Chapter 8

The Psychoanalytic Perspective

Modified: 2022-07-24 2:08 pm

Freud's psychoanalytic theory is the grandfather of personality theories. His emphasis on biological forces via the libido and later thanatos was revolutionary. Freud was a medical doctor and did not create a testable theory, at least not one easily testable. In the zeitgeist of his time his emphasis on the roles of sex and violence was groundbreaking.

• Learning Objectives:
  • •8.2 Explain how themes of conflict, defense, and metaphor permeate the psychoanalytic view of personality
    •8.2 Identify the differences between the three regions of the mind as posited by psychoanalysis
    •8.3 Examine how the three aspects of functioning—id, ego, and superego—influence the outward display of personality
    •8.4 Identify life instincts, death instincts, and catharsis
    •8.5 Analyze how the ego deals with actual or potential anxiety by employing defense mechanisms
    •8.6 Examine five psychosexual stages of personality development as posited in psychoanalysis
    •8.7 Explain how parapraxes and dreams can reveal the content of a person's unconscious

    •8.8 Analyze the use of projective techniques to assess unconscious processes

    •8.9 Examine the psychoanalysis approach to understanding the processes of origination of problems with their corresponding remedies

    •8.10 Evaluate criticisms of psychoanalytic theory and the state of current interest in the theory
• Box 8.1 Was Freud Really the Sole Creator of Psychoanalysis?
  • If he was not the creator, he certainly considered himself to have been that.
  • Freud was very protective of his ideas and theories
  • So protective that he broke with Adler and Jung because they dared to have ideas about psychoanalysis that were different than his.
• 8.1 Basic Themes (p.106)
  • Psychodynamic
    • Forces
    • Conflict
    • Defense
    • All of the above work and change over time
  • Forces
    • Aggression
    • Sexuality
    • Death
  • Many metaphors
    • Metabolism
    • Sociopolitical forces
      • Censors
      • Economics
    • Physical forces
      • Hydraulic model
      • Energy
  • Difficult to tease all of the above out
  • Topographical model of mind
• 8.2 The Topographical Model of Mind (p. 106)
  • Complex, metaphorical theory that calls on:
  • Biology
    • Lust, aggresssion, sexuality, death
    • Uses metabolic model (e.g., tearing down and building constantly)
  • Sociopolitics
    • Censors--usually self-censors
    • Economics
    • Compromise
    • Repression
  • Physics
    • Hydraulic forces in competition with each other
  • Symbol
    • Large body of evidence here, especially in his analysis of symbolic content of dreams
      • Example: dream about a king and queen and Freud would say the dream was about your father and mother
  • Metaphor
    • Many examples here as well
      • the iceberg model of personality
        • only a small part of the mind is above the surface (see the metaphor?)
  • Some simple principles
    • Structure of the mind
    • Unconsious motivation
    • Stages of personality
    • Defense mechanisms
  • Topography of mind
    • Conscious
      • What are you thinking about right now? That is your conscious (and, don't tell me :-)
    • Preconscious
      • Items in the preconscious can be easily brought into the conscious. What did you have for breakfast? Most likely that was not in your conscious UNTIL I asked you.
    • Unconscious
      • The biggest part of the mind
      • Items in the unconscious are not accessible, BUT Freud maintained they revealed themselves in dreams and slips of the tongue
        • Example (and not a true story!): A man stabs his wife 19 times in their house. The police arrest him and ask, "What did you have for breakfast?" The man cannot answer, the argument that led to his wif'e's death occurred at breakfast. But, he has pushed those events into his unconscious and cannot retrieve them.
• 8.3 The Structural Model of Personality (p. 107)
  
  • 8.3.1 Id
    • Goverened by the pleasure principle
    • Is biological
    • Consists of libido (sexual motivation) and thanatos (violence motivation)
      • FYI, World War I caused Freud to invent thanatos
    • Is the personality's source of energy
    • Is unconscious
      
  • 8.3.2 Ego
    • Is the public phase of the personality
    • Suppresses id demands via the reality principle
    • Example: child wants a cookie and asks mother for one when she is on the phone, does not get cookie. Think about it. The child's id wanted the cookie.
    • Another child also wants a cookie, but her mother is on the phone too. She waits until mom gets off of the call. She used her ego and its reality principle. Her ego suppressed her id successfully
    • Eventually, the ego must balance the push of the id and the restrictions of the superego
      
