14.2: Psychoanalytic Theory: The Controversial Legacy

• The functioning of dopamine and serotonin can be influenced by genes code for proteins.

• The functioning of many neurotransmitters is related to personal ity traits.
• People with low levels of serotonin activity are more impulsive and aggressive than other people.

• There have been few consis replicability tently replicated associations between genes and personality traits.

Can the results be duplicated in other people?

• Before researchers stepped in to conduct controlled studies of the causes of personality, psychologists, psychiatrists, and many other thinkers had created theoretical models that sought to explain the development and workings of personality.

What are the main driving forces in our personality?

• We'll look at and evaluate four influential models of personality, starting with the granddaddy of them all: Sigmund Freud's Freudian theory.

• Sigmund Freud is one of the most influential figures in all of psychology and his writings are synonymous with the theory of personality theory.
• Freud has shaped people's conception of psychology and psychotherapy, both for good and for ill.

• Freud's training wasn't in psychology or psychiatry, but in neurology.
• Freud thought that mental disorders were caused by his neurological background.

• In 1885, he spent a year in Paris studying under a neurologist.
• They had a lot of physical symptoms, including paralyses of the arms and legs.
• Some of the symptoms made little or no sense and were not physical causes.

• The sensory pathways extending to the hand run through the arm and Glove anesthesia defies standard neurological principles.
• The arm should as well if the hand lacks sensation.

• Freud concluded that mental disorders were produced by psychological factors.

• The second and third assumptions set this theory apart.

• Freudian says that we aren't free to choose our actions because we're at the mercy of powerful inner forces that lie outside our aware psychological events.
• Dreams, neurotic symptoms, and "freudian slips" of the tongue are all reflections of deep psychological conflict bubbling up to the surface.
• Freudians say that early childhood experiences, especially parenting, have a big influence on adult personality.

• No action is meaningless for Freudians.
• Even if we can't figure out what they are, all are attributable to preceding mental causes.
• Some might be inclined to ignore this behavior if your male professor cracks a long piece of chalk in two.
• Freudians agree that not all behaviors are symbolic.
• Some scholars insist that Freud said that a cigar is sometimes just a cigar in response to a question.

• Freud said that we rarely understand why we do what we do.
• The Freudian view of the mind has been likened to an ice cube with the unconscious part of personality submerged in it.
• The conscious component of the mind, the part of personality that we're aware of, is barely visible above the water's surface.
• Freud believes that the unconscious is more important than the conscious in the causes of our personality.

• According to some authors, Freud's conception of personality is similar to an The Structure of Personality Iceberg, with the conscious mind being the tip barely visible above the surface and impulses.

• If you were foolish enough to act on your impulses, you would feel bad about hurting your friend's feelings, but you would also be afraid of what would happen to you.
• Freud considers internal psychological conflict an unavoidable part of daily life.
• According to Freud, the id is our most primitive impulses, a seething cauldron of desires that makes most of us neurotic.

• When neurotic conflict becomes too unconscious, it's the part of the iceberg submerged underwater.
• The result may be mental illness.

• According to Freud, the id operates by means of in action, we only have to look to the third of our lives to understand the pleasure principle.
• The pleasure principle wants us to sleep.
• The word no isn't in the id's vocabulary, according to Freud.

• The ego is the boss of the personality because they reveal the inner workings of our decision maker.
• The ego's primary tasks are interacting with the real world id in action, but also illustrate how ego and superego and finding ways to resolve the competing demands of the other two cooperate to keep the id's wishes in check.
• According to psychic agencies.
• They don't seem to be worth their weight in gold.

• The reality principle governs the ego.

• The reality principle tries to delay gratification until it finds an appropriate outlet.
• If you find today's introductory psychology lecture to id's desires to be threatening, you may want to plaster over these wishes with symbols.
• In class, popu impulses by screaming.
• The pleasure principle lar psychology books are ugly.
• The ego's reality principle requires that you don't see dream symbols as universal.
• We'll feature your professor if we peruse this until you can find a social outlet for your dreams, such as throwing darts at a dartboard or looking up dream-related books on Amazon.com.

