Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Personality - Freud (Y1) - Coggle Diagram
Personality - Freud (Y1)
History of Freud
Used the technique of word association - participatn responds with the first word that comes to mind at a prompt; Galton, 1897, suggested that atypical answers and response times are a measure of intelligence
- Later used by Jung to explore repression through delayed responses
- Freud thought that this was a pathway for investigating thoughts at an unconscious level
- Transference - applying feelings for one person onto another
- Projection - projecting internal feelings as feelings felts by another
- Resistance / repression - blocking out memories to avoid recalling or accepting them
- The first bridge from experimental psychology to psychoanalysis
Freud's lifetime - born in 1856, attends Vienna medical school in 1873:
- 1885 - study visit with Charcot in Paris, investigating hysteria
- 1900 - dream interpretation
- 1905 - 3 essays on the theory of sexuality
- 1909 - Freud visits the USA and Stanley Hall
- 1912 - break in theorising due to WW1
- 1923 - structure of personality; ego and id, feminisim begins
- 1926 - Horney; flight from womanhood
- 1930 - civilisation and its discontents
- 1939 - Freud dies
Influence of cocaine: Freud was paid to endorse this in the 1880s, and he published an article extolling the benefits of it as a painkiller, decongestant and anti-depressant
- Inspired Karl Koller to develop a local anesthetic based on cocaine
- Solely responsible for it becoming a recreational drug in Europe
- 'I need a lot of cocaine'
- Theorised a nasogenital connection based on studies of a colleague called Flieess
- Attempted to treat Emma Eckstein's hysteria by removing turbinate bone, and left half a metre of gauze in her nasal cavity, causing infection and bleeding, and left her permanently disfigured
- Fliess ended relations with Freud when he tried to discredit hiim as the originator of childhood sexuality theory
Born in Czechoslovakia, moved to Leipzig in 1859 before settling in Vienna in 1860
- Studied in Vienna in the 1870s
- Researched nervous system with van Brucke and worked at the Meynert psychiatric clinic, qualifying as a doctor of medicine in 1881, specialising in neurology
- Charcot / Mesmer - mesmerism, claimed to alter a patient's consciousness by changing their magnetic field
- Napoleon of the neurosis and claimed to cure this through hyponosis
- Curiously only worked if the patient was told about what was going on beforehand
- Hysteria generalising beyond women - treatment did not work in men
- Androcentrism tradition, Freud disliked how unreliable it was
Studies in hysteria - Freud and Breuer set up a neuropsychiatric practice in 1886 which Freud latched onto, and Breuer was respected in his practice of a talking therapy to relieve symptoms
- Built upon early theory to suggest early repressed memories cause long term mental health issues
- Must be sexual to be repressed - for all women
- This obsession, along with Freud discrediting Breuer as the creator of psychoanalysis, led to their relationship dissolving
- Freud claimed that Breuer caused their patient Anna O to display and erotic transference onto himself, which he then fled from - Freud accused him of causing women to fall in love with him and then flees (projection)
- Origins of talk therapy
- A book of case histories of hysteria by F and B - trigger of a memory would activate repressed emotional energy (hysteria)
- Hysterical symptoms were attributed to repressed childhood experiences
- Cathartic method - to alleviate symptoms, one must bring unconscious (repressed memories) and emotions into the patient's consciousness by freeing them from their emotional energy
seduction hypothesis - all symptoms of hysteria are caused by sexual assault in children, and therefore this must be a widespread practice in Vienna
- Paradoxically, no one could remember these events due to repression, and these events were forgotten because they were distressing, ensuring that Freud's theory could not be disproven
- Freud would never produce clinical evidence to support this hypothesis and privately abandoned it
- Freud remained obsessed with the idea that sex was the cause of hysteria, leading him to develop further theories
-
Evaluation
Evidence for his ideas - unconscious motives and perceptions affect behaviour (Patton, 1992), but not always caused by urges
- Ego strength / self control (Baumeister 2007 and Block 1993)
- Defence mechanisms - repressive coping (Myers, 2000) and self esteem predictor (Hepper, 2010)
- Dreams reflect goals and emotional mehcanisms (Solms, 2000) - fundamental to memory formation and consolidation but they can have an important emotional function as emotions are important to memory
Not supported by evidence - fixation and its impacts on personality - Fisher and Greenberg (1996)
- Oedipus and Electra complex
- Freudian psychoanalysis (Fonagy, 1999)
- Many other ideas not falsifiable and testable
- Personality types (Stagner)
- Negative applications - use of repressed memories in criminal trials leads to convictions based on falase memories - False Memory Syndrome Foundation - 3000 families affected by this in first year alone
