Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis

1) What is the psychodynamic approach to personality?

The psychodynamic approach is a unique approach to personality that is outside the

mainstream of experimental psychology. It was originally derived from observations
made in clinical practice. It focuses on the nature of the whole, individual personality,
acting in the real world, rather than on small elements of behaviour observed in a
psychology laboratory. This perspective is based largely on the theories of Sigmund
Freud and Carl Jung, and their success
2) What is psychoanalysis?
Aims:

 uncovering the unconscious

 intellectual understanding

 release of pent-up emotions

Techniques:

 free-association

 analysis of dreams

Therapeutic processes:

 Resistance - either conscious or unconscious. Its occurrence usually indicates that

something important is close by and that the client is about to reveal something
important.

 Transference - feelings toward the person who is at the center of the patients conflicts is
transferred (displace) to the therapist. This might be love or hate. This is a defense
mechanism as its easier and less anxiety provoking to feel these emotions toward your
therapist than the object of these emotions, according to Freud. When transference
occurs, and it can be problematical, its interpretation becomes an important part of the
therapeutic process.

 Insight - this doesn’t actually refer simply to intellectual understanding rather to the re-
experiencing of the emotional reality of the repressed conflicts, memories, urges. This
leads to an understanding of how these conflicts have influenced functioning and
behaviour for years.
3) Freud’s description of the 3 levels of consciousness.

 Conscious (small): this is the part of the mind that holds what you’re aware of. You can
verbalize about your conscious experience and you can think about it in a logical fashion.

 Preconscious (small-medium): this is ordinary memory. So although things stored here

aren’t in the conscious, they can be readily brought into conscious.

 Unconscious (enormous): Freud felt that this part of the mind was not directly accessible
to awareness. In part, he saw it as a dump box for urges, feelings and ideas  that are tied
to anxiety, conflict and pain. These feelings and thoughts have not disappeared and
according to Freud, they are there, exerting influence on our actions and our conscious
awareness.  This is where most of the work of the Id, Ego, and Superego take place.

4) Find out about the “ID” , “EGO” and the “SUPER EGO”

THE ID: functions in the irrational and emotional part of the mind. At birth a babies mind is

all Id – want want want.  The Id is the primitive mind. It contains all the basic needs and
feelings. It is the source for libido (psychic energy). And it has only one rule: the pleasure
principle: I want it and I want it all now.  In transactional analysis, Id equates to "Child". Id
too strong = bound up in self-gratification and uncaring to others

THE EGO: functions with the rational part of the mind. The Ego develops out of growing
awareness that you can’t always get what you want. The Ego relates to the real world and
operates via the reality principle.  The Ego realizes the need for compromise and negotiates
between the Id and the Superego.  The Ego's job is to get the Id's pleasures but to be
reasonable and bear the long-term consequences in mind.  The Ego denies both instant
gratification and pious delaying of gratification.  The term ego-strength is the term used to
refer to how well the ego copes with these conflicting forces.  To undertake its work of
planning,  thinking and controlling the Id, the Ego uses some of the Id's libidinal energy.  In
transactional analysis, Ego equates to "Adult". Ego too strong = extremely rational and
efficient, but cold, boring and distant

THE SUPEREGO): The Superego is the last part of the mind to develop.  It might be called
the moral part of the mind. The Superego becomes an embodiment of parental and societal
values. It stores and enforces rules. It constantly strives for perfection, even though this
perfection ideal may be quite far from reality or possibility.  Its power to enforce rules comes
from its ability to create anxiety. The Superego has two subsystems: Ego
Ideal and Conscience. The Ego Ideal provides rules for good behavior, and standards of
excellence towards which the Ego must strive. The Ego ideal is basically what the Childs
parents approve of or value. The Conscience is the rules about what constitutes bad behavior.
The Conscience is basically all those things that the child feels mum or dad will disapprove
of or punish.
Superego too strong = feels guilty all the time, may even have an insufferably saintly
personality

5) Freud’s psychosexual stages of development

 The Oral Stage.  This stage occurs during the first year.  The mouth is the center of
pleasure.  Early weaning or greatly delayed weaning may leave a child overly
attached to forms of oral satisfaction.Fixation at the oral stage can produce adult
characteristics such as talking too much, overeating, smoking, drinking excessively,
or using "biting" sarcasm.  Another sign may be a desperate dependence on others.

 The Anal Stage.   This stage occurs during the second year when toilet training
interferes with the child's instinctual pleasure in having bowel movements at will.  If
toilet training is too harsh or is started too early, conflicts may result.

Adults fixated at this stage can be stingy, extremely organized, stubborn, and perhaps
excessively concerned with control, cleanliness, orderliness, or details.  Or they can
be sloppy, disorganized, or impulsive.

