Exam #3 Review Sheet

• Module 40
•Personality: An individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting
• Psychodynamic theories:Proposed that childhood sexuality and unconscious motivations influence personality.
• Free association: In psychoanalysis, a method of exploring the unconscious in which the person relaxes and says what ever comes to mind, no matter how trivial or embarrassing.
• Psychoanalysis: Freud’s theory of personality and therapeutic technique that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts. Freud believed that the patient’s free association, resistance, dreams, and transferences and the therapist’s interpretations of them - released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient to gain self insight.
• Unconscious: According to Freud , a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. According to contemporary psychologists, information processing of which we are unaware.
• Personality Structure • Id: contains a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to Freud, strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. The id operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification. • Ego: The largely conscious, “executive” part of the personality that, according to Freud, mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality. The ego operates on the reality principle, satisfying the id’s desires in ways that will realistically bring pleasure rather than pain. • Superego: the part of personality that, according to Freud, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations.
• Personality development • Freud’s Psychosexual Stages: The childhood stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital) during which, according to Freud, the id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones.
• Oedipus Complex: According to Freud, a boy’s sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father.
• Identification: The process by which, according to Freud, children incorporate their parents’ values into their developing superegos.
• Fixation: The inability to see a problem from a new perspective, by employing a different mental state.
• 6 Defense mechanisms: in psychoanalytic theory, the ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality. (Repression, Regression, Reaction Formation, Projection, Rationalization, Displacement, Denial)
• Alfred Adler: Proposed the inferiority complex. Believed that much of our behavior is driven by efforts to conquer childhood feelings of inferiority.
• Karen Horney : Believed childhood anxiety caused by the dependent child’s sense of helplessness triggers our desire for love and security. Also countered Freud’s assumption that women had penis envy.
• Carl Jung: Believed that our unconscious mind contained more than repressed thoughts and feelings. Believed in the collective unconscious, which contained a common reservoir of images derived from our species’ past.
• Repression : In psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.
• Collective unconscious: Carl Jung’s concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species’ history.
• Projective tests: A personality test, such as Rorschach or TAT, that provides, ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one’s inner dynamics.
• Rorschach inkblot test: The most widely used projective test, a set fo 10 inkblots, designed by Hermann Rorschach; seeks to identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots.
• Contradictions of Freud’s ideas: Today developmental psychologists see our development as lifelong and not fixed in childhood. Also they believe that Freud overestimated parental