Personality Psychology Ch. 9

Projection

A defense mechanism based on the notion that sometimes we see in others those traits and desires that we find most upsetting in ourselves. We literally "project" (i.e., attribute) our own unacceptable qualities onto others.

Rationalization

A defense mechanism that involves generating acceptable reasons for outcomes that might otherwise be unacceptable. The goal is to reduce anxiety by coming up with an explanation for some event that is easier to accept than the "real" reason.

Reaction Formation

A defense mechanism that refers to an attempt to stifle the expression of an unacceptable urge; a person may continually display a flurry of behavior that indicates the opposite impulse. This makes it possible for psychoanalysts to predict that sometimes people will do exactly the opposite of what you might otherwise think they would do. It also alerts us to be sensitive to instances when a person is doing something in excess. One of the hallmarks of reaction formation is excessive behavior.

Sublimation

A defense mechanism that refers to the channeling of unacceptable sexual or aggressive instincts into socially desired activities. For Freud, this is the most adaptive defense mechanism. A common example is going out to chop wood when you are angry rather than acting on that anger or even engaging in other less adaptive defense mechanisms such as displacement.

Identification

A developmental process in children. It consists of wanting to become like the same-sex parent. In classic psychoanalysis, it marks the beginning of the resolution of the Oedipal or Electra conflicts and the successful resolution of the phallic stage of psychosexual development. Freud believed that the resolution of the phallic stage was both the beginning of the superego and morality and the start of the adult gender role.

Dream Analysis

A technique Freud taught for uncovering the unconscious material in a dream by interpreting the content of a dream. Freud called dreams "the royal road to the unconscious."

Transference

A term from psychoanalytic therapy. It refers to the patient reacting to the analyst as if he or she were an important figure from the patient's own life. The patient displaces past or present (negative and positive) feelings toward someone from his or her own life onto the analyst. The idea behind this is that the interpersonal problems between a patient and the important people in his or her life will be reenacted in the therapy session with the analyst. This is a specific form of the mechanism of evocation, as described in the material on person-situation interaction.

Psychoanalysis

A theory of personality and a method of psychotherapy (a technique for helping individuals who are experiencing some mental disorder or even relatively minor problems with living). This can be thought of as a theory about the major components and mechanisms of personality, as well as a method for deliberately restructuring personality.

Fixation

According to Erikson, if a developmental crisis is not successfully and adaptively resolved, personality development could become arrested and the person would continue to have a fixation on that crisis in development. According to Erikson, if a developmental crisis is not successfully and adaptively resolved, personality development could become arrested and the person would continue to have a fixation on that crisis in development.

Psychosexual Stage Theory

According to Freud, all persons pass through a set series of stages in personality development. At each of the first three stages, young children must face and resolve specific conflicts, which revolve around ways of obtaining a type of sexual gratification. Children seek sexual gratification at each stage by investing libidinal energy in a specific body part. Each stage in the developmental process is named after the body part in which sexual energy is invested.

Manifest Content

According to Freud, what the dream actually contains.

Latent Content

According to Freud, what the elements of the dream actually represent.

Psychic Energy

According to Sigmund Freud, a source of energy within each person that motivates him or her to do one thing and not another. In Freud's view, it is this energy that motivates all human activity.

Displacement

An unconscious defense mechanism that involves avoiding the recognition that one has certain inappropriate urges or unacceptable feelings (e.g., anger, sexual attraction) toward a specific other. Those feelings then get displaced onto another person or object that is more appropriate or acceptable.

Preconscious

Any information that a person is not presently aware of, but that could easily be retrieved and made conscious, is found in the preconscious mind.

Moral Anxiety

Caused by a conflict between the id or the ego and the superego. For example, a person who suffers from chronic shame or feelings of guilt over not living up to "proper" standards, even though such standards might not be attainable, is experiencing this

Objective Anxiety

Fear occurs in response to some real, external threat to the person. For example, being confronted by a large, aggressive-looking man with a knife while taking a shortcut through an alley would elicit (fear) in most people.

Blindsight

Following an injury or stroke that damages the primary vision center in the brain, a person may lose some or all of his or her ability to see. In this blindness the eyes still bring information into the brain, but the brain center responsible for object recognition fails. People who suffer this "cortical" blindness often display an interesting capacity to make judgments about objects that they truly cannot see.

