PSYC104 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Walter Mischel, Nomothetic, Unconditional Positive Regard
1 Jun 2018
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Personality: Continued
Freud’s Structural Model –
• Id, Ego, Superego
• Id – the it (das es)
o Concerned with the pleasurable
o ‘Pleasure principle’ – wants more and it wants it now →
immediate gratification
o Does not understand ‘no’ and cannot wait – impulsiveness
o Runs according to primary process thinking – wishful,
illogical, associative thought
o “Pit of roiling, libidinous energy demanding immediate
satisfaction”
• Superego
o Concerned with the ideal
o Internalized moral principles of our parents by
introjection/identification
o Responsible for self-imposed standards of behaviour
o Seeks perfection and can make us deeply
unhappy/guilty/anxious
• Ego
o Concerned with the actual
o Works on the ‘reality principle’ – balances the drives of the id,
the constraints of the superego, and what is realistically
possible in the world
o Does the repressing of ‘unacceptable’ urges
o Realistically satisfies the drives in conjunction with
environment
o Involves:
▪ Perception
▪ Memory
▪ Motor co-ordination
▪ Cognition
▪ Problem solving
▪ Management of emotions
▪ Finding compromises
o It can delay gratification and weigh alternatives – secondary
process thinking = rational, logical, goal-directed
o Responsible for defense mechanisms like sublimation (take the
energy from libido and use it for different things such as sport,
art etc.)
• How the Ego works –
o Ambitious young lawyer supervises a more talented rival –
▪ Wants to hurt rival (id)
▪ Urges to provide poor evaluation
▪ Conscience is uncomfortable with such a blatant lack of
integrity (superego)
▪ Thus – justifies the poor evaluation on moral grounds
e.g. such evaluations discourage laziness
(compromisation by ego)
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Freud’s Defence Mechanisms
• Unconscious mental processes used by the ego to protect the person from
experiencing unpleasant emotional states (especially anxiety) or to avoid
danger
• Ego does this by falsifying inner perceptions
• Not just an interesting theory → there is good empirical evidence for most
defence mechanisms
• Repression
o Repressing thoughts or memories that are too painful, disturbing or
threatening to acknowledge
• Denial
o Refuse to acknowledge painful or threatening external realities or
painful emotions
• Projection
o A person attributes his/her own unacknowledged feelings or impulses
to others
o Good evidence for this defence – research shows that the process of
keeping a thought suppressed seems to keep it chronically activated at
an implicit level (non conscious) → this keeps the mind ‘looking out’
for it (and thus more likely to see it in others)
• Reaction Formation
o Turns unacceptable feelings or impulses into their opposites
o E.g. conservative, family values politicians who have affairs
o George Rekers, board member of the National Association for
Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, an organization dedicated to
‘changing the sexuality of gay people’ (who is gay himself but he has
probably been brought up to condemn homosexuality)
• Sublimation
o Converting aggressive or sexual impulses into socially acceptable
activities such as sport, art, music etc.
• Rationalisation
o Explains away actions in a seemingly logical way to avoid
uncomfortable feelings, especially guilt and shame
• Displacement
o Directing emotions (like anger) away from the real target to a
substitute
o Usually when a person feels powerless to display that emotion to the
real target
• Regression
o As already noted, returning to behaviours from an earlier stage of
psychosexual development, usually when stressed
• Passive Aggression
o Indirect expression of anger towards others
o Often ambiguous enough that others cannot clearly categorise it as
aggression
o E.g. squeezing the toothpaste from the middle of the tube knowing this
is one of your partner’s pet hates
• Isolation (also called Isolation of Affect)
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o Severing of the conscious psychological ties between an unacceptable
act or impulse and its memory source
o The act is not ‘forgotten’ exactly, but is separated from the emotions
linked to it
o In classic psychoanalysis is linked with obsessional neuroses
• Undoing
o Usually in children – try to ‘undo’ the unpleasant outcome of some act
by mentally replaying it (or ritualistically re-enacting it) with a
different, more acceptable outcome
• Identification with the aggressor (Stockholm Syndrome)
o Empathising, sympathizing with a person who is treating one brutally
• Reversal
o The turning around of an instinct
o E.g. moving from sadism to masochism
o Anna Freud believed this defence may underlie reaction formation
• Defences can often be adaptive – help us to function better psychologically
• A positive bias (seeing oneself through unrealistically positive eyes) is linked
with happiness and good health
• Realism is linked with depression and poor health
Object relations theories
• One of the areas of theory/research that grew from psychoanalysis
• Like psychoanalysis, ORT has grown from a clinical tradition of research
• Unlike classical psychoanalysis, it focuses on relationship seeking rather than
instinctual gratification
• Disturbances to early relationships also disturb the development of one’s self-
definition and creates vulnerability to blows to self-esteem
• Concerned with how past experiences of important others in one’s life are
represented as –
o Aspects of understandings about one’s self
o Aspects of understandings about others
o Aspects of understandings about the self in relation to others
• Concerned about how these understandings affect relationships in the present
• Although there are many differences among object relations theorists, they all
agree on the importance of early relationships in the development of mental
representations of the self, and of the self in relation to others
• These mental representations may be called:
o Inner working models
o Schemas
o Mental models
o Knowledge structure and many more
• Similar concept regardless of label
• Self systems
o Some suggest that these representations of self, others, and self in
relation to others are organized into a self-system
o People are motivated to maintain a sense of cohesion, coherence and
integration among elements of the system
o Seen as important in terms of developing a stable and healthy sense of
self
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Research and therapy of homosexuality, an organization dedicated to. Psychodynamic approach: strengths, strong empirical support for some constructs mental models, defences, importance of childhood experience, clinical utility and success, weaknesses, does not deal with adult learning, male-centred and hard to test some facets. In terms of neural networks, a schema might be thought of as a group of nodes with associative links that are so strong that the activation of any node/concept within it, will begin to activate the entire schema network. If enough nodes are activated, the entire schema will reach threshold, become fully activated, and then influence the person"s thoughts, feelings and behaviour. Costs and consequences: act on script, evaluate response to your response; feedback. Strengths of social-cognitive theories: acknowledges the role of thoughts, memories and neural networks in personality, readily testable through experimentation, applied value (therapies, change framework)
