What is Personality

1
What is Personality?

• Personality
• an individuals characteristic pattern of
  thinking, feeling, and acting
• four basic perspectives
• Psychoanalytic
• Trait
• Humanistic
• Social-cognitive

2
The Psychoanalytic Perspective

• From Freuds theory which proposes that childhood
  sexuality and unconscious motivations influence
  personality
• Freud argued that humans are driven by life
  instincts (for example, sex) and by death
  instincts (for example, aggression)
• If either anxiety or social constraints prevent
  direct expression of these drives, they will be
  expressed indirectly or unconsciously. Freud
  maintained that the aggressive drive is often
  sublimated into competition and achievement.

3
The Psychoanalytic Perspective

• Psychoanalysis
• Freuds psychoanalytic theory that attributes our
  thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and
  conflicts
• techniques used in treating psychological
  disorders by seeking to expose and interpret
  unconscious tensions

4
The Psychoanalytic Perspective

• Free Association
• in psychoanalysis, a method of exploring the
  unconscious
• person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind,
  no matter how trivial or embarrassing

5
The Psychoanalytic Perspective

• Unconscious
• According to Freud- a reservoir of mostly
  unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings and
  memories
• Contemporary viewpoint- information processing of
  which we are unaware
• Studying the unconscious Dreams, hypnosis,
  Freudian slips . . . .
• Preconscious
• information that is not conscious, but is
  retrievable into conscious awareness

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Personality Structure

• Id
• contains a reservoir of unconscious psychic
  energy
• strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive
  drives
• operates on the pleasure principle, demanding
  immediate gratification

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Personality Structure

• Superego
• the part of personality that presents
  internalized ideals
• provides standards for judgement and for future
  aspirations

8
Personality Structure

• Ego
• the largely conscious, executive part of
  personality
• mediates among the demands of the id, superego
  and reality
• operates on the reality principle, satisfying the
  ids desires in ways that will realistically
  bring pleasure rather than pain

9
Personality Structure

• Freuds idea of the minds structure

10
Personality Development

• Psychosexual Stages
• Individuals pass through a series of psychosexual
  stages during which id impulses of a sexual
  natures find a socially acceptable outlet.
• ids pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct
  erogenous zones
• Unresolved conflicts between id impulses and
  social restrictions during childhood continue to
  influence ones personality in adulthood
• Oedipus Complex
• a boys sexual desires toward his mother and
  feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival
  father

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Personality Development
12
The Case of Little Hans

• 5 year old Hans was afraid to leave his house b/c
  of an irrational fear that a horse would bite
  him.
• Hans was afraid of his erotic feelings toward his
  mother and aggressive wishes toward his father
• wanted to sleep with his mother
• Hans experienced castration anxiety
• feared his mother would prefer his fathers
  bigger widdler which was like a horse.
• 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.

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Personality Development

• Identification
• the process by which children incorporate their
  parents values into their developing superegos
• Fixation
• a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at
  an earlier psychosexual stage, where conflicts
  were unresolved

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Egos Defense Mechanisms

• Unconscious function of the ego that protects it
  form anxiety-evoking material by preventing
  accurate recognition of this material.

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Defense Mechanisms

• Reaction Formation
• Sublimation
• Denial
• Repression
• Regression
• Projection
• Displacement
• Rationalization

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Defense Mechanisms

• Defense Mechanisms
• the egos protective methods of reducing anxiety
  by unconsciously distorting reality
• Repression
• the basic defense mechanism that banishes
  anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories
  from consciousness
• Forgetting that a difficult term paper is due

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Defense Mechanisms

• Regression
• defense mechanism in which an individual
  retreats, when faced with anxiety, to a more
  infantile psychosexual stage where some psychic
  energy remains fixated
• An adolescent cries when forbidden to use the
  car.
• An adult becomes highly dependant on his parents
  after a breakup of a marriage.

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Defense Mechanisms

• Reaction Formation
• defense mechanism by which the ego unconsciously
  switches unacceptable impulses into their
  opposites
• people may express feelings that are the opposite
  of their anxiety-arousing unconscious feelings
• A person who is angry at a teacher behaves in a
  sickly sweet manner

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Defense Mechanisms

• Projection
• defense mechanism by which people disguise their
  own threatening impulses by attributing them to
  others
• A hostile person perceives the world as a
  dangerous place.
• A sexually frustrated person interprets innocent
  gestures as sexual advances.
• Rationalization
• defense mechanism that offers self-justifying
  explanations in place of the real, more
  threatening, unconscious reasons for ones
  actions
• A student blames her cheating on the sub leaving
  the test on the desk.
• Income tax cheating everyone does it

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Defense Mechanisms

• Displacement
• defense mechanism that shifts sexual or
  aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or
  less threatening object or person
• as when redirecting anger toward a safer outlet
• Mom and dad come home and yell at you because
  they are mad at their boss.

21
Defense Mechanisms

• Denial refusal to accept the true nature of a
  threat.
• Teenagers live in denial it cant happen to
  me
• Smokers

22
Defense Mechanisms

• Sublimation
• defense mechanism by which people rechannel their
  unacceptable impulses into socially approved
  activities
• Boxers
• A person paints naked people for the sake of
  beauty and art.

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Assessing the Unconscious

• Projective Test
• a personality test, such as the Rorschach or TAT,
  that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to
  trigger projection of ones inner dynamics
• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
• a projective test in which people express their
  inner feelings and interests through the stories
  they make up about ambiguous scenes

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Assessing the Unconscious- TAT
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Assessing the Unconscious

• Rorschach Inkblot Test
• the most widely used projective test
• a set of 10 inkblots designed by Hermann
  Rorschach
• seeks to identify peoples inner feelings by
  analyzing their interpretations of the blots

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Assessing the Unconscious- Rorschach
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Neo-Freudians

• Alfred Adler
• importance of childhood social tension
• Karen Horney
• sought to balance Freuds masculine biases
• Carl Jung
• emphasized the collective unconscious
• concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of
  memory traces from our species history

28
Evaluating the Psychoanalytic Perspective

• Important within its historical context
• Researchers find little support that defense
  mechanisms disguise sexual and aggressive
  impulses
• History does not support Freuds idea that sexual
  repression causes psychological disorder