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Cards (41)

  • Conscious
    Mental elements in awareness at any given point in time; Minor role in psychoanalytic theory
  • Preconscious
    Contains elements not conscious but can become conscious
  • Unconscious
    Contains drivers, urges, or instincts beyond awareness; Motivate most of our words, feelings and action
  • Id
    Pleasure principle, present at birth, core of personality and completely unconscious, sole function is to seek pleasure, no morality
  • Two Biological Instincts of the Id
    • Eros: Life instinct; Helps the individual to survive; respiration, eating and sex
    • Thanatos: Death instinct; Viewed as a set of destructive forces in all humans; Can be expressed as an act of violence or regression
  • Ego
    Develops around 2-3 years old, reality principle, decision-making or the executive branch of personality; In contact with reality; Partly conscious, partly preconscious, and partly unconscious
  • Superego
    Develops around age 5, moralistic and idealistic principle
  • Two Subsystems of the Superego
    • Conscience - Results from experiences with punishments for improper behavior; tells us what we should not do
    • Ego-Ideal - Develops from experiences with rewards for proper behavior; tells us what we should do
  • Drives
    • Source, aim, and object of drives
    • German word for Trieb = it refers to a drive or a stimulus within the person
    • Operates as a constant motivational force
    • Libido = sex drive
    • Every basic drive is characterized by an impetus
    • Source - the region of the body in a state of excitation or tension
    • Aim - to seek pleasure by removing that excitation or reducing the tension
    • Object - person or thing that serves as the means through which the aim is satisfied
  • Sex
    • Aim is pleasure, but not limited to genital satisfaction
    • Freud believed that the entire body is invested with libido
    • Erogenous zones = the mouth and the anus are especially capale of producing sexual pleasure
    • Sex can take many forms: narcissism, love, sadism and masochism
  • Narcissism
    • Infants are primarily self-centered, with their libido invested almost exclusively on their own ego. This condition, which is universal, is known as primary narcissism.
    • Secondary narcissism - Self love that occurs later in life and occurs when the libido is withdrawn from objects and centered on the self
  • Love
    • Develops when people invest their libido on an object or person other than themselves
    • Children's first sexual interest is the person who cares for them, generally the mother
  • Sadism
    The need for sexual pleasure by inflicting pain or humiliation on another person
  • Masochism
    Experiences sexual pleasure from suffering pain and humiliation inflicted either by themselves or by others
  • Aggression
    • Aim of the drive is to return the organism to an inorganic state.
    • The ultimate inorganic situation is death, and the final aim of the aggressive drive is self-destruction
    • teasing, gossip, sarcasm, humiliation, humor, and the enjoyment of other people ' s suffering
  • Anxiety
    • A felt, affective, unpleasant state accompanied by a physical sensation that warns the person against impending danger
    • 3 kinds of anxiety = neurotic, moral, and realistic
    • Neurotic anxiety - The threat that unacceptable Id impulses will break through and be acted on by an individual
    • Moralistic anxiety - Would result from sexual temptations if a child believes that yielding to the temptation would be morally wrong
    • Realistic anxiety - Anxiety in response to an identifiable threat or danger Response to threat and/or perception of genuine risk in the external world
  • Defense Mechanisms
    • Repression
    • Reaction Formation
    • Displacement
    • Fixation
    • Regression
    • Projection
    • Introjection
    • Sublimation
  • Stages of Development
    • Oral Stage (Birth to 1 year)
    • Anal Stage (1 to 3 years)
    • Phallic Stage (3 to 6 years)
    • Latent Stage (6 to Puberty)
    • Genital Stage (Puberty to Death)
  • Freud did not have a good understanding of women, gender, and sexuality
  • Reasons for Freud's lack of understanding of feminine psyche:
  • Freud insisted that psychoanalysis was a science, but it was not based on experimental investigation but rather on subjective observations
  • Freud's theories were not falsifiable, but they did organize knowledge into a meaningful framework and served as a guide for the solution of practical problems
  • Freud: '"I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador - an adventurer… with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort"'
  • Free Association
    The verbalization of every thought that comes to the patient' s mind, no matter how irrelevant or repugnant
  • Dream Analysis
    • Used by Freud to transform manifest content of dreams to the more important latent content
    • Manifest Content - It is the surface meaning or the conscious description given by the dreamer
    • Latent Content - refers to its unconscious material
  • Transference
    • Refers to the strong sexual or aggressive feelings, positive or negative, that patients develop toward their analyst during the course of treatment
    • Positive Transference - It permits the patients to more or less relive childhood experiences within the nonthreatening climate of the analytic treatment
    • Negative Transference - in the form of hostility must be recognized by the therapist and explained to patients so that they can overcome RESISTANCE
  • Resistance
    Refers to the attitude, idea, feeling, or action that interferes with a change from the present situation
  • Freudian Slips
    A verbal or memory mistake linked to the unconscious mind; also known as parapraxes
  • Psychoanalytic psychotherapy with men with intellectual disabilities resulted in a striking decrease in aggression, offending and other behavioral problems
  • Sigmund Freud: '"in the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart"'
  • Personality
    A pattern of relatively permanent traits and unique characteristics that give both consistency and individuality to a person's behavior
  • Traits
    • Contribute to individual differences in behavior, consistency of behavior over time, and stability of behavior across situations
  • Characteristics
    Unique qualities of an individual that include such attributes as temperament, physique, and intelligence
  • Theory
    A scientific theory is a set of related assumptions that allows scientists to use logical deductive reasoning to formulate testable hypotheses
  • Perspectives in Theories of Personality
    • Psychodynamic Theories
    • Humanistic-Existential Theories
    • Dispositional Theories
    • Biological-Evolutionary Theories
    • Learning-(Social) Cognitive Theories
  • Psychodynamic Theories
    • Focused on the importance of early childhood experience and relationships with parents as guiding forces that shape personality development
    • Sees the unconscious mind and motives as much more powerful than the conscious awareness
    • Traditionally used dream interpretation to uncover the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and impulses as a main form of treatment of neurosis and mental illness
  • Humanistic-Existential Theories
    • Currently known as "positive psychology"
    • The primary approach is that people strive toward meaning, growth, well-being, happiness, and psychological health
    • States of positive emotion and happiness foster psychological health and pro-social behavior
    • Existential theorists assume that not only are we driven by a search for meaning, but also that negative experiences such as failure, awareness of death, death of a loved one, and anxiety, are part of the human condition and can foster psychological growth
  • Dispositional Theories
    • Argue that the unique and long-term tendencies to behave in particular ways are the essence of our personality
    • These unique dispositions, such as extraversion or anxiety, are called traits
    • The field has converged on the understanding that there are five main trait dimensions in human personality
  • Biological-Evolutionary Theories
    • Emphasizes that what we think, feel, and do is always an interaction between nature (biological) and nurture (environment)
    • Personality have been shaped by forces of evolution
    • Behavior, thought, feelings, and personality are influenced by differences in basic genetic, epigenetic, and neurological systems between individuals
  • Learning-(Social) Cognitive Theories

    • Focuses only on behavior, not on hypothetical and unobservable internal states such as thoughts, feelings, drives, or motives
    • All behaviors are learned through association and/or its consequences
    • Personality is shaped by how we think and perceive the world