PSYC10004 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: Freudian Slip, Mind, Phallic Stage
5. Psychoanalytic Approaches to Personality
Elements of Psychoanalytic Theory
• Unusually broad focus
• Contains a theory of personality but also offers theoretical tools for understanding culture,
society, art and literature
• Primarily an account of the processes and mechanisms of the mind
• Ma diffeet opoets efeed to as odels that are difficult to integrate
The Topographic Model
• Refers to levels or layers of mental life
• Freud proposed mental content – ideas, wishes, emotions, impulses, memories, etc – can be
located at one of three levels: Conscious, Preconscious, Unconscious
• The Conscious: small fraction of things that the person is currently paying attention to
• The Preconscious: things in mental life not readily paid attention to
o Boundary between conscious and preconscious is permeable
• The Unconscious: where some mental processes that cannot be made conscious are
o Distinguished between mental contents that are descriptively unconscious and
dynamically unconscious
o Descriptively unconscious: simple exist outside of consciousness, include
preconscious material
o Dynamically unconscious: things that cannot be made conscious; force keeping them
out
• Preconscious blocks unconscious thoughts but sometimes allows some loose in the form of
dreams, Freudian slips, etc.
The Structural Model
• The Id: linked to instinctual drives and fundamental sources of motivation, sexual and
aggressive in nature
o All Ids otets ae uosious
o Pleasue Piiple: sties to otai pleasue ad aoid unpleasure
• The Ego: pshi ag, delaed gatifiatio, deteie he ost sesile o pudet to
do something
o ‘ealit Piiple: euies that Ego egulate pesos ehaiou
o Has defence mechanisms: denial, isolation of affect, projection, reaction formation,
repression, sublimation
o Servant of three masters: Id, Super-Ego, environment
• The Super-Ego: conscience, internalised set of moral values, standards and ideals
The Genetic Model
• Oral Stage
• Anal Stage
• Phallic Stage: Oedipus complex, Electra Complex
• Latency
• Genital Stage
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