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Psychoanalytic Theory - Freud
Psychoanalytic Theory - Freud
Psychoanalytic Theory - Freud
Personality According to
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939)
• Founder of psychoanalysis
• Proposed the first complete theory
of personality
• A person’s thoughts and behaviors
emerge from tension generated by
unconscious motives and
unresolved childhood conflicts.
Learn more about Freud at:
www.freud.org.uk
www.lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/freud
Psychoanalytic Approach
• Developed by Sigmund Freud
• Psychoanalysis is both an approach
to therapy and a theory of personality
• Emphasizes unconscious motivation
– the main causes of behavior lie
buried in the unconscious mind
Psychoanalysis as a Therapy
• A therapeutic technique that attempts
to provide insight into one’s thoughts
and actions
• Does so by exposing and interpreting
the underlying unconscious motives
and conflicts
Freud’s View of the
Mind
Free Association
• Freudian technique of
exploring the unconscious
mind by having the person
relax and say whatever
comes to mind no matter
how trivial or embarrassing
• Hypnosis – Relaxing a
person into a highly
The Couch
suggestive state to uncover
unconscious memories or
conflicts
Personality Assessment
Projective Techniques
Id: “I want”
Superego: “I should”
Ego: “I will”
Psychoanalytic Approach
Rational, Information
planful, in your
mediating Conscious
Conscious immediate
dimension Ego
Ego awareness
of personality
Superego
Superego Preconscious Information
which can
Moralistic, easily be
judgmental, made
Unconscious conscious
perfectionist
dimension of
personality Id Thoughts,
feelings,
urges, and other
Irrational, information
illogical, that is difficult
impulsive to bring to
dimension of conscious
personality awareness
Defense Mechanisms
Unconscious Self-Deceptions
Defense Mechanisms
• Unconscious mental processes
employed by the ego to reduce
anxiety by unconsciously distorting
reality.
Repression
• Puts anxiety-producing thoughts,
feelings, and memories into the
unconscious mind
• Unconscious forgetting
• The basis for all other defense
mechanisms
Denial
• Rejecting the truth of a painful reality.
Regression
• Going back to a safer, simpler way of
being.
• Assuming childlike behaviors when
facing stress or trauma
Reaction Formation
• Replacing an unacceptable wish
with its opposite
• Behaving in ways that are exactly
opposite of how we truly feel.
Projection
• Attributing something that we don’t
like about ourselves to someone else.
Displacement
• Shifts an unacceptable impulse
toward a more acceptable or less
threatening object or person
• “Taking out” an emotion on a safe or
more accessible target than the actual
source of the emotion.
Rationalization
• Displaces real, anxiety-provoking
explanations with more comforting
justifications for one’s actions
• Reasoning away or making excuses to
reduce anxiety-producing thoughts
Sublimation
• Substitute an undesirable emotion or
drive with a socially acceptable one.
Undoing
• Unconsciously neutralizing an anxiety
causing action by doing a second action that
undoes the first.
Freud’s Psychosexual
Stages
Psychosexual Stages
• In Freudian theory, the childhood stages of
development during which the id’s pleasure
seeking energies are focused on different parts of
the body
• The stages include: oral, anal, phallic, latency,
and genital
• A person can become “fixated” or stuck at a
stage and as an adult attempt to achieve pleasure
as in ways that are equivalent to how it was
achieved in these stages
Oral Stage (birth – 18 mo.)