PSYC104 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Operant Conditioning, Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre
8 May 2018
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PSYC104 Lecture
Week 7 – Personality
Freud and personality
• Freud assumed that
o Symptoms have meaning
o Symptoms may be psychosomatic
o Unconscious conflicts are the causes of some illnesses
o Repressed mental processes may affect the person in the form of a bodily symptom
o Emphasised ambivalence
Freud and drives
• Unconscious conflicts come from various sources, including society shunning them
• The drives
o Respiration
o Hunger
o Pain-avoidance
o Thirst
o Sex (libido)
Freud’s psychosexual stages
• Oral (0-18 months)
• Anal (2-3 years)
• Phallic (4-6 years)
• Latency (7-11 years)
• Genital (12+ years)
Freud’s structural model
• Id → concerned with the pleasurable
• Ego → concerned with the ideal
• Superego → concerned with the actual
Freud’s defence mechanisms
• Unconscious mental processes used by the ego to protect the person from experiencing unpleasant
emotional states
• Repression → repressing thoughts or memories that are too painful to acknowledge
• Denial → refuse to acknowledge painful external realities or emotions
• Projection → a person attributes his/her own unacknowledged feelings or impulses to others
• Reaction formation → turns unacceptable feelings or impulses into their opposites
• Sublimation → converting aggressive or sexual impulses into socially acceptable activities such as
sport, art, etc.
• Rationalisation → explains away actions in a seemingly logical way to avoid uncomfortable feelings
• Displacement → directing emotions away from the real target and to a substitute
• Regression → returning to behaviour from an earlier stage of psychosexual development
• Passive aggression → indirect expression of anger towards others
• Isolation → severing of the conscious psychological ties between an unacceptable act or impulse and
its memory source
• Undoing → usually in children, trying to ‘undo’ the unpleasant outcome of some act by mentally
replaying it with a different more acceptance outcome
• Identification with the aggressor (Stockholm Syndrome) → empathising with a person who is treating
one brutally
• Reversal → the turning about of an instinct
Object relations theories
• Focuses on relationship seeking rather than instinctual gratification
• Five elements of inner representations of self
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