Parsimonious - yes, concepts are few and easy to understand
- Description - partially good, explanations are simplistic
- Heurisitic value - prompted a lot of research
- Applied value - basis of talking therapies, theory of unconscious mind still useful today
- Provided NO empirical evidence, only retrospective case studies
Clincial applications - impersonal therapy with psychoanalyst never facing patient to reduce non verbal cues, and minimise interaction - treatment is not about relationship
- Analyst aims to find and resolve problems through catharsis
- Patients understand nature of their conflict
- Assessment of unconscious through free association - all patients thoughts lead to significant unconscious material, patient's therapuetic needs and the knowledge they are in therapy will lead to associations of what is psychologically significant except so far as resistance operates and resistance is minimised by relxaation
Analyst listen uncritically, offers in terpretation - emotion is the essential characteristic, but analyst remains detached
- Key part in relationship is transference - patient displaces feelings from previous figures onto analyst; patient projects needs and desires onto analyst, who takes on different roles that allow the patient to discharge frustrations without consequence to the relationship with that individual (abreaction) as the analyst is emotionally detached
- Counter transference - analyst transfers some of their own emotional reactions onto the patient e.g. analysis has awakened some of their own conflicts and as part of their training they can recognise this as they also undergo psychoanalysis
Freudian theory
The unconscious - Freud believed that the unconscious was the most powerful in his iceberg theory of the mind
- Conscious thought - material we are activeyl aware of and what we know we are thinking / doing
- Preconscious mind - currently unconscious, but can be easily recalled to conscious, memories and stored knowledge
- Unconscious mind - thoughts, memories, feelings, urges or fantasies that we are unaware of because they are actively kept there - death and sex drives - Freud argued that this is because they are sexually or morally unacceptable, and repression is an active and continuous process of keeping it there
- Distinctions between 3 are blurred, with information crossing over when one part weakens - e.g. unconscious comes through dreams to conscious in a modified form
- Drugs and alcohol inhibit unconscious
- Dream analysis is functional for understanding unconscious - manifest and latent content
Different thinking styles are associated with different levels of consciousness - dreams are primary process thinking (irrational mental activity) due to being governed by id pleasure principle - present desires as fulfilled
- Secondary process thinking - reality principle of the ego, rational thought which is logical and organized, and we operate according to the external world and the facts as we see them
- Pleasure principle is innate, primitive instinct which drives behaviour whereas reality principle is learned as we grow up, hence id being primary and ego being secondary - imagination, creativity, emotions are all examples
Source of human motivation - main motivations are hunger, sexualty and aggression (death drive)
- Period of Darwiniism - claimed each child is born with a fixed amount of biological energy known as the libido, which would later become the sex drive
- Emphasized developmental experiences as well as biological inheritance of libido and pleasure principle
- Two types of drive to behaviour - sexual drives energised by the libido and the life preserving drives of hunger and pain - both are positive and lead to prolongation of life
- Death instinct - humans suffer from self destructive and aggressive instincts and human motivation is explained by the need to satisfy instinctual drives
Structure of personality - tripartite; id, ego and superego - develop in this order
Id - raw, unihibited energy, containing the libido, source of instincts, cravings, impulses and our survival drives for satisfaction, reproduction, aggressive drives for domination and self destructive instincts - entirely unconscious
- Only part present at birth, infants try to directly gratify needs - pleasure principle, instant gratification - primary process thinking
- Instinctual demands are socialised through development as id impulses counter social world expectations
- Solved through planning, delaying and requesting gratification
Ego - executive part of personality - reality principle; planning, thinking and organising part and operates according to secondary process thinking, mediates between demands of id and expectations of the social world - mostly preconscious and conscious
Superego - conscience of the child, source of guilt, helps make judgements about what is right or wrong and what behaviour is permissible - composed of internalized parental attitudes and evaluations, acting in opposition to the id and helping the ego rechannel immoral id impulses
- Morality principle - internalise morals of parents and is affected by nurture and cultural values
- Pre conscious, conscious and unconscious
