Personality
A person’s pattern of thinking,
feeling and acting.
Psychoanalytic Perspective
Of Personality
Freud's Early Exploration into
the Unconscious
• Used hypnosis and free
association (relax and
say it all) to delve into
unconscious.
• Mapped out the “mental
dominoes” of the patients
past in a process he
called psychoanalysis.
Freud's Personality Structure
• Ego
• Superego
• Id
Id
• Unconscious energy
that drives us to
satisfy basic sexual
and aggressive drives.
• Id operates on the
pleasure principle,
demanding immediate
gratification.
Superego
• Part of personality
that represents our
internalized ideals.
• Standards of
judgment or our
morals.
Ego
• The boss
“executive” of the
conscious.
• Its job is to
mediate the desires
of the Id and
Superego.
• Called the “reality
principle”.
Freud's Stages of Psychosexual
Development
• Freud believed that your personality
developed in your childhood.
• Mostly from unresolved problems in the
early childhood.
• Believed that children pass through a
series of psychosexual stages.
• The id focuses it’s libido (sexual energy)
on a different erogenous zone.
Oral Stage
• 0-18 months
• Pleasure center is
on the mouth.
• Sucking, biting
and chewing.
Anal Stage
• 18-36 months
• Pleasure focuses on
bladder and bowel
control.
• Controlling ones life
and independence.
• Anal retentive
Phallic Stage
• 3-6 years
• Pleasure zone is
the genitals.
• Coping with
incestuous
feelings.
• Oedipus and
Electra complexes.
Latency Stage
• 6- puberty
• Dormant sexual
feeling.
• Cooties stage.
Genital Stage
• Puberty to death.
• Maturation of
sexual interests.
Fixation
• A lingering focus of
pleasure-seeking
energies at an
earlier psychosexual
stage.
• Where conflicts
were unresolved.
Orally fixated people may need to chain smoke or chew gum.
Or denying the dependence by acting tough or being very sarcastic.
Anally fixated people can either be anal expulsive or anal retentive.
Defense Mechanisms
• The ego’s protective methods of
reducing anxiety by distorting reality.
• Never aware they are occurring.
• Seven major types.
Repression
• The Mac Daddy
defense mechanism.
• Push or banish
anxiety driven
thought deep into
unconscious.
• Why we do not
remember lusting
after our parents.
Denial
• When faced with
anxiety the person
refuses to admit
what seems
apparent to
everyone else.
• Multiple DUI’s and
a drinking problem?
Reaction Formation
• Ego switches
unacceptable
impulses into their
opposites.
• Being mean to
someone you have a
crush on.
Projection
• Disguise your own
threatening impulses
by attributing them
to others.
• Thinking that your
spouse wants to cheat
on you when it is you
that really want to
cheat.
Rationalization
• Offers selfadjusting
explanations in
place of real, more
threatening
reasons for your
actions.
• You don’t get into a
college and say, “I
really did not want
to go there it was
too far away!!”
Displacement
• Shifts the
unacceptable
impulses towards a
safer outlet.
• Instead of yelling at
a teacher, you will
take anger out on a
friend by peeing on
his car).
Sublimation
• Re-channel their
unacceptable impulses
towards more
acceptable or socially
approved activities.
• Channel feeling of
homosexuality into
aggressive sports
play.
How do we assess the
unconscious?
We can use hypnosis or free
association.
But more often we use projective
tests.
Projective Tests
• A personality test.
• Provides an ambiguous stimuli
designed to trigger projection of
one’s inner dynamics.
Examples Are:
TAT
Thematic Apperception Test
• A projective test which people
express their inner feelings through
stories they make about ambiguous
scenes
TAT
Rorschach Inkblot Test
• The most widely used projective
test
•A set of ten inkblots designed to
identify people’s feelings when
they are asked to interpret what
they see in the inkblots.
Rorschach Inkblot Test
Rorschach Inkblot Test
Rorschach Inkblot Test
Rorschach Inkblot Test
Neo-Freudians
• Psychologists that took some premises
from Freud and built upon them.
Alfred Adler
Karen Horney
Carl Jung
Alfred Adler
• Childhood is important
to personality.
• But focus should be on
social factors- not
sexual ones.
• Our behavior is driven
by our efforts to
conquer inferiority and
feel superior.
• Inferiority Complex
Karen Horney
• Childhood anxiety is
caused by a
dependent child’s
feelings of
helplessness.
• This triggers our
desire for love and
security.
• Fought against
Freud’s “penis envy”
concept.
Carl Jung
• Less emphasis on social
factors.
• Focused on the
unconscious.
• We all have a collective
unconscious: a
shared/inherited well of
memory traces from our
species history.