• Our sense rules for interpreting dream symbols include a duck, an icicle, and morality.
• The penis is depicted in a spear, an umbrella, or a tie as a metaphor for "above ego", which is what Freud meant when he said a spear, an umbrella, or a tie symbolizes the penis.
• The vagina is represented by the pocket, tunnel, jug, or gate, and the superego is represented by the sense of right and wrong we've internalize from our kangaroo.
• Freudians say we to explain that one.
• People with overly developed superegos are guilt-prone, guilt-free people are vastly oversimplify in particular, and are at risk for developing psychopathic personality.

• Our most primitive ego experiences anxiety when danger arises, signaling it to take corrective actions.
• Sex and aggression can be simple, like jumping out of the way of a car.

• The main defense mechanisms were outlined by Freud and his daughter, Anna.

• Many psychologists don't subscribe to the Freudian view of these and other defense mechanisms, so we'll present a brief discussion of some of the most important ones here.

• We forget because we appropriate outlet want to forget.
• Freud says that we suppress unhappy childhood memories to avoid pain.
• The explanation is unlikely because investigators have unconscious maneuvers intended to minimize anxiety in other animals, including mice and rats.

• According to Freud, the id is the Table 14.4 Major Freudian Defense Mechanisms and an example of each.

• A person is watching a car drive.
• According to Freud, the id operates by means of threatening memories or impulses combat scene finds himself unable to remember.

• The word no is not in the id's vocabulary.

• A mother who lost her child in a car accident insists her child is alive.

• A college student starts sucking his decision maker.
• During a difficult exam, the ego's primary tasks are interacting with the real world younger and safer time thumb.

• An inflated sense of hatred and revulsion toward a coworker is caused by the ego that's crept into everyday language.

• There are many works of art that portray an individual self-worth.

• The reality principle governs the ego.

• The reality principle tries to delay gratification until it can find a woman who complains about other women's immoral behavior.

• A golfer angrily throws his club into the air and says that the artwork captures the impulses by screaming in class.
• After missing an easy putt, the pleasure principle is not acceptable.

• A political candidate loses their superego.

• A woman whose husband cheated on her with anxiety-provoking experiences reassured herself that "according to the ritual standards."
• Men of morality are the focus of the superego.
• This agency is like a judgmental parent looking down upon the ego because Freud's impersonal thoughts are sexually promiscuous.

• A boy who likes beating up on impulse grows up to become a successful professional boxer.

• People with psychotic disorders often engage in denial, as do people undergoing extreme stress.
• It's not uncommon for the relatives of people who have recently died in accidents to insist that their loved ones are still alive.

• Older children who have stopped sucking their thumbs sometimes return to doing so.

• The person feels a different emotion when they see the observable emotion.
• Most dream dictionaries are formed by the intensity with which the person expresses the emotion, as this emo bookstores imply that there are universal tion displays an exaggerated or "phony" quality.

• Henry Adams and his colleagues found that males with psychoanalysts reject this claim.

• Future investigators need to rule out the rival hypothesis.

• People with paranoia are projecting their unconscious explanations for the findings onto others.

• We may pound our fist against the punching bag at the gym in order to make ourselves feel better after a frustrating day at work.

• The story of a man who started fires as a child and went on to become the chief of his local fire department is included.

• Freud's model of psychosexual development is more controversial than any other aspect of his theory.
• His theory has not been more widely criticized as it often involves a psychological minimization.
• Freud says personality development proceeds of previously desired outcomes.
• Freud believed that other parts of the body are sources of sexual pleasure in early development.
• "These grapes are insisted that sexuality begins in infancy," Freud said.
• He said that the extent to which we resolve is too green and sour.
• Each stage bears important implications for personality development.