 The Phallic Stage.   This stage occurs between the ages of three and five, when the
focus of pleasure shifts to the genital area. A boy's id impulses involve sexual desire
for the mother and a desire to eliminate, even kill, the father.  This is called the
Oedipus complex.  The boy's hostile fantasies about his father create a fear of
retaliation called castration anxiety, which leads the boy's ego to repress the
incestuous desires and identify with the father.
The female child begins with a strong attachment to her mother.  She
experiences penis envy and blames her mother for the missing penis and considers her
inferior for lacking a penis.  The child transfers her love to her father, but she
identifies with her mother by adopting female gender-role behaviors. 

Freud believed that most people are fixated at the phallic stage.  Extreme fear,
aggression, or difficulties with an authority figure may reflect unresolved conflicts
with the same-sex parent.  Uncertainty about one's identity as a male or female,
problems maintain a stable love relationship, and the appearance of disordered or
socially disapproved sexual behavior may also stem from poorly resolved conflicts of
the phallic stage.

 The Latency Period and the Genital Stage.

The latency period occurs between the ages of six and adolescence.  During this
period sexual impulses lie dormant and the child focuses on education and other
matters.
The genital stage begins in adolescence and continues the rest of life.

6) Defense mechanisms in psychodynamic theory.

Anxiety comes from realistic sources in the external world and conflict within one’s own
mind. A common conflict is when the id desires something that ego and/or superego don’t
agree with. An important function of the ego is to operate defense mechanisms.

Psychological defenses are the way we deal with anxiety:

Denial

Denies source of anxiety exists (I didn’t fail my exam, it must be a mistake. Man keeps
setting the table after his wife has left him; denying therefore that she has left. Denial often
shows up in daydreams and fantasies. Daydreaming about how things might have been is a
common way we cope with anxiety by denying that things happened the way they did).

Repression

Banishing the memory: banishing old, bad memories, or even current things. (For example,
you might fancy fondling the leg of the person next to you and this could cause you anxiety
so you repress the desire!).

Regression

Moving back to an earlier stage (when highly stressed, we abandon adult coping strategies
and move back to the stage at which we are fixated; e.g. stressed: oral personality might
smoke more; anal character may become even more compulsive and obstinate than usual).

Reaction formation

Doing or thinking the opposite (woman who is angry with boss goes out of her way to be
kind and courteous; one of the hallmarks of reaction formation is excessive behaviour)

Projection

Ascribing unwanted impulse to someone else (the unfaithful husband who is extremely
jealous of his wife, always suspecting she might be unfaithful; George Pell).

Rationalization

Finding a rational explanation for something you’ve done wrong. (You didn’t fail the exam
because you didn’t study hard enough but because I set bad questions. Your boyfriend breaks
up with you and you rationalize that you never really liked him that much anyway).

Intellectualization
Turn the feeling into a thought the person who finds his/her partner has cancer, deals with it
by becoming an absolute expert on cancer and focuses on the disease intellectually rather
than dealing with the emotions),

Displacement

Moving an impulse from one object (target) to another (angry with boss: go home and yell at
your partner or kick the dog)

Sublimation

Transforming impulses into something constructive (Freud saw this as the most adaptive of
the defense mechanisms: go out and chop wood when you’re angry). Freud believed that the
greatest achievements in civilization were due to the effective sublimation of sexual and
aggressive urges.

Carl Jung and Analytical Psychology

1) Personal unconscious

The personal unconscious is pretty much self defining and doesn't need to be perceived as
mysterious or supernatural (though it is occult in the truest sense of the word - 'hidden'). The
personal unconscious contains all the stuff that simply isn't conscious. It contains stuff that
can be made conscious by simple act of will, stuff that requires some digging, as well as stuff
that may never be recalled to consciousness ever again. It is made up of the things you've
experienced every day of your life. I'm not sure if it is strictly true that nothing is ever really
and truly lost, totally forgotten, but it seems that the psyche is very reluctant to let much go in
the event that it might come in handy someday. The psyche is a pack rat, the unconscious full
of its stuff.

The personal unconscious is also a dumping ground for things we aren't comfortable with
and which we'd really rather not have in consciousness very often. Repressed memories are a
hot issue at the moment, but even without total all out suppression of memory, we are adept
at not thinking about things we'd rather not think about.

Another interesting aspect of the personal unconscious is that recall can be influenced by
context. For example, being slow to recognize a person on the street who you know very well
from school or work or wherever. There is no sharp dividing line between conscious and
unconscious mind.

