PSY100H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 13: Gordon Allport, Genital Stage, Psychodynamics

• School: UTSG
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY100H1
• Professor: Ashley Waggoner Denton

Document Summary

His definition stresses that personality causes people to have characteristic behaviours and thoughts and feelings; they do and think and feel things relatively consistently over time. Psychodynamic theories emphasize unconscious and dynamic processes psychodynamic theory: freudian theory that unconscious forces, such as wishes and motives, influence behaviour. Freud referred to these psychic forces as instincts defining them as mental representations arising out of biological or physical need. People satisfy the life instinct by following the pleasure principle, which directs people to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. The energy that drives the pleasure principle is the libido. Multiple forces can be in conflict, and freud viewed such conflict as the essential cause of mental illness. Unconscious mind contains wishes, desires, and motives, and they are associated with conflict, anxiety, or paint; to protect the person from distress, they are not accessible. Much of human behaviour was influence by unconscious processes.