Understanding Personality: Insights from Freud and Neo-Freudians

1. Personality Myers Chapter 13

2. Personality • An individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting

3. Issues in Personality Theory • Free will or determinism? • Nature or nurture? • Past, present, or future? • Uniqueness or universality? • Equilibrium or growth? • Optimism or pessimism?

4. Freud • Found that nervous disorders often made no neurological sense • Concluded disorders had psychological causes - “discovered” the unconscious • Thought hypnosis was the door to the unconscious • Patients had uneven capacity

5. Freud • Free association: method of exploring the unconscious • Patient relaxes and says whatever comes to mind

6. Freud • Psychoanalysis • Freuds’ theory of personality • Attributes thoughts and actins to unconscious motives and conflicts • The techniques used in treating psychological disorders by seeking to expose and interpret unconscious tensions

7. Freud • Unconscious • Freud: a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories • Modern: information processing of which we are unaware

8. Freud - Personality Structure

9. Freud - Psychosexual Stages of Development • Oral (0-18 months): pleasure centers on the mouth • Anal (18-36 months): pleasure centers on the bowel/bladder elimination

10. Freud - Psychosexual Stages of Development • Phallic (3-6 years): pleasure centers on the genitals • Oedipus complex: unconscious sexual desires toward the mother & hatred of the father • Cope with threatening feelings through identification with the father

11. Freud - Psychosexual Stages of Development • Latency (6 years to puberty): sexuality is dormant • Genital (puberty +): sexual interests mature

12. Defense Mechanisms • The ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality • Repression • Regression • Reaction formation • Projection • Rationalization • Displacement • Denial

13. Defense Mechanisms • Repression • Underlies all other defense mechanisms • Banishes anxiety arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness • Can be incomplete • Slips of the tongue • Dream symbols

14. Defense Mechanisms • Regression • Retreat to an earlier, more infantile stage of development • E.g., A child sucking their thumb on the first day of second grade

15. Defense Mechanisms • Reaction formation • The ego unconsciously makes unacceptable impulses look like their opposites • E.g., A young man who is very interested in but unsuccessful with women acts like a “woman hater”

16. Defense Mechanisms • Projection • One attributes threatening impulses to others • E.g., The spouse who is cheating makes accusations that their faithful partner is being flirtatious

17. Defense Mechanisms • Rationalization • One offers self-justifying explanations for behavior • E.g., The alcoholic who insists they don’t enjoy drinking, but says she feels obliged to have a drink “just to be social”

18. Defense Mechanisms • Displacement • One diverts impulses to a more acceptable object or person • “Kicking the dog”

19. Defense Mechanisms • Denial • One refuses to believe or even perceive painful realities • E.g., Ignoring mounting credit card debt

20. Neo-Freudians • Accepted Freud’s basic ideas • Personality structures (id, ego, superego) • Importance of the unconscious • Shaping of personality in children • Dynamics of anxiety and defense mechanisms

21. Neo-Freudians • Differed from Freud • More emphasis on the conscious mind • Believed we have more positive motives than just sex and aggression

22. Carl Jung • Neo-Freudian • Agreed with Freud’s emphasis on the powerful influence of the unconscious • Collective unconscious: a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species’ history

23. Contemporary Psychodynamic Theorists & Therapists • Reject the notion that sex is the basis of personality • Agree with Freud • Much of our mental life is unconscious • We struggle with inner conflicts • Childhood shapes our personalities and attachment styles

24. Methods for Accessing the Unconscious • Projective tests: a personality test that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one’s inner dynamics • Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) • Rorschach inkblot test

25. Rorschach Inkblot Test • Participant is presented with a number of inkblots and asked to describe what the blot might be or what it brings to mind

26. False consensus effect • The tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs and behaviors • Similar to Freud’s idea of projection

27. Critique of Freud’s theory of Psychoanalysis • Many ideas contradicted by current research • Theory offers after-the-fact explanations • Recent theories question • Overriding importance of childhood experiences • Degree of parental influence • Timing of gender-identity formation • Significance of childhood sexuality • Existence of hidden content in dreams

28. Critique of Freud’s Theory of Psychoanalysis • Does repression occur? • Cognitive psychologists: “Freudian slips” are a natural by-product of how we process information and direct action

29. The Humanistic Perspective • Focused on the ways “healthy” people strive for self-determination and self-realization • Rebelled against Freud and behaviorism • Emphasized importance of • Current environmental influences on our growth potential • Having our needs for love and acceptance satisfied

30. The Humanistic Perspective • Rebelled against Freud and behaviorism • Emphasized importance of • Current environmental influences on our growth potential • Having our needs for love and acceptance satisfied

31. The Humanistic Perspective • Abraham Maslow • Hierarchy of needs • Self-actualization: the motivation to fulfill one’s potential • Self-transcendence: the desire to find meaning and purpose beyond the self

32. The Humanistic Perspective • Carl Rogers • Agreed with Maslow - we are basically good and are endowed with self-actualizing tendencies • Nurture growth in others • Be genuine, empathic, and accepting • Unconditional positive regard

33. The Humanistic Perspective • Self concept: all the thoughts and feelings we have in response to “Who am I?” • Maslow and Rogers both saw as central feature of personality • Ideal self: we feel dissatisfied and unhappy if we fall short (Rogers)

34. The Humanistic Perspective • Assessed personality using self-report questionnaires • Compare your actual self to your ideal self • Interviews and intimate conversations

35. The Humanistic Perspective • Critiques • Vague and subjective concepts • Reflections of theorists values rather than descriptions • Very individualistic • Promotes selfishness, self-indulgence, erosion of moral restraints • Fails to appreciate human capacity for evil • Naïve optimism leads to social problems

36. The Trait Perspective • Attempt to describe personality in terms of stable and enduring behavior patterns, or dispositions to feel or act • Dominant traits and their associated characteristics describe personality “types”

37. The Trait Perspective • WWI Personal Data Sheet (1917) • Identify emotionally disturbed recruits • Several questions about symptoms

38. The Trait Perspective • Factor analysis: a statistical procedure that identifies clusters of behaviors that tend to appear together • Simultaneously measure correlations among a group variables

39. Hans J. Eysenck

40. MMPI • Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory • Empirically derived • Not valid in all situations

41. The Big Five • Five distinct personality dimensions • Conscientiousness • Agreeableness • Neuroticism (emotional stability vs. instability) • Openness • Extraversion

42. The Big Five

43. Person-Situation Controversy • Traits persist over time but human behavior varies widely from situation to situation • Traits are weak predictors of behavior • Trait perspective: despite variations, a person’s average behavior across situations is consistent

44. Person-Situation Controversy

45. Person-Situation Controversy • Traits are socially significant • Health • Thinking • Job performance • Predict mortality, divorce, & occupational attainment • >Cognitive ability or socio-economic status

46. Person-Situation Controversy • Behaviors can be inconsistent from situation to situation • Personality tests are weak predictors of behaviors • Knowing someone’s extraversion score will not tell us how sociable they will be in any given situation

47. Person-Situation Controversy • People’s average behavior across many situations is predictable • More consistent in casual/informal situations • We have a hard time faking a different personality

48. Expressive Styles • Our animation, manner of speaking, and gestures • Impressively consistent • Individual differences judged in a matter of seconds • The power of first impression

49. Social-Cognitive Perspective • Applies principles of learning, cognition, and social behavior to the understanding of personality

50. Social-Cognitive Perspective • Reciprocal determinism: the interacting influences between personality and environmental factors • Different people choose different environments • Our personalities shape how we interpret & react to events • Our personalities help create situations to which we react