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PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY Sigmund Freud

OVERVIEW
 Personality is largely unconscious, hidden, and unknown.
 Concept of sexual energy helps us gratify and survive, not always
genitals (ex. Eating)
 Human personality and behavior are powerfully shaped by early
childhood relationships
 People are hedonistic (pleasure seeking)
 Aim of psychoanalysis is to reduce tension

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DYNAMICS OF PERSONALITY
Freud postulated a DYNAMIC, or MOTIVATIONAL PRINCIPLE, to
explain the driving forces behind people’s actions.
To Freud, people are motivated to seek pleasure and to reduce
tension and anxiety (Tension – unpleasant feeling)
 INSTINCT - drive or impulse mental representations of internal
stimuli, that drive a person to take certain actions (Ex: Hunger)
 REPETITION COMPULSION: aspect of an instinct which reflects a
cycle from excitation to quiescence. This cycle repeats every time
one experiences tension or excitation.

LEVELS OF THE MIND

1. Conscious: top and small portion
2. Pre-Conscious: contains defense
mechanisms and memory
3. Unconscious: animalistic-causing drives
Phylogenetic Endowment: part of our
unconscious that originates experiences of our
early ancestors that have been passed on to
us through hundreds of generations of
repetition

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PROVINCES OF THE MIND

ID
•Upon birth, the Id is the only personality structure
•Core of the personality
•Buried in the Unconscious
•Strives constantly to reduce tension by satisfying basic desires;
actions are governed by the “pleasure principle” (e.g., sucking
nipple/thumb/toy, defecating/urinating)
•“the Id is primitive, chaotic, inaccessible to consciousness,
unchangeable, amoral, illogical, unorganized, and filled with
energy received from basic drives and discharged for
satisfaction”

PROVINCES OF THE MIND

EGO
•Starts to develop around 2nd year in life
•Mind’s source of communication with external world; operates according
to the “reality principle”
•Decision-maker - The Ego satisfies the Id or the Superego to reduce
“tension”, but takes into account the realities of the world (conscious),
past experiences (preconscious), and desires (unconscious)
•Many times it uses defense mechanisms to defend itself from anxiety
that results from the hostile Id, Superego and Reality
•Healthy Mind/Maturity – is having a strong Ego that does not
allow the Id or Superego to have too much control over the
personality.

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PROVINCES OF THE MIND

SUPER EGO
•Develops around the 5th year of life
•Represents the standards, ideals and values of the of the society and the “elders” in
particular; operates in the “moralistic or idealistic principle”, but has no contact with the
real world
•Promotes behaviors worthy of praise, which can increase our self-esteem, opposes the Id
and the Ego, and uses guilt to restrain
•Two sub-systems of the Superego:
1. The Conscience – forms out the experiences with punishments; prescribes what “should not
be done”
2. The Ego-ideal – forms out of the experiences with rewards; prescribes what “should be
done”

DRIVE
Psychological or mental representation of an inner bodily
source of excitement
Cathexis or Object-cathexis: investment of libidinal energy
to fulfill a need
Anti-cathexis: When the id becomes too impulsive and
threatening, the ego erects it
Identification: action of finding the right object to
counterpart the image
Psychic energy is displaceable for variations in object-
choice

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FOUR FEATURES OF DRIVES

SOURCE: stimulus or need, something in deficit
IMPETUS: amount of energy or intensity
AIM: goal or purpose
OBJECT: object or person that will satisfy

BASIC GROUPS OF DRIVES

👠
SEX /EROS: for survival, productivity, life, satisfying 🍆🍔
physiological need
 Libido - energy force of Eros; form of psychic energy,
manifested by the life instincts, that drives a person toward
pleasurable behaviors and thoughts
 Erogenous Zones: Organs of the body that are especially
sensitive to the reception of pleasure.
In Freudian theory, the three principal erogenous zones are
the mouth. anus and genitals.

