Tomas Esquer-Perez
Period 3

Chapter 13 Vocab personality: an individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. free association: a method of exploring the unconscious in which the person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind. psychoanalysis: Freud’s theory of personality and therapeutic technique that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts. unconscious: a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. According to contemporary psychologists, information processing of which we are unaware. id: contains a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to Freud, strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. ego: the largely conscious part of personality that mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality. superego: the part of personality that, according to Freud, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment and for future aspirations. psychosexual stages: the childhood stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital)
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. fixate: according to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved. defense mechanisms: the ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality. repression: the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness. regression: psychoanalytic defense mechanism in which an individual faced with anxiety retreats to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated. reaction formation: psychoanalytic defense mechanism by which the ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites. projection: psychoanalytic defense mechanism by which people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others. rationalization: defense mechanism that offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions. displacement: psychoanalytic defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person. denial: defense mechanism by which people refuse to believe or even to perceive painful realities. collective unconscious: Carl Jung’s concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species’ history. projective test: a personality test, such as the Rorschach or TAT, that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of one’s inner dynamics.
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): a projective test in which people express their inner feelings and interests through the stories they make up about ambiguous scenes.
Rorschach inkblot test: the most widely used projective test, a set of 10 inkblots, designed by Hermann Rorschach; seeks to identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of the blots. terror-management theory: a theory of death-related anxiety; explores people’s emotional and behavioral responses to reminders of their impending death. self-actualization: according to Maslow, one of the ultimate psychological needs that arises after basic physical and psychological needs are met and self-esteem is achieved; the motivation to