lecture 19

PSYB30PersonalityMon, March 28/2011 Lecture 19 – Myth & Narrative Overview of Week 11 •PART I: Sigmund Freud •PART II: Alfred Adler •PART III: Carl Jung Overview of Part I •Freud’s Psychoanalysis ▯ Latent & Manifest ▯ Compromise Formation ▯ Dreams, Symptoms, & Parapraxes (slips of the tongue) Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) •Freud provided the first (and perhaps only) comprehensive theory of personality: ▯ Structure (id—ego—superego) ▯ Dynamics (conscious vs. Unconscious) ▯ Development (oral—anal—phallic—latency—genital) so theories today are really limited on their scope...like a personality psychologist of today will try and come up with a theory of agreeableness as a personality trait whereas these guys like Freud tried to come up with entire theories of personality...so they basically had more balls than our guys today. RESPECT. •Freud introduced the “talking cure” (psychotherapy), and many (if not all) of his ideas are still widely accepted and used by clinicians today; eg: ▯ The importance of early childhood experiences With almost any kind of personality disorder, a therapist will make reference to one’s www.notesolution.com childhood ▯ Internal conflicts and anxiety ▯ Ego defenses Psychotherapy isn’t easy due to the fact that the harder a therapist presses the patient into diving deeper into their conscious to figure out what’s really causing their conflict, the harder the mind’s defenses work to suppress the true answers Prof says that he bets that every single clinician incorporates some very basic Freudian ideas in their thinking and practice •Even though that the general map that Freud drew of the mind is probably wrong, we should still tip our hats to him. When Christopher Columbus drew his maps of the world, they were wrong but the leap between how the world was viewed before and how it was viewed after is what we should respect Fundamental Concepts Critical ideas in Freudian psychoanalytic thought •Basic Instincts: Sex & Aggression ▯ the libido – an innate life-preserving force that drives human action ▯ thanatos – an aggressive drive within people •Defense Mechanisms ▯ repression ▯ secondary defense mechanisms we can call on if repression fails ▯ used to protect us from anxiety •Anxiety ▯ concept referring to the conflicts between the various structural elements of the psyche www.notesolution.com ▯ the ego is always in battle between both the id and superego. If either one wins the battle, the result is us experiencing anxiety ▯ our defense mechanisms serve the purpose of ensuring this does not happen (ego remains in control) Text & Subtext Freud makes the distinction between the manifest (how things seem on the surface) content of things and the latent (how they truly are underneath) content of things. Things are never as they seem! •Manifest Content (Text) ▯ The surface or conscious level of experience ▯ eg., the dream that you remember having there’s the thoughts you currently have going through your mind, this nagging symptom you’ve been having the past several weeks, there’s the stupid slip of the tongue you had when you were talking to your friends the other day. All of these are manifest behaviours, they all have a surface appearance But Freud argued that a true understanding of these actions requires recognizing that the manifest emerges out of a great mob of competing latent material there is all of this hidden unconscious material which gives rise to the manifest •Latent Content (Subtext) ▯ The hidden or unconscious level of experience ▯ e.g., the underlying meaning of the dream Freud claims that a good dream is the one you don’t remember having because that is the proper function of a dream there are the actual stupid words you said when you had the slip of the tongue, and then www.notesolution.com there are the underlying urges and motives of which you truly wish to say that were being restrained by other parts of the self ▯ Latent determines Manifest There’s so much latent material that any manifest material is “overdetermined” there’s so many elements that go into determined a behaviour that we can’t say that it’s simply determined, but that it is “overdetermined” behaviour Treaty & Compromise Freud: it’s best to think of your behaviour as a kind of Treaty •Much of human behaviour serves as a kind of treaty, or a compromise among conflicting forces; i.e., the id’s instincts and the superego’s censure ▯ any dream you have, anytime you act, anytime you think is all a kind of treaty. ▯ Cities on the verge of war draw on a treaty – an agreement of terms under which you will not conflict anymore •Everyday examples: ▯ Dreams dreams are thought to represent a manifest representation of what our underlying urges, wishes and fears are ▯ Neurotic symptoms In The King’s Speech, around the time of world war II as the world is moving towards radio and television, King George can’t afford to have this stutter that’s plagued him his entire life anymore. He secretly starts to consult a speech therapist and throughout the film you see that King George comes by his stutter often because of his terrible father who shows little love for his sons. The stutter seems to represent a holding back of the things he wants to say because of fears to how his father will react and you sense that the www.notesolution.com stutter is a kind of compromise between speaking his mind, and then addressing and respecting the fears he has in the relationship with his father So the stutter is a compromise b/t two things that are incompatible; you either speak, or you don’t speak. These are his two urges and the stuttering is the compromise between the two urges ▯ Parapraxes (slips of tongue) in each of these regular everyday behaviours (the stupid things we say that we didn’t mean to say, or the sometimes odd or terrifying dreams we have) are all indications of the kinds of compromises that we find between the deep unconscious forces we have in front of us and what the conscious mind will allow us to experience Dreams Dream work: involves movement from latent to manifest in order to produce a dream •So what happens is your mind gives you moderate doses of some of the latent content which cannot be expressed through manifest (some of the stuff we have in our unconscious is unacceptable to society) that is inside of you and disguises it so it doesn’t look as it truly is. ▯ So you don’t expose yourself to this unconscious material directly. Your mind disguises it in manifest material, and the manifest material is what you realize next morning •Dream work refers to The spontaneous and unconscious process of manifesting a dream, accomplished via: ▯ Symbolic Representation the conversion of wishes/urges into concrete images things in dreams are not as they appear, they stand for (symbolize) something else the symbolic representation (the stuff we see in the dream) is presumably less distressing than the actual thing that it represents www.notesolution.com ▯ Condensation (Compression) the omission (or compression) of multiple latent elements into a single manifest image or theme So dreams are efficient things. As the dreamer, you will take a bunch of latent content and mash them together to produce the dream which helps in managing the huge flow of latent content ▯ Displacement (Substitution) of an important source of struggle A shift in emphasis (a substitution) of an important but threatening source with a trivial but safer one So a dream will take something latent and substitute it with something else to prevent the anxiety that comes with experiencing the actual latent content. This substitution is trivial, might seem odd that you’re dreaming about it, but it’s safer for you to dream about it ▯ Secondary Revision After producing all of the symbols and changes that won’t be threatening to you, there’s still a mess and what’s needed is a process that helps to organize all of these symbols into coherent narrative the process of trying to make a dream is like trying to make a film: •The director shoots all the scenes that will go into the movie •These shots are often taken out of order and