The Psychoanalytic Perspective Chapter 13, Lecture 2

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The Psychoanalytic PerspectiveChapter 13,
Lecture 2
For Freud the determinist, nothing was
ever accidental. In such ways, Freud
suggested, the twig of personality is bent at an
early age. - David Myers
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Psychoanalytic Perspective

• In his clinical practice, Freud encountered
  patients suffering from nervous disorders. Their
  complaints could not be explained in terms of
  purely physical causes.

Culver Pictures
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
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Psychodynamic Perspective

• Freuds clinical experience led him to develop
  the first comprehensive theory of personality,
  which included the unconscious mind, psychosexual
  stages, and defense mechanisms.

Culver Pictures
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
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Exploring the Unconscious

• A reservoir (unconscious mind) of mostly
  unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and
  memories. Freud asked patients to say whatever
  came to their minds (free association) in order
  to tap the unconscious.

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Dream Analysis

• Another method to analyze the unconscious mind is
  through interpreting manifest and latent contents
  of dreams.

The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli (1791)
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Psychoanalysis

• The process of free association (chain of
  thoughts) leads to painful, embarrassing
  unconscious memories. Once these memories are
  retrieved and released (treatment
  psychoanalysis) the patient feels better.

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Model of Mind
The mind is like an iceberg. It is mostly hidden,
and below the surface lies the unconscious mind.
The preconscious stores temporary memories.
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Personality Structure

• Personality develops as a result of our efforts
  to resolve conflicts between our biological
  impulses (id) and social restraints (superego).

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Id, Ego and Superego

• The id unconsciously strives to satisfy basic
  sexual and aggressive drives, operating on the
  pleasure principle, demanding immediate
  gratification.

The ego functions as the executive and mediates
the demands of the id and superego.
The superego provides standards for judgment (the
conscience) and for future aspirations.
Just as the body unconsciously defends itself
against disease, so also, believed Freud, does
the ego unconsciously defend itself against
anxiety. - David Myers
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Personality Development

• Freud believed that personality formed during the
  first few years of life divided into psychosexual
  stages. During these stages the ids
  pleasure-seeking energies focus on pleasure
  sensitive body areas called erogenous zones.

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Psychosexual Stages
Freud divided the development of personality into
five psychosexual stages.
p.556
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Oedipus Complex

• A boys sexual desire for his mother and feelings
  of jealousy and hatred for the rival father. A
  girls desire for her father is called the
  Electra complex.

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Charles Potkay and Ben Allen describe Freuds
case study of Little Hans as the cornerstone of
Freuds ideas about the Oedipus complex.
Five-year-old Hans was afraid to leave his house
because of an irrational fear that a horse would
bite him. Hans developed the fear after having
seen a horse fall down in the street. Freud
believed that the real target of Hans fear was
something else through displacement Hanss
unconscious anxiety had merely been redirected
from its original source onto horses. Freud
suggested that Hans was actually afraid of his
erotic feelings toward his mother and aggressive
wishes toward his father.
Potkay, C.R., Allen, B.P. (1986). Personality
Theory, research and application. Monterey, CA
Brooks/Cole.
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Freud supported his hypothesis with the following
observations
1. Hans has said he wanted to sleep with his
mother, coax with or caress her, be married to
her, and have children just like daddy.
2. Hans experienced castration anxiety. His
parents warned that if he continued to play with
his widdler (penis), it would be cut off. He
noticed that his sister had no widdler.
3. Hans wanted his mother all to himself, was
jealous of his father, and feared his mother
would prefer his fathers bigger widdler, which
was like a horse.
Potkay, C.R., Allen, B.P. (1986). Personality
Theory, research and application. Monterey, CA
Brooks/Cole.
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Freud supported his hypothesis with the following
observations
4. Hans was most afraid of horses with black
muzzles, similar to his fathers black moustache.
Hans had accidentally knocked a statue of a
horse from its stand. When he saw a real horse
fall down, he recognized his own aggressive
impulse that his father fall down and die, an
idea that frightened him and that he could not
consciously acknowledge. Horses, then, were
symbolic substitutes for Hanss father, whom he
both feared and hated.
Potkay, C.R., Allen, B.P. (1986). Personality
Theory, research and application. Monterey, CA
Brooks/Cole.
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Freud supported his hypothesis with the following
observations
5. Through psychoanalysis, the unconscious was
made conscious. Hanss fears were brought into
the open and he achieved insight. Freud
observed, Hans was really a little Oedipus who
wanted to have his father out of the way, to
get rid of him, so that he might be alone with
his handsome mother and sleep with her.
Potkay, C.R., Allen, B.P. (1986). Personality
Theory, research and application. Monterey, CA
Brooks/Cole.
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Identification

• Children cope with threatening feelings by
  repressing them and by identifying with the rival
  parent. Through this process of identification,
  their superego gains strength that incorporates
  their parents values.

