Lesson 2

• Sigmund Freud is known for his theories of personality, including his focus on sex and aggression, his heroic image, and engaging communication skills.
• Freud's understanding of human personality evolved through patient interactions and dream analysis.
• Freud's unconventional approach, relying on deductive reasoning and case study, distinguishes him from modern psychology.
• Sigmund Freud was born on March 6, 1856 or May 6, 1856 in Freiberg, Czech Republic, and was the first child of Jacob and Amalie Nathanson Freud.
• Sigmund Freud's mother, Amalie, was his favorite, possibly contributing to his lifelong self-confidence.
• Sigmund Freud maintained a warm relationship with his mother throughout his life, considering the mother-son bond as the most perfect.
• Introjection is a defense mechanism whereby people incorporate positive qualities of another person into their own ego.
• Sublimation is the repression of the genital aim of Eros by substituting a cultural or social aim.
• Paranoia is an extreme type of projection, a mental disorder characterized by powerful delusions of jealousy and persecution.
• Projection and paranoia are distinguished by Freud (1922/1955) as being characterized by repressed homosexual feelings toward the persecutor.
• Each defense mechanism combines with repression, and each can be carried to the point of psychopathology.
• All defense mechanisms protect the ego against anxiety and are universal in that everyone engages in defensive behavior to some degree.
• Projection is the defense mechanism of seeing in others unacceptable feelings or tendencies that actually reside in one’s own unconscious.
• At puberty, a renaissance of sexual life occurs, and the genital stage is ushered in.
• Freud's developmental theory is almost exclusively a discussion of early childhood, with the first 4 or 5 years of life, or the infantile stage, being the most crucial for personality formation.
• Normally, however, defense mechanisms are beneficial to the individual and harmless to society.
• The infantile stage is followed by a 6- or 7-year period of latency during which time little or no sexual growth takes place.
• At the age of three, Freud's family moved from Freiberg to Vienna, where he would reside for nearly 80 years until the Nazi invasion in 1938.
• Freud was hostile and had an unconscious death wish towards Julius, his younger brother, when Julius died at six months old, Freud carried guilt for causing his brother's death.
• The ego can make decisions on each of the three levels of consciousness: preconscious, conscious, and unconscious.
• At the core of personality and completely unconscious is the psychical region called the id, a term derived from the impersonal pronoun meaning “the it,” or the not-yet-owned component of personality.
• The doorkeeper is the primary censor, while the screen guards the important guest, preventing some preconscious elements from reaching consciousness.
• The unconscious does gain admission to consciousness, but only because their true nature is cleverly disguised through the dream process, a slip of the tongue, or an elaborate defensive measure.
• The guard can turn back or throw out those who have slipped in, preventing the menacing crowd from seeing an important guest behind a screen.
• Consciousness, which plays a relatively minor role in psychoanalytic theory, can be defined as those mental elements in awareness at any given point in time.
• The id serves the pleasure principle.
• The ego becomes the decision-making or executive branch of personality.
• Freud's theory of unconsciousness is compared to a large entrance hall with disreputable people trying to escape to a smaller reception room.
• The ego grows out of the id during infancy and becomes a person’s sole source of communication with the external world.
• The id has no contact with reality, yet it strives constantly to reduce tension by satisfying basic desires.
• The ego, or I, is the only region of the mind in contact with reality.
• A guard guards the threshold between the two rooms, preventing undesirables from escaping.
• The most primitive part of the mind was das Es, or the “it,” which is almost always translated into English as id; the second division was das Ich, or the “I,” translated as ego; and the final province was das Uber-Ich, or the “over-I,” which is translated as superego.
• The ego is governed by the reality principle, which it tries to substitute for the pleasure principle of the id.
• The perceptual conscious system, which is turned toward the outer world and acts as a medium for the perception of external stimuli, is a source of conscious elements.
• The second source of conscious elements is from within the mental structure and includes nonthreatening ideas from the preconscious as well as menacing but well-disguised images from the unconscious.
• The id is primitive, chaotic, inaccessible to consciousness, unchangeable, amoral, illogical, unorganized, and filled with energy received from basic drives and discharged for the satisfaction of the pleasure principle.
• Freudian theory is less useful because it is challenging to falsify, as evidenced by a case where a dream's content conflicted with a wish fulfillment explanation, leading to a low rating in generating falsifiable hypotheses.
• Freud's perspective leans heavily toward determinism, suggesting that much of human behavior is shaped by past events and unconscious influences rather than conscious, present goals, resulting in limited control over actions.
• Psychoanalytic theory is able to generate research, is falsifiable, organizes data, and guides action.