex ways Even 17 year old boys do not spend all of their time fantasizing about sex and conquest and running around looking for opportunities for direct instinctual gratification There are too many constraints in the real world too many tasks to attend to in everyday life and too much complexity and restraint built into the human mind to permit the direct translation of drive into behavior Instead our instincts get played out in fantasies and dreams and they get expressed in very subtle and sublimated ways in everyday behavior So subtle in fact that we are likely not even to notice But of course that is precisely the psychoanalytic point Which structure of the brain is associated with how we experience hunger The hypothalamus is the forebrain structure thought to regulate eating drinking Cells in adipose fat tissue secrete a chemical called leptin that signals to the hypothalamus that it is time to stop eating It s also linked to endorphins dopamine which is released when we enjoy what we are eating Understand Freud s major contributions to psychology The most influential psychologist of the 20th century was Sigmund Freud 1856 1939 Freud was the prime inventor of a particular kind of psychology usually psychoanalysis Drawing on extensive case studies of therapy patients seen in medical settings Freud and his followers developed psychoanalysis outside the mainstream of scientific psychology But psychoanalysis has a substantial impact on personality psychology proper to say nothing of its pervasive cultural influence in the 20th century West Anthropology political science literature literary criticism art and the cinema all acknowledge certain Freudian underpinnings and influences Psychoanalytic theories valid or not have even crept into our everyday parlance as we speak knowingly today inhibitions repressed memories the Oedipus complex and Freudian slips Introduced by Sigmond Freud more than 100 years ago the psychoanalytic view of human motivation suggests that behavior is ultimately determined by unconscious sexual aggressive drives and by the complex intrapsychic conflicts that arise in daily life Unconscious processes work to repress threatening impulses thoughts and feelings While repression is universal research suggests that some individuals may use repression more than do others Repressors report little anxiety on a conscious level but they adopt a highly defensive approach to life Research suggests that repressors report fewer negative memories from their past and are able to keep emotionally negative scenes separated from one another in memory Freud s contribution that has the most empirical support today is using therapy to treat mental illnesses Freud was one of the first people to have people talk about their problems Having people talk about their problems is one of the most therapeutic techniques o Is there empirical support for his psychosexual stages of development No data supports Freud s psychosexual stages of development o Do we still think the same way about the unconscious mind What is the id ego and superego Book definition Those fearsome things that Dostoyevsky said were stored away by every decent man or woman constitute what Freud called the unconscious A fundamental proposition of psychoanalytic approach to personality is that much of what we know and feel is outside our every conscious awareness Our lives are driven by intrapsychic mysteries that transpire at an unconscious level buried deep beneath the manifest surface of everyday waking consciousness We do not and typically cannot know
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