PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY

OF PERSONALITY
Moselle Hannah P. Bobadilla
What do yyou know about Freud?
Who is Sigmund Freud?
 Freiberg, Moravia,
p
Czech Republic
 March or May 6, 1856

 Firstborn
Fi tb
 Mother’s favorite

out of her 7 children

 Intensely curious about

human nature
Overview of Freud
Freud’ss Life
 Prefers
f teaching and physiology but forced
f to take
medicine practice
 Study w/ / Jean-Martin Charcot – hypnotic technique
in treating hysteria
 Josef Breuer – Catharsis
 Published a research study about male hysteria
 Wilhelm Fleiss
 Professional Isolation at 1890s – starts Dream
Analysis
 Overview of Freud
Freud’ss Life
 Ch
Characteristics:
t i ti
 Troubled friendship ties
 Intense intellectual curiosity
 Surrounded with a male-dominated society
 Among g Freud’s adult personality
p y characteristics were self-
confidence, ambition, desire for achievement, and dreams of glory
and fame
 Publications:
 Interpretation of Dreams
 Psychopathology
y p gy of Everyday
y y Life
 Three Essays on Theory of Sexuality
 Jokes and their Relation to Unconscious
 Founded International Psychoanalytic Association
1909 – 20th Anniversary of Clark University
LEVELS OF MENTAL LIFE
Emerging eminence on the unconscious
1 - Unconscious
 Drives, urges, instincts
 Beyond
y awareness but motivates action
 Dreams, slips of tongue and repression
 So ce Experience
Source: E i andd Ph
Phylogenetic
l ti EEndowment
d t
2 - Preconscious
 Can become conscious quite readily
 Sources: Conscious Perception
p and Unconscious
 Note: Ideas slip past the “vigilant censor” and
entered in a disguised form
3 - Conscious
 Directly available
 Source: Perceptual
p Conscious and Nonthreateningg
Ideas from preconscious and well-disguised ideas
from unconscious
Levels of Mental Life (Illustration)
( )
PROVINCES OF THE MIND
Not an actual place, but a construct
1 - Id
 Primary Process
 Basic desires
 Pleasure Principle
 No contact with the external world
 Demands gratification w/o regard of what is
possible and what is proper
 Amoral
 Primitive chaotic
Primitive, chaotic, illogical,
illogical unorganized,
unorganized filled with
energy
2 - Ego
 Secondary Process
 Reality
y Principle
p
 Communication with the external world
 D ii
Decision-making
ki / executive
ti bbranchh off personality
lit
 Takes consideration of the incompatible and equally
unrealistic demand of id and super ego
 Continuouslyy develop
p strategies
g to control id
3 - Super Ego
 Ideal aspects of personality
 Moralistic and idealistic principle
p p
 No contact with the external world
 2 subsystem:
b t
 Conscience – what we should not do
 Ego-ideal - what we should do

 Guilt – when ego acts/intends to act contrary to the

moral standard of super ego
Three Hypothetical
yp Persons
DYNAMICS OF
PERSONALITY
insistence that people are motivated primarily by drives of which they
have little or no awareness
DRIVES
 Constant motivational force
 Internal stimulus originated
g in Id
 Categories
 Eros (Sex)
 Whole body = erogenous zone
 Aim: reduce sexual tension
 All pleasurable activity is traceable to the sexual drive

 Thanatos (Aggression)
 Aim: return an organism to its organic state  self-
destruction & inflict injury to others
ANXIETY
 Only the ego can produce or feel anxiety
 Three Kinds of Anxiety
y
 neurotic (id)
 moral (superego)

 realistic (external world)

 Anxiety
A i t serves as an ego-preservingi mechanism
h i
because it signals us that some danger is at hand
DEFENSE MECHANISM
To protect ego against anxiety
Denial
a person living with a terminal illness insists that
he is just undergoing some kind of “slump”
slump
instead of an imminent death
Displacement
An employee who feels very hostile against his
boss but cannot act on it; hence, becoming hostile
with his children instead
Projection
Peter loves James, but he believes that he hates
him However,
him. However it was against his moral principles
to hate someone, and so eventually, he convinced
instead
himself that James hates him instead.
Rationalization
Ann was fired from her job. She told her sister
that the job was not good anyway.
anyway
Reaction Formation
Someone disturbed by sexual longings may
become a crusader against pornography
Regression
During an earthquake, a woman goes into a
fetal position under her desk.
desk
Repression
Jessie acts like a normal sibling but unconsciously
wants to break the bones of her brother
Sublimation
Robert repressed his sexual urges and decides
to paint instead
Fixation
Polly is always chewing a gum whenever I see
her
Introjection
Many teenagers today dye their hair and wear
fashionable multi-layered
multi layered clothes to look more
like their K-pop idols
STAGES OF
DEVELOPMENT
Important
p Terms under “Infantile Period” (Oral,
( , Anal,, Phallic))