• Fixations can occur if children were deprived of sexual satisfaction or if they were excessively grateful during that stage.

• Difficulty moving ahead to the next stage can be experienced in either case.
• Freud thought of five psychosexual stages, but most modern critics don't share his views.

• Babies get sexual pleasure by sucking and drinking.
• According to Freud, infants depend on their mother's breast as a source of satisfaction just as adults depend on others for reassurance.
• These adults are prone to eating and drinking in ways that are not healthy.

• They need to learn to stop their urges and wait the mouth to move their bowels in a socially appropriate place.
• Children will become fixated and prone to regression if toilet training is too harsh or too gentle.
• Tend toward stubbornness and excessive neatness in adulthood.

• Children enter into a love triangle with their parents.

• Freud never explained why girls think they are inferior to boys because of their missing organ.
• Freud's most ridiculed concept is penis envy, because there's no research support for it.

• The child wants the opposite-sex parent all for himself or herself and wants to eliminate the same-sex parent as a rival.
• Children abandon their love for the opposite-sex parent when reality sets in.

• The stage is set for psychological problems later in life if children don't fully resolve the game.

• Fielder throws his bat to the ground.
• There was a time when the latency was engaging in displacement.

• During the phallic stage in which romantic relationships boys supposedly love their mothers and want to eliminate their fathers as rivals, there is a emergence of mature conflict.

• At age 12 sexual impulses reawaken.
• The emergence of mature romantic relationships can be seen if development up to this point is unconscious.

• Freud's detractors acknowledge that he was an ingenious thinker.
• Many authors have raised troubling questions about the scientific status of psychoanalytic theory, and ingenuity shouldn't be confused with scientific support.
• We'll look at five major criticisms.

• Falsifiability theory can be difficult to refute.

• The answer would seem to be yes, but Freudians could say that these boys are attracted to their mothers at an unconscious level.

• One of Freud's patients disliked her mother-in-law so much that she took pains to not go on a summer vacation with her.
• She wanted to go on a summer vacation with her mother-in-law.
• Freud believes that all dreams are wish fulfillments.
• Freud's "heads I win, tails you lose" reasoning renders the theory difficult to understand.

• The parts of Freudian theory that can be altered are often the ones that are difficult to alter.
• Freud claimed that children exposed to harsh toilet training would grow up to be perfect.
• There is no correlation between toilet training practices and adult personality.
• There's little scientific support for many Freudian defense mechanisms.

• Freud believed that his preferred method of treatment was the only way to improve.
• Although psychotherapies based on Freudian principles tend to be more effective than no treatment at all, there's no compelling evidence that they're more effective than a variety of other psychological interventions.

• Freud claims that a lot of our behavior is done unconsciously.

• There are increasing reasons to doubt Freud's specific conceptualization of the unconscious.
• Freud was almost certainly correct about two things: We're often unaware of why we do things, and we then convince ourselves after the fact of plausible, but often incorrect explanations for why we did them.
• The studies reviewed by Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson show that we often convince ourselves that we act for reasons that are plausible but incorrect.
• Pappenheim, who later became the founder of social work in Germany with presumably false but plausible explanations, was brought up by participants.

• Recent evidence suggests that subliminally presented stimuli, like Pappenheim, can sometimes affect our behavior in wealthy Viennese women.
• The generalizability of his derives was questioned by other highly controversial evidence, in which researchers observe the effects of subtle stimuli conclusions to other cultures.

• After the study ended, primed participants walked down the hallway more slowly than unprimed participants.
• There's plenty of reason to be skeptical of the findings because several research teams have failed to replicate them.

• The unconscious was seen by Freud as a place where sexual and aggressive energies, along with repressed memories, are housed.
• Research doesn't support the existence of this place, and we don't know where it is.

• Freud's theories are said to be based on atypical samples but generalized to the rest of humanity.
• Most of Freud's patients were upper-class neurotic Viennese women, a far cry from the average Nigerian man or Malaysian woman.

