Personality
• Distinctive and relatively enduring ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that characterize a person’s response to situations
Personality components
• Identity - you are like no one else
• Internal Causes -it’s inside you, not in the environment
• Organized -the pattern ‘fits together’, has
meaning
Things that attribute to personality
Psychodynamic theorists look for the causes of behaviour in a dynamic interplay of
inner forces that often conflict with one another
Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory
Psychic energy
* Discharged directly or indirectly
Mental events
The Id
Pleasure principle
• Seeks immediate gratification or release
• Regardless of rational considerations and
environmental realities
The Ego
The Superego
• The last personality structure to develop
• The moral arm of the personality
• Controls impulses of id with external control • According to Freud, the superego developed by the age of four or five
- operates according to moralistic goals
Ego cannot always control id = conflict
In the form of
• Anxiety when impulses of id threaten to get out of control
Defence mechanisms
Psychosexual Development
Series of stages:
* Adult personality is function of progressing through theses stages, if not could cause fixation
Fixation
• Arrested development where instincts focused on particular area
Research on Psychoanalytic Theory
Psychosexual stages:
• Concept of childhood sexuality rejected
• Issue = importance of early experiences & emotional attachment
Neoanalytic Approaches
• Adler
• Motivated by social interest
* Striving for superiority
Object relation theorists
• Focus = mental representations people form of themselves
•Become ‘working models’ to interpret social
interactions
• Can generate self-fulfilling prophecies
Object relation theorist can effect what’s
Attachment style in adult relationships
Secure vs avoidant vs anxious-ambivalent
Neoanalysts were psychoanalysts who
disagreed with certain aspects of Freud’s thinking and developed their own theories.
Humanistic Approach
• Reaction to Freud
• Emphasis on role of conscious, creative potential, self-actualization
Motivations for behaviours
Maslow & Rogers
• Innate tendency towards self - actualization
Abraham Maslow
• Considered self-actualization to be the ultimate human need and the highest expression of human nature