 Oral Fixation
 Anal Fixation
 Oedipus Complex
 Male Oedipus Complex
 Female Oedipus Complex
APPLICATIONS OF
PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY
more concerned with theory building
than with treating sick people
Goals of the Psychoanalytic Therapy

 1) To make unconscious motives conscious

 2) To strengthen the Ego

 FOCUS: earlier experiences which are discussed,

reconstructed, interpreted, and analyzed
Early Therapeutic Technique
 Method: Active approach
 Purpose:
p Extracting
g repressed
p childhood memories
 Limitation:
 Freud realize that highly suggestive and even coercive
tactics may have elicited memories of seduction and
that it lacked clear evidence that these memories are
real
Later Therapeutic Technique
 Method: Free Association
 Purpose:
p to arrive at the unconscious byy starting
g with
a present conscious idea
 *Transference
Transference – strong sexual/aggressive feelings
that patients develop to their analyst
 Li it ti
Limitations:
 Not all old memories can be brought into consciousness
 Not effective w/ constitutional illnes

 Patient, once cured, may later develop another psychic

problem
Dream Analysis
 Transform the manifest content of dreams to the
more latent content
 Basic assumption: all dreams are wish fulfilment
except
p patients
p suffering
g traumatic experience
p
 Dreams are forced in the unconscious but try to
work their way to the conscious
through:
 Condensation

 Displacement
Freudian Slips
 Fehlleistung, or “faulty function,” or parapraxes
 Everyday
y y slipsp are not chance accidents but reveal
a person’s unconscious intentions
CRITICISMS
Critiques:
 Freud did not understand women and his theory of
personality was strongly oriented toward men
 Freud’s definition of science needs some
explanation
p
 Freud called psychoanalysis as a science to separate
from
o philosophy
p osop y or o ideology
deo ogy
 Translation of Freud’s work make him seem to be more
scientific and less humanistic
 May regard his theory-building methods as untenable
and rather unscientific
EVALUATION
Thoughts re: Freud?
Looking back…
 The conditions
Th diti under
d which hi h Freud
F d collected
ll t d ddata
t were
unsystematic and uncontrolled.
 Freud may have reinterpreted his patients
patients’ words, guided by
a desire to find supportive material
 Freud’s research was based on a small and unrepresentative
samplel off people,
l lilimited
it d to
t himself
hi lf andd those
th who
h chose
h to
t
undergo psychoanalysis with him. No more than a dozen or
so cases have been detailed in Freud’s writings, and most of
those patients were young, unmarried, educated, upper-
class women
 Freud made limited attempts to verify his patients’
patients reported
accounts of their childhood experiences.
 Psychoanalysis depends on the therapist's subjective
interpretation
On a positive note…
 FFreud’s
d’ influence
i fl on A
American
i popular
l culture
l and d
consciousness has been enormous
 Freudian psychoanalysis became a vital force in
modern psychology (an alternative to somatic/drug
treatments)
Now he is seen as the greatest originator of all, the agent of the Zeitgeist
p
who accomplished the invasion of ppsychology
y gy byy the principle
p p of the
unconscious process.… It is not likely that the history of psychology can be
written in the next three centuries without mention of Freud’s name and still
claim to be a general history of psychology. And there you have the best
criterion
it i off greatness:
t posthumous
th ffame. (B
(Boring,
i 1950
1950, pp. 743,
743 707)
 THANK YOU!
References:
• Feist & Feist (2008). Theories of Personality 7th Edition. USA: The McGraw-
Hill Companies, Inc.
• Schultz & Schultz (2011). A History of Psychological Thought 10th Edition.
Belmont, CA: Cengage.