Lecture 13 (ch.10)
The Intrapsychic Domain
- Largely based on the work of Sigmund Freud
• Unconscious motivated behaviour and helped us understand why people did things
- Psychoanalytic Theory
• Some concepts (i.e. repression) have been supported
Can’t generalize Freud’s findings to the population
Not always aware of all the information we take in
• However, contemporary Psychoanalytic Theory (called the neo-analytic movement)
has moved beyond Freud’s original theories
• Instead, psychoanalysts today focus on childhood relationships and adult conflicts
with others
• Topics: Unconscious, Motivation, Conflict,Attachment, etc
• Childhood experiences guide the rest of your adult relationships - influences
attachment potentially developmental processes where we move from an immature
phase to a more mature phase – develop ability to self-regulate emotions and
behaviour and we develop an identity
Assumptions
- Psychic Determinism:
• Nothing happens by chance or accident
• Everything we do, think, say and feel is an expression of our mind
• Assumption in psychoanalysis that nothing happens by accident – everything you do
is based on some underlying thought in your mind
• Have processes happening in our minds that go on at the same time between our
conscious and our unconscious – conflicted feelings
Most of our thoughts are in the unconscious – we’re unaware of them
Five Central Propositions
- Contemporary psychoanalysis is based on five foundational concepts:
1. Much of mental life is unconscious
• Have processes happening in our minds that go on at the same time between our
conscious and our unconscious – conflicted feelings
• Most of our thoughts are in the unconscious – we’re unaware of them
2. Mental processes operate in parallel, hence individuals can have conflicted feelings 3. Childhood experiences are important
• Childhood experiences guide the rest of your adult relationships - influences
attachment potentially developmental processes where we move from an
immature phase to a more mature phase – develop ability to self-regulate
emotions and behaviour and we develop an identity
4. Mental representations guide people’s actions
5. Development involves regulating sexual & aggressive feelingsAND moving from
immature/social dependent to interdependent
Contemporary Views on the Unconscious
- Motivated Unconscious View- unconscious desires that motivate us to do things
• Behavior is motivated by unconscious processes
• Not really supported by research – ex. subliminal messages don’t motivate people
• But there are processes that go on that we’re aware of that motivate our behavior
- Cognitive Unconscious View- priming people
• Individuals can be unaware of information that their sensory stimuli are processing
(i.e. subliminal perception, priming, ability to type)
Ex. study: primed people with words of the elderly, when these people walked out
of the lab later, they walked more slowly because they were thinking of older
people
Ex: music being played backwards supposedly having subliming messages
• Information is “not in conscious awareness” but is not necessarily repressed
Repression and Contemporary Research on Memory
- Memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus argues that we should not conclude that all
recovered memories are false, just because some are apparently false
- Also, we should not assume that all recovered memories are true, just because some are
true
- Loftus argues that we must be aware of processes that contribute to the construction of
false memories (e.g., popular press, behavior of some therapists)
- Suggesting questions of psychologists can create false memories - Spreading activation model of memory – thinking of ex. shrub activates the area of your
brain that makes you think of ex. Grass
• Explains why we can think something happened that actually didn’t
So, You Want to Have a False Memory:ACloser Look
- Spreading activation model of memory: Mental elements are stored in memory along
with associations to other elements in memory
- Most modern cognitive psychologists believe that false memories can occur
- Humans have a constructive memory—i.e., memory influences in various ways what is
recalled
- Research on mistakes of recognition on word lists help us understand dramatic false
memories of, e.g., childhood abuse
Ego Psychology
- Erikson’s Eight Stages of Development (no specific questions about these on exam)
• Development of the self – guides our thoughts about who we are
• Developing an identity
• Erikson’s stages (read, but not specific questions on exams that ask you to memorize
these)
- Karen Horney and a Feminist Interpretation of
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