  • 8.3.3 Superego
    • Also unconscious
    • Consists of two parts:
      • Conscience
        • Think of the classic metaphor of angel on one shoulder and devil on the other
      • Ego Ideal
        • Rules for good behavior (social)
          • Example: Good boys do not hit their brothers and sisters
            
  • 8.3.4 Balancing the Forces
    • Ego strength is a term describing an ego that can successfully balance between id and superego
• Freud's use of terms such as drive and instinct is similar to those in chapter 5
• Drives (and instincts) have two parts:
  • Biological
  • Psychological
    • Example: hunger is need for nutrition, eating is the behavior
• Box 8.2 The Drives of Personality
  • Translation is difficult. In Freud's case from German to English
    • FYI, on Freud's only trip to the United States (1908) he lectured in German
    • Bettelheim argued that the translations of German words such as:
      • Ich (I)
      • Es (It)
      • Trieb (Instinct)
    • were mistranslated to English
    • Furthermore, the Latin words:
      • Eros
      • Psyche
    • also lost their original mythic meanings when translated
• 8.4 The Drives of Personality (p.109)
  
  • 8.4.1 Life and Death Instincts
    • Libido includes:
      • Eros and the drives related to survival reproduction and pleasure
    • Thanatos does not have as detailed components as libido
      • Thanatos came into Freudian theory after the carnage of World War I
    • FYI: Hollywood loves libido and thanatos
      • Movies fall into categories such as romantic comedies (libido) and action adventure (thanatos)
        
  • 8.4.2 Catharsis
    • Freud believed that psychic energy building up would eventually overflow its ego boundaries and lead to a kind of psychic release especially for aggression
    • Note the hydraulic model
    • Subsequent evidence shows some instances where catharsis occurs but, overall, it is not strongly supported
• 8.5 Anxiety and Mechanisms of Defense (p. 111)
  • It was Freud's daughter, Anna, who first formalized the defense mechanisms
  • For Freud, anxiety was a central concept to his theory
  • Anxiety could come from threats to:
    • the id (neurotic anxienty)
      • Imagine being fired from your job. Your id may want you to assault your boss. But, if you do, you'll get in even more trouble
    • the ego (reality anxiety)
      • One of my students was mugged in Little Rock. That was an example of reality anxiety, it was really happening, she was getting robbed, her assailant was pointing a gun at her, and she could die
    • the superego (moral anxiety)
      • Imagine a married man in an apartment seeing a neighbor sunning herself in their shared backyard. He feels erotic attraction to her, but his superego informs him that such feelings are forbidden.
        
  • 8.5.1 Repression
    • Repression is central to psychoanalysis. It requires that highly anxiety-arousing items be stored deep in the unconscious, where they will not affect conscious activities. Repressed items, however, may manifest themselves in dreams or in slips of the tongue. A repressed item is not usually available for recall. Instead, it may appear later, unexpectedly. For example, I once attempted to recall all of the Fourth of July days I had spent over a ten-year period, but one was unaccessible to me. A few weeks later, while in the shower, it hit me. I had been involved in a major family dispute that particular day, and had apparently repressed it.
  • 8.5.2 Denial
    • A reality that causes anxiety is simply not perceived. For example, a mother may unconsciously refuse to see her son's true character because it is too anxiety-arousing. The use of denial may lead to abrupt intrusion of reality into one's life. The mother above, for example, may receive the news that her son has been arrested for armed robbery.
      
  • 8.5.3 Projection
    • Projection is blaming others or other things for one's problems or failures. For example, someone might say, "The devil made me do it", or blame others for being the cause of a problem.
      
  • 8.5.4 Rationalization and Intellectualization
    • Rationalization is realizing that one's motives are not always pure or publicly acceptable and substituting appropriate motives. For example, failing to study because one was "exhausted" rather than "lazy" is an example. Being lazy is not seen as a socially acceptable motivation.
    • Intellectualization is treating an emotionally charged situation in a muted or non emotional fashion. For example, someone who accepts the news of a marital breakup passively and with stoicism may be using intellectualization.
      
  • 8.5.5 Displacement and Sublimation
    • Displacement is the redirection of energy from a dangerous or forbidden object to a more socially acceptable one. For example, attraction to a married person may be displaced to some other activity. A classic instance is playing a musical instrument instead.
      