From the K. Vandervelde private collection
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Defense Mechanisms

• The egos protective methods of reducing anxiety
  by unconsciously distorting reality.

1. Repression banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts,
feelings, and memories from consciousness.
2. Regression leads an individual faced with
anxiety to retreat to a more infantile
psychosexual stage.
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Defense Mechanisms
3. Reaction Formation causes the ego to
unconsciously switch unacceptable impulses into
their opposites. People may express feelings of
purity when they may be suffering anxiety from
unconscious feelings about sex.
4. Projection leads people to disguise their own
threatening impulses by attributing them to
others.
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Defense Mechanisms
5. Rationalization offers self-justifying
explanations in place of the real, more
threatening, unconscious reasons for ones
actions.
6. Displacement shifts sexual or aggressive
impulses toward a more acceptable or less
threatening object or person, redirecting anger
toward a safer outlet.
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Defense Mechanisms
7. Denial protects the person from real events
that are painful to accept, either by rejecting a
fact or its seriousness
Here is a chart summarizing the most important
Freudian defense mechanisms.
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The Neo-Freudians

• Like Freud, Adler believed in childhood tensions.
  However, these tensions were social in nature and
  not sexual. A child struggles with an inferiority
  complex during growth and strives for superiority
  and power.

National Library of Medicine
Alfred Adler (1870-1937)
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The Neo-Freudians

• Like Adler, Horney believed in the social aspects
  of childhood growth and development. She
  countered Freuds assumption that women have weak
  superegos and suffer from penis envy.

The Bettmann Archive/ Corbis
Karen Horney (1885-1952)
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The Neo-Freudians

• Jung believed in the collective unconscious,
  which contained a common reservoir of images
  derived from our species past. This is why many
  cultures share certain myths and images such as
  the mother being a symbol of nurturance.

Archive of the History of American Psychology/
University of Akron
Carl Jung (1875-1961)
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Assessing Unconscious Processes

• Evaluating personality from an unconscious minds
  perspective would require a psychological
  instrument (projective tests) that would reveal
  the hidden unconscious mind.

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Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

• Developed by Henry Murray, the TAT is a
  projective test in which people express their
  inner feelings and interests through the stories
  they make up about ambiguous scenes.

Lew Merrim/ Photo Researcher, Inc.
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Rorschach Inkblot Test

• The most widely used projective test uses a set
  of 10 inkblots and was designed by Hermann
  Rorschach. It seeks to identify peoples inner
  feelings by analyzing their interpretations of
  the blots.

Lew Merrim/ Photo Researcher, Inc.
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Projective Tests Criticisms

• Critics argue that projective tests lack both
  reliability (consistency of results) and validity
  (predicting what it is supposed to).

1. When evaluating the same patient, even trained
   raters come up with different interpretations
   (reliability).

2. Projective tests may misdiagnose a normal
individual as pathological (validity).
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Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective
Modern Research

1. Personality develops throughout life and is not
   fixed in childhood.
2. Freud underemphasized peer influence on the
   individual, which may be as powerful as parental
   influence.
3. Gender identity may develop before 5-6 years of
   age.

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Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective
Modern Research

1. There may be other reasons for dreams besides
   wish fulfillment.
2. Verbal slips can be explained on the basis of
   cognitive processing of verbal choices.
3. Suppressed sexuality leads to psychological
   disorders. Sexual inhibition has decreased, but
   psychological disorders have not.

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Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective

• Freud's psychoanalytic theory rests on the
  repression of painful experiences into the
  unconscious mind.

The majority of children, death camp survivors,
and battle-scarred veterans are unable to repress
painful experiences into their unconscious mind.
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The Modern Unconscious Mind

• Modern research shows the existence of
  non-conscious information processing. This
  involves

1. schemas that automatically control perceptions
   and interpretations
2. the right-hemisphere activity that enables the
   split-brain patients left hand to carry out an
   instruction the patient cannot verbalize
3. parallel processing during vision and thinking
4. implicit memories
5. emotions that activate instantly without
   consciousness
6. self-concept and stereotypes that unconsciously
   influence us

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Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective

• The scientific merits of Freuds theory have been
  criticized. Psychoanalysis is meagerly testable.
  Most of its concepts arise out of clinical
  practice, which are the after-the-fact
  explanation.

We are arguing like a man who should say,
If there were an invisible cat in that chair,
the chair would look empty but the chair does
look empty therefore there is an invisible cat
in it. - C.S. Lewis
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Homework
Read p.564-567
To criticize Freuds theory by comparing
it with current concepts, some say, is
like criticizing Henry Fords Model T by
comparing it with todays hybrid cars. -
David Myers