Three parts of personality are in constant intrapsyhcic conflict in which the outcome is mental illness, or mostly anxiety
Development of personality - the psychosexual development stages
- Each stage has the libido invested in a different area of the body, known as an erogenous zone, and the body part selected is determined by biological development
- These zones then remain the most sensitive to stimulation and the focus of pleasure and source of gratification
- Fixations in each stage prevent progression, leading to certain personality types
- Needs are frustrated or overindulged, leading to fixation
- early childhood leads to personality
- Oral stage (birth to 12 months) - source of libido is the mouth, and this is when id is in control
- instant gratification, pleasure gained through feeding -> weaning, oral receptive personalities are gullible due to over indulgence, or oral aggressive and thus spiteful at their lack of indulgence
- Anal stage - 18 months to 3 years - focus of libido is the anus, pleasure gained from bowel movements
- Toilet training - ego develop as child begins to learn mediating between demands of the social world and the demands of the id
- If not able to toilet train, they become anally expulsive, meaning they are messy and do not obey authority
- If able to toilet train but are too restrictive, they become anally retentive and their fixation leads to an uptight, nervous and controlling personality
- Phallic stage - focus of libido is on the genitals - learning of sex roles:
- Superego develops as child identifies with same sex parent and internalises their behaviour
- Boys - conflict is the Oedipus complex; see father as sexual rival for mother they are attracted too, fear reprimandation through castration anxiety from father, internalise feelings for mother and project onto other woman and identify with father, taking some of his authority
- Girls - Electra complex; develop feelings for father, annoyed at mother for removing her penis, penis envy of father, and internalises this by the need to have a child and identifying with mother
- Fixations in this stage lead to phallic personalities (young masturbation) and homosexuality
- Latency stage - libiido is dormant, focus is on socialisation with same-sex peers - defence mechanisms develop and fixation in this stage leads to difficulty in forming heterosexual relationships
- Genital stage - libido source is puberty, and sexual attachment to opposite sex grows - socialisation and development is complete, personality fully formed by end of phallic stage
Defence mechanisms - unconscious, emerge from socialisation at latency stage
Protect us from anxiety and pain and protects self esteem - push conscious bad experiences into the unconscious
- Psychologically helpful unless used inappropriately or indiscriminately
- Anna Freud - 12 defence mechanisms
- Failure of these can lead to mental illness through increased anxiety
- Repression - suppression of inconvenient or disagreeable feelings, pushing unacceptable thoughts, feelings and impulses into the unconscious
- Morokoff - study of women with high sexual guilt and low sexual guilt, and found that self reported arousal and physiological arousal matched in HSG group, but not in LSG group, suggesting guilt over arousal meant it was repressed
- Only dangerous when normal feelings are held back, making honest relationships impossible
- Denial - deny unpleasant events or reality of a situation (phantom limb syndrome), most commonly seen in PTSD
- Projection - blaming others or objects for our shortcomings, externalizing unacceptable feelings and attributing them to others, can lead to paranoia
- Reaction formation - overcome unacceptable impulses and gaining mastery of the initial impulse by exaggerating the opposing tendency - can become sufferers of obsessional neurosis (OCD)
- Rationalisation - reasons for actions are given, to justify and conceal the true meaning; denial of a poor outcome can protect self esteem and give us the courage to try again
- Conversion reaction - unacceptable thoughts or emotions are converted into physical symptoms - Anna O who had arm paralysis from psychological issues
- Phobic avoidance - intensity of anxiety around a certain place or situation is out of proportion
- Displacement - too afraid to express feelings directly to the provoker, leading to deflection elsewhere, taking out frustration on someone lower down the pecking order to less likely to complain - good for avoiding conflict, but not good for interpersonal relations
- Regression - avoiding anxiety by returning to an earlier, simpler stage of life, determined by fixed points in development - result of trauma or massive change
- Isolation - anxiety associated with event is avoided by recalling the event without the emotion associated with it
11.. Undoing - ritualistic behaviors are adopted to negate thoughts or actions the person had earlier and felt guilty about having - e.g. holding something to avoid bad luck
- Sublimation - most advanced and mature defence mechanism - partial expression of unconscious drives in a modified, socially acceptable way - diverted from original aim and channelled into something socially desirable