Oedipal Conflict

For boys, the main conflict in Freud's phallic stage. It is a boy's unconscious wish to have his mother all to himself by eliminating the father.

Castration Anxiety

Freud argued that little boys come to believe that their fathers might make a preemptive Oedipal strike and take away what is at the root of the Oedipal conflict: the boy's penis. This fear of losing his penis is called castration anxiety; it drives the little boy into giving up his sexual desire for his mother.

Instincts

Freud believed that strong innate forces provided all the energy in the psychic system.. In Freud's initial formulation there were two fundamental categories: self-preservation instincts and sexual instincts. In his later formulations, Freud collapsed the self-preservation and sexual instincts into one, which he called the "life".

Thanatos

Freud postulated that humans have a fundamental instinct toward destruction and that this instinct is often manifest in aggression toward others. The two instincts were usually referred to as libido, for the life instinct, and thanatos, for the death instinct. While thanatos was considered to be the death instinct, Freud also used this term to refer to any urge to destroy, harm, or aggress against others or oneself.

Libido

Freud postulated that humans have a fundamental instinct toward destruction and that this instinct is often manifest in aggression toward others. The two instincts were usually referred to as libido, for the life instinct, and thanatos, for the death instinct. While the libido was generally considered sexual in nature, Freud also used this term to refer to any need-satisfying, life-sustaining, or pleasure-oriented urge.

Wish Fulfillment

If an urge from the id requires some external object or person, and that object or person is not available, the id may create a mental image or fantasy of that object or person to satisfy its needs. Mental energy is invested in that fantasy and the urge is temporarily satisfied. Whereby something unavailable is conjured up and the image of it is temporarily satisfying.

Reality Principle

In psychoanalysis, it is the counterpart of the pleasure principle. It refers to guiding behavior according to the demands of reality and relies on the strengths of the ego to provide such guidance.

Insight

In psychoanalysis, through many interpretations, a patient is gradually led to an understanding of the unconscious source of his or her problems.

Neurotic Anxiety

Occurs when there is a direct conflict between the id and the ego. The danger is that the ego may lose control over some unacceptable desire of the id. For example, a man who worries excessively that he might blurt out some unacceptable thought or desire in public is beset by this.

Interpretations

One of the three levels of cognition that are of interest to personality psychologists. Interpretation is the making sense of, or explaining, various events in the world. Psychoanalysts offer patients interpretations of the psychodynamic causes of their problems. Through many interpretations, patients are gradually led to an understanding of the unconscious source of their problems.

Repression

One of the first defense mechanisms discussed by Freud; refers to the process of preventing unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or urges from reaching conscious awareness.

Free Association

Patients relax, let their minds wander, and say whatever comes into their minds. Patients often say things that surprise or embarrass them. By relaxing the censor that screens everyday thoughts, free association allows potentially important material into conscious awareness.

Symbols

Psychoanalysts interpret dreams by deciphering how unacceptable impulses and urges are transformed by the unconscious into symbols in the dream. (For example, parents may be represented as a king and queen; children may be represented as small animals.)

Defense Mechanisms

Strategies for coping with anxiety and threats to self-esteem.

Superego

That part of personality that internalizes the values, morals, and ideals of society. This makes us feel guilty, ashamed, or embarrassed when we do something wrong, and makes us feel pride when we do something right. It sets moral goals and ideals of perfection and is the source of our judgments that something is good or bad. It is what some people refer to as conscience. The main tool of the this in enforcing right and wrong is the emotion of guilt.

Conscious

That part of the mind that contains all the thoughts, feelings, and images that a person is presently aware of. Whatever a person is currently thinking about is in this part of the mind.

Pleasure Principle

The desire for immediate gratification. The id operates according to the pleasure principle; therefore, it does not listen to reason, does not follow logic, has no values or morals (other than immediate gratification), and has very little patience.

Secondary Process Thinking

The ego engages in secondary process thinking, which refers to the development and devising of strategies for problem solving and obtaining satisfaction. Often this process involves taking into account the constraints of physical reality, about when and how to express some desire or urge.