• Freud's theories were applied to virtually all of humanity, even though he studied a relatively small number of individuals.

• According to Freudian hypotheses, shared environment plays a key role in shaping personality.
• Freudians claim that the child emerging from the phallic stage assumes the personality characteristics of the same-sex parent.
• As behavior-genetic studies have shown, shared environment does not play a role in adult personality.

• Freudian theory has had a profound influence on modern conceptions of the mind, but it is problematic from a scientific standpoint.
• Freud's best insight is that we are often unaware of why we do what we do.
• This insight is consistent with other models of personality, including behaviorism, and was not original to Freud.
• Freud's insights are consistent with recent neuroscience findings, according to several scholars.
• It's not clear if the idea of suspending rational analysis during dreams is unique to Freud or not.
• It's too early to tell if neuroscience will vindicate most of Freud's claims.

• Many of the Neo-Freudians broke from their mentor to forge their own way of achieving Freud's students, according to Alfred Adler.

• neo-Freudians are people who modified Freud's views in significant ways.

• Freudian theory emphasizes unconscious influences and the importance of lead to overcompensation for early experience in shaping personality.

• Compared with Freudian theory, Neo-Freudian theories place less emphasis on sexual unconscious is our shared storehouse of ity as a driving force in personality and more emphasis on social drives.
• He claimed that there was a need for approval.

• Compared with Freudian theory, neo-Freudian theories are more optimistic because of the simultaneous occurrence of thoughts.
• Freud was noto and events reflect the actions of the collective unconscious.

• Alfred Adler was the first follower of Freud to leave the fold.
• Adler said that the goal in life is to be better than others.
• People may try to become famous entertainers, great athletes, or outstanding parents to satisfy their superiority desires.

• People with an inferiority complex tend to overcompensate for their low self-esteem.
• They try to show their superiority to others even if it means dominating them.

• Adler's hypotheses are difficult to make up.

• He said that the person had selected a lifestyle that gave them a convenient excuse for being unable to achieve greatness.
• With a little creativity, we can come up with an Adlerian explanation for almost any behavior.

• Carl Gustav Jung was a student of Freud.

• Although Freud anointed Jung to be the standard-bearer of the next generation of psychoanalysts, Jung became dissatisfied with Freud's emphasis on sexuality.
• Jung is a cult figure in pop psychology and his views have become influential in popular psychology.

• The collective unconscious is the memories that ancestors have passed down to us.
• Cultural similarities in myths and legends are due to our shared storehouse of ancestral memories.
• Jung argued that the memories of thousands of generations of individuals who've seen their mothers after birth have been passed down to us genetically.

• The idea might have been taken by people in their emotional reactions to many features of the world.
• Archetypes are too far away from the fact that include the mother, the goddess, the hero, and the circle.

• The practitio to us across generations tries to infer children's Archetypes on the basis of shapes that they draw in sand and use them as a starting point for therapy.

• Jung's theory suffers from some of the same problems as those of Freud and Adler.

• Jung theorizes that Archetypes are transmitted from our ancestral past, but he may not have considered a rival explanation.
• It's possible that Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses are universal because they reflect important elements of the environment, like the sun and moon.

• Freud KAREN HORNEY: FEMINIST PSYCHOLOGY was believed to be the first major feminist psychological theorist.
• The first major feminist personality theorist was a German physician named Karen Horney.
• Not leaving much causes feelings of being inferior in many women.

• Freud's idea of penis envy was misguided.
• The excessive dependency on men that society has ingrained in them from an early age is what leads to women's sense of inferiority.
• She objected to the complex because it was neither inevitable nor universal.

• The excesses of Freudian theory were toned down by many neo-Freudian theorists.
• When it comes to the psychological differences between the sexes, they argued that social influences must be taken into account in the development of personality.
• They realized that personality is not fixed over time as Freud had thought.
• Falsifiability is a serious concern for neo-Freudian theories such as Adler and Jung.