Who is Sigmund Freud?
- Founder of Psychoanalytic Theory
- Talk therapy
What is Talk Therapy?
- Freud’s idea: Helps to talk about problems
- Talking allows the conscious, rational mind deal with them
- Solid scientific ground here (though Freud never knew)
- Various forms of psychotherapy (Freudian and non-Freudian) improve mental health
Issue with Talk Therapy?
People don’t always remember problem causes
* Problems at the unconscious level
What is Freud’s Iceberg Model?
3 Levels:
- Conscious level - what we’re currently thinking about
- Thoughts & perceptions - Preconscious Level - what we can bring from memory to think about
- Memories & stored knowledge - Unconscious Level - source of deep troubles according to Freud (The source of mental disease)
- Fears, Violent motives, immoral urges, shameful experiences etc
How can you learn about the unconscious according to Freud?
- Ego censors the unconscious
- Need to bypass the ego’s censorship
Can bypass ego through:
* Dreams
* Drugs
* Slips (when you’re thinking one thing but say a mother opps I mean another)
* Motivated Forgetting (intentionally forgetting painful experiences)
What is Psychic Determinism (Teleology)?
Frued believes nothing is an accident! (everything has meaning behind it)
e.g.
* Spilled water. Guess you’re ready to leave
* Forgot their birthday. Guess you hate them.
* Crashed your car. Secret death wish.
- Teleology: explaining things by their purpose
Where does the unconscious come from according to Freud?
According to Freud: : Life history, especially childhood
* Getting psychologically stuck at a developmental stage
- Defence against past traumas
What are some Defence Mechanisms used for the unconscious?
- Denial
* I don’t believe it! Can’t have happened! - Repression
* Motivated forgetting - Reaction formation - believe the opposite to who you are to deny who you really are:
* Hypocrisy: Homophobic gay man - Rationalization
* I have to be mean to be fair (really I like being mean) - Projection
* Everyone else is mad (really I’m mad) - Intellectualization
* Using jargon to obscure unpleasant thoughts (lifeguards: code brown = someone pooped in the pool) - Displacement
* Anger at work taken out elsewhere…on the family - Sublimation
* Become lawyer because you like arguing
What are Freud’s 4 Developmental stages?
- Oral (infant stage = when breast feeding)
* Dependent on caretakers for all needs
* Too much or too little care: stuck looking for help as adult - Anal (when potty training and learning to use bodies)
* Learning to control self, obey authorities
* Too much or too little authority: obsessed with control or avoid self-control - Phallic
* Develop identity, learn differences between boys and girls
* Stuck: overly rigid morality or amorality - Genital
* Healthy Adult: Generate children and legacy—Love and Work
What is Id, Ego, Superego?
Id: motivation for pleasure
* Ice Cream!
Superego: internalized rules to follow
* No! Eat Healthy!
Ego: decides how to bridge the id and superego
* OK, maybe just a little…
Are Freud’s ideas supported in modern psychology?
Talk therapy (sort of)
* Modern psychotherapy is varied
Defence mechanisms (sort of)
* Not always motivated, but people project and rationalize, etc.
Developmental stages (sort of)
* Piaget
The unconscious (sort of)
Self control struggle (sort of)
* Conflict between motivations
* Resembles modularity hypothesis in evolutionary psychology, global workspace theory of consciousness
Motivations (sort of)
* Sex drive, sure; death drive, no
Aggressive motive - NO
* Catharsis—idea that if you just spend your aggression energy you’ll be less aggressive later
* TOTALLY WRONG —aggression seems to precipitate more aggression
Where did Frued go wrong?
- Freud thinks everything happens for a reason—no accidents
- Freud is overly confident in untested hypotheses
- Freud thinks everything is about sex
- Oedipus Complex.
- Freud thinks women are inferior versions of men. (Penis envy)
- Unconscious may be overstated
- Case Studies Method Only
- Wealthy Victorian women
- No experiments or statistics
- No operational definitions
- Scientific theories must be falsifiable
- Must be possible for evidence to prove it wrong
What is the Psychoanalytic perspective of consciousness?
- Conscious awareness helps you solve problems stemming from the unconscious
What is the Behaviorist perspective of consciousness?
- Consciousness is a needless assumption
- Environment determines behaviour
What is automaticity?
Automatic influences on behaviour
e.g.
* Reflexes
* Muscle memory
* Impulsivity
* Implicit learning (conditioning)
- Higher order processes, too?
- Decision-making
- Judgments
- Controlling behaviour
What is the idea of Embodiment?
The body’s influence on mind
e.g. nodding makes us feel “yes”
shaking our head = no
What is Priming?
Stimulus exposure’s influence (without conscious intention) on mind & behaviour
e.g. given cold/hot coffee to hold and how that will alter how we judge someone
What was found about the implicit biases experiment (good and bad words with black and white people)?
Adam Hahn found that: people can guess their implicit bias scores prior to doing the experiment
- so is it really an implicit bias if we already are aware of it?
Irrationality of conscious reasoning. Why do we say sharks when asked “what kills more people, sharks or coconuts?”
- Heuristics and biases
- Substitute “what’s scarier” for “what kills more people”
- Too little reflective thinking
What is an issue with priming studies?
Illogical Scientific Inference:
- show X sometimes is biased
–> Concludes: X is always biased
Irrationality of conscious reasoning?
Confirmation bias: look for things that support our own pre-existing beliefs
What are the case against consciousness?
- Unconsciousness controls much behaviour
- e.g. word puzzle with old people related words = people walked slower
- warm/cold coffee effects how we judge people
- Embodiment: Body influences behaviour
- Priming: Environment influences behaviour
- Conscious reasoning prone to error, posthoc justification
- saying you prefer a car with a hot girl and saying you chose it because it looks like it has better gas mileage on it instead
- Conscious reasoning takes more effort, slower
–> Looking at all this you may conclude that consciousness doesn’t do anything and only hinders us (but this is not the case)
What is the idea of Epiphenomenalism?
Consciousness is a useless by-product of brain
