LearningCurve 14a. Introduction to Personality and Psychodynamic Theories

Pschoanalysis

) Freud's theory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts. (2) Sigmund Freud's therapeutic technique used in treating psychological disorders. Freud believed the patient's free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences—and the therapist's interpretations of them—released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient to gain self-insight.

_____, a prominent neo-Freudian, proposed the popular idea of the inferiority complex.

Adler

Freud believed that this would retrieve painful unconscious memories, often from childhood, and then help them overcome their current troubles.

free association

Kanesha meets with a therapist because she wants to do something about the path her life is taking. The doctor tells her to lie down on the couch, relax, and say whatever comes to mind. This psychoanalytic method is known as:

free association

Judith is an extremely sarcastic person. She also comes across as tough and sometimes angry. According to Freud, she is fixated at which stage of development?

oral

Dr. Conway states that his research investigates the patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting that distinguish one person from another. Dr. Conway's research is MOST likely in the area of:

personality

Modern psychological researchers criticize Sigmund Freud's ideas because they claim they offer after-the-fact explanations but fail to _____ behavior and traits.

predict

Dr. Chen has a patient who has lost all feeling in his left hand. To determine the cause, Dr. Chen asks the patient to relax and say whatever comes to mind, no matter what it is. Dr. Chen is:

preforming free association

Using such techniques as dream analysis and free association, Dr. Brown tries to reveal and understand a client's unconscious conflicts. Dr. Brown is BEST described as a _____ therapist.

psychoanalysis

The two earliest theories of personality are the _____ and _____ theories.

psychoanalytic; humanistic

refers to the banishment of anxiety from consciousness

repression

When Sigmund Freud's female patients told him that they were sexually abused as children, some scholars believe that Freud was:

skeptical and attributed these stories to his patients' own childhood sexual wishes.

Many researchers believe that this is not a repository of seething passions and repressive censoring, but rather a mechanism for cooler information processing that occurs without our awareness.

the conscious

Psychodynamic Theories

theories that view personality with a focus on the unconscious and the importance of childhood experiences

Based on decades of psychological research, MOST psychologists agree with the psychoanalytic perspective that much of one's mental life is:

unconscious

The _____ is the part of the mind that stores unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories.

unconscious

Sigmund Freud thought that the part of a dream that people remember is a censored version of:

unconscious wishes