Psy - Personality

Chapter 10 Outline -

Personality - is an individual's unique pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that persists over time and across situations.

1. Psychodynamic Theories - p 328 - see behavior as the product of psychological forces that interact within the individual often outside conscious awareness. (Frued)

- Frued traced it to sexual and aggressive urges; others, like Karen Horney, saw it as rooted in the individuals struggle to deal with dependency.

i. ALL psychodynamic theorists share the sense that unconscious processes primarily determine personality and can best be understood within the context of life-span development.

A. Sigmund Frued- best known and most influential of the psychodynamic theorists.

a. Unconscious - all ideas, thoughts, and feelings of which we are not and normally cannot become aware.

b. Psychoanalysis - theory of personality Freud developed, as well as the form of therapy invented.

c. How personality is structured:

* Id - the collection of unconscious urges and desires that continually seek expression. (basic drive, present at birth, instincts) Think of the id as the 'devil on your shoulder' and the superego as the 'angel of your shoulder.'

* Pleasure principle - the way in which the id seeks immediate gratification of an instinct.

ID tries to obtain immediate pleasure not pain.

* Ego - conscious/preconciously, mediates b/w environment demands (reality), conscience (superego), and instinctual needs (id) (makes deicison, everyday reality, realistic state of conscious)

* Reality Principle - the way in which the ego seeks to satisfy instinctual demands safely and effectively in the real world.

* Superego - social and parental standards the individual has internalized; the conscience and the ego ideal. (moral decisions chose b/w wrong and right) conscience and guilty

* Ego Ideal - the part of the superego that consists of standards of what one would like to be.

The ego satisfies the demands of the ID in a reasonable morally manner that is approved by the superego.

* conscious (small): this is the part of the mind that holds what you're aware of. You can verablize about your conscious experience and you can think about it in a logical fashion.

* preconscious (small-medium): this is ordinary memory. So although things stored here aren't in the conscious, they can be readily brought into conscious.

* unconscious (enormous): Freud felt that this part of the mind was not directly accessible to awareness. In part, he saw it as a dump box for urges, feelings and ideas that are tied to anxiety, conflict and pain. These feelings and thoughts have not disappeared and according to Freud, they are there, exerting influence on our actions and our conscious awareness. This is where most of the work of the Id, Ego, and Superego take place.

d. How personality develops: Frued - focuses on the way in which we satisfy the sexual instinct during the course of life.

* Libido - the energy generated by sexual instinct

* Fixation - a partial or complete halt at some point in the individual's psychosexual development.

Oral Stage (Birth to 18 months). During the oral stage, the child if focused on oral pleasures (sucking). Too much or too little gratification can result in an Oral Fixation or Oral Personality which is evidenced by a preoccupation with oral activities. This type of personality may have a stronger tendency to smoke, drink alcohol, over eat, or bite his or her nails. Personality wise, these individuals may become overly dependent upon others, gullible, and perpetual followers. On the other hand, they may also fight these urges and develop pessimism and aggression toward others.

Anal Stage (18 months to three years). The child's focus of pleasure in this stage is on eliminating and retaining feces. Through society's pressure, mainly via parents, the child has to learn to control anal stimulation. In terms of personality, after effects of an anal fixation during this stage can result in an obsession with cleanliness, perfection, and control (anal retentive). On the opposite end of the spectrum, they may become messy and disorganized (anal expulsive).

Phallic Stage (ages three to six). The pleasure zone switches to the genitals. Freud believed that during this stage boy develop unconscious sexual desires for their mother. Because of this, he becomes rivals with his father and sees him as competition for the mother's affection. During this time, boys also develop a fear that their father will punish them for these feelings, such as by castrating them. This group of feelings is known as Oedipus Complex ( after the Greek Mythology figure who accidentally killed his father and married his mother).

Latency Stage (age six to puberty). It's during this stage that sexual urges remain repressed and children interact and play mostly with same sex peers.

Genital Stage (puberty on). The final stage of psychosexual development begins at the start of puberty when sexual urges are once again awakened. Through the lessons learned during the previous stages, adolescents direct their sexual urges onto opposite sex peers, with the primary focus of pleasure is the genitals.

Electra Complex - girls go through a similar situation, developing unconscious sexual attraction to their father.

Oedipus Complex - boys also develop a fear that their father will punish them for these feelings, such as by castrating them.

B. Carl Jung - agreed with many of Freud's tenets but expanded the role of the unconscious.

* Personal unconscious - one of the two levels of the unconscious, it contains the individ. Repressed thoughts, forgotten experiences, and undeveloped ideas.

* Collective unconscious - the level of unconscious that is inherited and common to