2) Collective Unconscious

The collective unconscious likewise is pretty much self defining. While you participate in it,
it isn't your exclusive property, we all share in it. It belongs to the species. When Jung had
his official doctor hat on and was defining things ex cathedra , the collective unconscious
was something passed on genetically. It was like an edition of a book of which we each had
our own copy. However, in more off the record materials such as letters, Jung seemed to
possess a more spiritual understanding of something which we are all tapped into somehow,
an understanding which would not have sold in medical circles then and doesn't sell in any
academically oriented circles now, though Jung has become very popular with the general
reading public who seem to enjoy very much those ideas of Jung's which are farthest out on a
limb.

In any event, it was a theory which took courage to advance, but Jung felt it necessary to do
so, since he was noticing a strong degree of correspondence between dreams of patients, both
private and institutionalised, and mythological motifs. In alchemy he found not only parallels
in terms of content, but process as well. What he was seeing he felt to be a psychic fact, and
the only acceptable explanation for the persistence of these patterns down through
millenniums was biological inheritance.

3) Archetypes

Archetypes are essentially quasi autonomous functions which give rise to specific motifs, as
common in all mythology as in any individual's life. They are often discussed in terms of
personifications which appear in dreams, but they can also be seen in themes of stories,
mythological or lived. They are very potent as patterns of action. Another reason I prefer to
consider them functionally is that they perform discrete functions as will be seen below.
They are more than just different flavours of the same thing.

Another advantage of starting with a rather broader definition to avoid a common confusion
of archetype with personified image. While the Self may give rise to an image of Jesus Christ
for example, it is also the archetype behind the most abstract of mandalas. I also wished to
start this way because it's especially difficult in the case of the Anima/Animus who seem to
be especially prone to personification, given the emphasis on gender.
 4) Persona

The Persona is that which we present to the outside world. It isn't really our selves, though there
is a danger we can identify too much with it and believe it to be so. It is a mask. It's not a bad
thing to have, in fact it's necessary for getting along with others. Jung seems to talk about it in
the singular, but I suspect that a well adjusted person has several masks and is adept at juggling
them and knowing which one is appropriate when and just how opaque it needs to be. In any
event, singular or plural, it's a fact of life. Ask a doctor what he does and he won't say, "I do
medicine", he's unlikely even to say, "I practice medicine". What you'll likely hear is "I'm a
doctor". Occupation isn't the only shelf where masks are pulled from. Religion, sexual
orientation, politics, the social sciences....

5) Anima, Animus

The Anima is the female soul image of a man, the Animus the male soul image of a woman.
That is the most simple definition, and one which many struggle with, since Jung seems quite
absolute in defining a person's soul image as gender opposite.

"Soul image" sounds very pretty, but the Anima/Animus is not without a negative pole as
well. Jung's anima whispered to him that what he was doing was "art". He rejected this and
pushed ahead as a 'scientist' which was much better in a society which regards science as
'serious' and art as less so.

If one is on good terms with one's Anima/Animus he/she can prove a valuable messenger
between the unconscious and the conscious, a connecting link - a veritable Hermes.

6) The Shadow(Alter-Ego)

Sex and the life instincts in general are, of course, represented somewhere in Jung's system. They
are a part of an archetype called the shadow. It derives from our prehuman, animal past, when
our concerns were limited to survival and reproduction, and when we weren't self-conscious.

It is the "dark side" of the ego, and the evil that we are capable of is often stored there. Actually,
the shadow is amoral -- neither good nor bad, just like animals. An animal is capable of tender
care for its young and vicious killing for food, but it doesn't choose to do either. It just does what
it does. It is "innocent." But from our human perspective, the animal world looks rather brutal,
inhuman, so the shadow becomes something of a garbage can for the parts of ourselves that we
can't quite admit to.
Symbols of the shadow include the snake (as in the garden of Eden), the dragon, monsters, and
demons. It often guards the entrance to a cave or a pool of water, which is the collective
unconscious. Next time you dream about wrestling with the devil, it may only be yourself you are
wrestling with!

7) Introversion/Extraversion

Jung developed a personality typology that has become so popular that some people don't
realize he did anything else! It begins with the distinction
between introversion and extroversion. Introverts are people who prefer their internal world
of thoughts, feelings, fantasies, dreams, and so on, while extroverts prefer the external world
of things and people and activities.

The words have become confused with ideas like shyness and sociability, partially because
introverts tend to be shy and extroverts tend to be sociable. But Jung intended for them to
refer more to whether you ("ego") more often faced toward the persona and outer reality, or
toward the collective unconscious and its archetypes. In that sense, the introvert is somewhat
more mature than the extrovert. Our culture, of course, values the extrovert much more. And
Jung warned that we all tend to value our own type most!

We now find the introvert-extravert dimension in several theories, notably Hans Eysenck's,
although often hidden under alternative names such as "sociability" and "surgency."