Penis Envy

The female counterpart of castration anxiety, which occurs during the phallic stage of psychosexual development for girls around 3 to 5 years of age.

Latency Stage

The fourth stage in Freud's psychosexual stages of development. This stage occurs from around the age of six until puberty. Freud believed few specific sexual conflicts existed during this time, and was thus a period of psychological rest. Subsequent psychoanalysts have argued that much development occurs during this time, such as learning to make decisions for oneself, interacting and making friends with others, developing an identity, and learning the meaning of work. The this period ends with the sexual awakening brought about by puberty.

Projective Hypothesis

The idea that what a person "sees" in an ambiguous figure, such as an inkblot, reflects his or her personality. People are thought to project their own personalities into what they report seeing in such an ambiguous stimulus.

Id

The most primitive part of the human mind. Freud saw this as something we are born with and as the source of all drives and urges. It is like a spoiled child: selfish, impulsive, and pleasure loving. According to Freud, it operates strictly according to the pleasure principle, which is the desire for immediate gratification.

Deliberation-Without-Awareness

The notion that, when confronted with a decision, if a person can put it out of their conscious mind for a period of time, then the "unconscious mind" will continue to deliberate on it, helping the person to arrive at a "sudden" and often correct decision some time later.

Denial

The notion that, when confronted with a decision, if a person can put it out of their conscious mind for a period of time, then the "unconscious mind" will continue to deliberate on it, helping the person to arrive at a "sudden" and often correct decision some time later.

Ego

The part of the mind that constrains the id to reality. According to Freud, it develops within the first two or three years of life. This operates according to the reality principle. This part of the mind understands that the urges of the id are often in conflict with social and physical reality, and that direct expression of id impulses must therefore be redirected or postponed.

Anal Stage

The second stage in Freud's psychosexual stages of development. This stage typically occurs between the ages of 18 months and three years. At this stage, the anal sphincter is the source of sexual pleasure, and the child obtains pleasure from first expelling feces and then, during toilet training, from retaining feces. Adults who are compulsive, overly neat, rigid, and never messy are, according to psychoanalytic theory, likely to be fixated at this stage.

False Consensus Effect

The tendency many people have to assume that others are similar to them (i.e., extraverts think that many other people are as extraverted as they are). Thinking that many other people share your own traits, preferences, or motivations.

Phallic Stage

The third stage in Freud's psychosexual stages of development. It occurs between three and five years of age, during which time the child discovers that he has (or she discovers that she does not have) a penis. This stage also includes the awakening of sexual desire directed, according to Freud, toward the parent of the opposite sex.

Genital Stage

The final stage in Freud's psychosexual stage theory of development. This stage begins around age 12 and lasts through one's adult life. Here the libido is focused on the genitals, but not in the manner of self-manipulation associated with the phallic stage. People reach the genital stage with full psychic energy if they have resolved the conflicts at the prior stages.

Oral Stage

The first stage in Freud's psychosexual stages of development. This stage occurs during the initial 18 months after birth. During this time, the main sources of pleasure and tension reduction are the mouth, lips, and tongue. Adults who still obtain pleasure from "taking in," especially through the mouth (e.g., people who overeat or smoke or talk too much) might be fixated at this stage.

Primary Process Thinking

Thinking without the logical rules of conscious thought or an anchor in reality. Dreams and fantasies are examples. Although this does not follow the normal rules of reality (e.g., in dreams people might fly or walk through walls), Freud believed there were principles at work in primary process thought and that these principles could be discovered.

Unconscious

This part of the mind is about which the conscious mind has no awareness.

Resistance

When a probing psychoanalyst threatens a patient's defenses, the patient may unconsciously set up obstacles to progress. This signifies that important unconscious material is coming to the fore. The resistance itself becomes an integral part of the interpretations the analyst offers to the patient.

Fundamental Attribution Error

When bad events happen to others, people have a tendency to attribute blame to some characteristic of the person, whereas when bad events happen to oneself, people have the tendency to blame the situation.

Ego Depletion

When exertion of self-control results in a decrease of psychic energy.

Electra Complex

Within the psychoanalytic theory of personality development, the female counterpart to the Oedipal complex; both refer to the phallic stage of development.