Freud

• Levels of Mental Life:

  1. Unconscious
  2. Preconscious
  3. Conscious
• Unconscious

  • drives and instincts that are beyond awareness but that motivate most human behaviors
  • drives can become conscious only in disguised or distorted form
• Two sources of Unconscious

  1. Repression - blocking out anxiety-filled experiences
  2. Phylogenetic Endowment or inherited experiences - lie beyond an individual's personal experience.
• Preconscious

  • contains images that are not in awareness but that can become conscious either quite easily or with some level of difficulty
• Conscious

  • stem from either the perception of external stimuli (our perceptual conscious system) or from the unconscious and preconscious after they have evaded censorship
• Three regions of the mind:

  1. The Id
  2. The Ego
  3. The Superego
• The Id

  • completely unconscious
  • pleasure principle and contains our basic instincts
  • primary process
• The Ego

  • secondary process
  • reality principle
  • reconciling the e unrealistic demands of the id and the superego
• The Superego

  • idealistic principle
  • Two subsystems: Conscience and Ego ideal
  • Conscience - punishment
  • Egoideal - acceptable behavior
• Dynamics of personality refers to those forces that motivate people
• Two primary instincts : Sex and aggression
• The aim of the sexual instinct is pleasure, especially the mouth, anus, and genitals.
• The object of the sexual instinct is any person or thing that brings sexual pleasure.
• All infants possess primary narcissism, or self-centeredness, but the secondary narcissism of adolescence and adulthood is not universal.
• Sadism - receiving sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on another
• Masochism - receiving sexual pleasure from painful experiences
• Sadism and masochism satisfy both sexual and aggressive drives
• The destructive instinct aims to return a person to an inorganic state, but it is ordinarily directed against other people and is called aggression.
• Ego feels anxiety

  Id, superego, and outside world an be a source of anxiety
• Neurotic anxiety - ego's relation with the id
• Moral anxiety - results from the ego's relation with the superego
• Realistic anxiety - similar to fear, ego's relation with the real world
• Defense mechanisms operate to protect the ego against the pain of anxiety
• Repression

  • forcing unwanted, anxiety-loaded experiences into the unconscious
  • most basic defense mechanisms
• Undoing - ego's attempt to do away with unpleasant experiences and their consequences
• Isolation - marked by obsessive thoughts, ego's attempt to isolate an experience
• Reaction formation - repression of one impulse and the ostentatious expression of its exact opposite
• Displacement - people redirect their unwanted urges onto other objects or people in order to disguise the original impulse
• Fixation - psychic energy is blocked at one stage of development, making psychological change difficult
• Regression - a person reverts to earlier, more infantile modes of behavior
• Projection - unacceptable feelings or behaviors that actually reside in one's own unconscious, can become paranoia
• Introjection - people incorporate positive qualities of another person into their own ego to reduce feelings of inferiority
• Sublimation - elevation of the sexual instinct's aim to a higher level, which permits people to make contributions to society and culture
• Stages of development - from birth to maturity
• Infatile Period

  • first 5 years of live and divided into 3 subphases;
  • oral, anal, phallic
• Oral Phase - infant is primarily motivated to receive pleasure through the mouth
• Anal phase - second year of life, anal trait of orderliness, stinginess, and obstinacy
• Phallic Phase

  • boys and girls begin to have differing psychosexual development
• Male castration complex

  • form of castration anxiety
  • well-formed male superego
• Girl castration complex

  • form of penix envy
  • flexible female superego