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BASIC GROUPS OF DRIVES

AGGRESSIVE DRIVE / THANATOS: the compulsion to
destroy, conquer, and kill, goal is to regress or to go back to
inorganic state
 Self- Destruction - the final aim of aggressive drive
 Positive side is to realize that time is limited which make
humans move away from Thanatos.
 The aggressive tendency is present in everyone and is the
explanation for wars, violence, and religious persecution
Ex: teasing, gossip, sarcasm, humiliation, humor, and the
enjoyment of other people's suffering

TYPES OF INSTINCTS
LIFE INSTINCTS: the drive for ensuring survival of the individual
and the species by satisfying the needs for food, water, air, and
sex
DEATH INSTINCTS: the unconscious drive toward decay,
destruction, and aggression; guided by constancy principle
Constancy principle
Freud calls this the nirvana principle
The principle of constancy is the principle of psychic functioning
that seeks to maintain the quantity of excitation contained in the
vessel at a low or constant level

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TYPES OF ANXIETY
 NEUROTIC ANXIETY - Caused by id impulses that the ego can barely
control, apprehension about an unknown danger
- People may experience neurotic anxiety in the presence of a teacher,
employer, or some other authority figure because they previously experienced
unconscious feelings of destruction against one or both parents
 MORAL ANXIETY - Comes from threats of punishment
from the superego, children establish a superego usually
by the age 5 or 6
REALISTIC ANXIETY - this kind of anxiety is defined as
an unpleasant, nonspecific feeling involving a possible
danger. It is closely related to fear.

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DEFENSE MECHANISMS
REPRESSION - Blocking a wish or desire from conscious expression, can uncover through
hypnosis, cornerstone of all defense mechanisms
DENIAL - Refusal to accept unpleasant reality
PROJECTION - Externalizing or attributing an unconscious impulse to another person
INTROJECTION - People incorporate positive qualities of another person into their ego
REACTION FORMATION - Doing things that is opposite with what you feel
REGRESSION - Returning to an earlier stage through expressing an impulse
SUBLIMATION - Doing things that are socially acceptable, positive and productive,
highest form or most mature defense mechanism

DEFENSE MECHANISMS
DISPLACEMENT - Displacing emotions to inanimate objects or subordinates
RATIONALIZATION - Behaviors or feelings are justified and explained in a
seemingly rational or logical manner to avoid the true explanation
- Sweet lemoning (pretending to like what one really dislikes) or sour graping
(pretending to dislike what one really likes)
INTELLECTUALIZATION - Focuses on the cognitive aspect and attempts to isolate the
emotion involved
IDENTIFICATION - Modeling someone's behavior after the behavior of someone else
UNDOING - "cancel out" or "make-up" for a bad act by doing good
COMPENSATION - people overachieve in one area to compensate for failures in
another

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GOAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
(1)To strengthen our censors, (2)To uncover repressed memories
TRANSFERENCE: Strong, undeserved feelings that the patient develops toward the
analyst during the course of treatment. These feelings may be either sexual or hostile but
they stem from the patient's earlier experiences with parents.
COUNTERTRANSFERENCE: Strong, undeserved feelings that the therapist develops
toward the patient during the course of treatment. These feelings can be either positive
or negative.
CATHARSIS: the process of reducing or eliminating a complex by recalling it to conscious
awareness and allowing it to be expressed
FREE ASSOCIATION: Fundamental rule of psychoanalysis technique in which the therapist
encourages patients to report, without restriction, any thoughts that occur to them

DREAM ANALYSIS
Procedure used to probe the unconscious through
interpretation of the patient's dreams
They are a type of wish fulfilment, that is, a
representation of what the individual would like to have

Contents of Dream
Manifest Content: what the dreamer sees and remembers
Latent Content: the meaning of the manifest content, what
is the unconscious interpretation of the said dream.

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PARAPRAXES OR FREUDIAN SLIPS

Slips of the tongue or pen, misreading,
incorrect hearing misplacing objects, and
temporarily forgetting names or
intentions that are not chance accidents
but reveal a person's unconscious
intentions
Ex: A husband might refer to his wife by
her maiden name may unconsciously wish
he'd never married this woman.

SYMBOLISMS
HUMOR
According to Freud for a joke to be funny, it must contain
anxiety provoking material.
We laugh only at the things that bother us. Most often, sex
and death are favorite topics
According to Freud, if you want to know what's in a person's
mind, examine what he or she finds humorous.
SYMBOLIC BEHAVIOR
Our unconscious desires are interpreted as symbolic
representations thus many of our daily behaviors be taken as
symbols or gestures of these unconscious thoughts

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END.

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