    • Sublimation is when motives are either sexual or violent, reflecting the psychoanalytic instincts of libido and thanatos (both will be discussed later), and are redirected into non-instinctual paths. For example, aggressive motivations may be redirected into the more acceptable framework of games.
  • Added by me: Reaction Formation
    • Reaction formation is showing the exact opposite of one's true motivation or intentions. (Unconsciously, remember.) So, saying "I hate you." may indicate love instead. Or, believing that you love to teach may be necessary after you have spent years preparing and then found out that the only job you could obtain was in a horrible school with violent students. The choice is to admit your wasted time and energy preparing for such a job, or to believe that you enjoy it.
  • 8.5.6 Research on Defenses
    • Projection has been demonstrated in some experiments but also has not been supported in other experiments
    • Because of the ambiguous nature of Freudian theory it is difficult to test his ideas scientifically
  • FYI
    • Remember that all of the defense mechanisms above are unconscious mechanisms to convert anxiety into a more manageable form.
    • The defense mechanisms to NOT eliminate anxiety
• Box 8.3 Unintended Effects of Thought Suppression
  • White Bears
    • Wegner's group asked participants to think or not think about a white bear
    • They discovered that:
    • Participants could not easily suppress thinking about a white bear
    • There was a rebound effect for those who who were later asked about the white bear
    • But, those who were already thinking about the white bear did not show the rebound effect
• 8.6 Psychosexual Development (p. 114)
  
  • Freud never worked with children
  • His ideas about psychosexual development came from his therapeutic work with adult patients
  • The stages emphasize erogenous zones (see below)
  • Fixation occurs when the a person is stuck in a particular stage and manifests behaviors because of it (e.g., oral fixation or anal fixation)
    • 8.6.1 The Oral Stage
      • It runs from birth to age 2. In the oral stage infants and toddler explored the world primarily with their most sensitive area, their mouths. They also learn to use their mouths to communicate.
      • Notice the real world validity of this stage. Infants do try to mouth objects.
        
    • 8.6.2 The Anal Stage
      • In the anal stage, children learned to control the elimination of bodily wastes.
      • Toilet training is the highlight of this stage
        • Notice that boys must learn two strategies here
      • Neil Simon's play, The Odd Couple, was his homage to the anal stage
        • The two characters, Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, manifest opposite ends of the anal stage
          • Oscar is compulsively sloppy
          • Felix is compulsively neat
      • FYI, in grad school we used to ask people if they were wrappers or folders. Can you see where that question came from?
        
    • 8.6.3 The Phallic Stage
      • The Phallic Stage (3-5 years of age) is probably the most controversial. The word phallic means penis-like. In this stage, children discover their sexual differences. The controversy comes from Freud's description of the Oedipus (for males) and Electra (for females) complexes, with their attendant concepts of castration anxiety and penis envy, respectively. Those complexes lead, according to Freudian theory, to normal differentiation of male and female personalities. The defense mechanism of repression was invoked to explain why no one could remember the events of this stage.
      • Inspired by the play Oedipus Rex, Freud adapted it to his purposes. His Oedipus Complex applied to boys. When they were old enough to realize the difference between men and women they also assumed that females (such as a sister, perhaps) had lost their penises in a battle with their father. He had ripped them off. Freud’s name for this presumed belief was castration anxiety.
      • The formerly stable family unit was now under threat, as both the boy and father desired the same woman: the child’s mother and the father’s wife. Furthermore, the father was much larger and more powerful than the son. Freud believed that sons abandoned their mother and identified with their fathers, thus resolving the crisis created by the Oedipus Complex. Following the resolution, it was quickly and deeply buried in the unconscious. After its resolution, boys began to take the first steps toward manhood.
      • But, for girls, Freud’s story, the Electra Complex (but named by Jung), was less convincing. During their Phallic Stage, girls, too, learned the difference between the sexes. Freud now argued that they felt what he called penis envy. The resolution of the Electra Complex was less clear cut as well. Girls already identified with their mothers because of their long association since birth, but the lack of a penis prevented them from consummating their childhood id desires for her. Instead, they began their own heterosexual journey, seeking their lost penis first in their fathers and later in their husband. Freud believed they finally satisfied their penis envy while giving birth. As in the case of boys, girls too, totally repressed this episode in their psychosexual development.
        
      8.6.4 The Latency Period
      • In this stage, little new development is observable. In this stage, boys play with boys, and girls with girls, typically. Sexual interest is low or non-existent.
      • FYI, parents in our region often force children at this stage to interact together (such as during birthday parties where boys and girls are invited. The boys and girls themselves might prefer to only have guests of the same gender attend
        
    • 8.6.5 The Genital Stage
      • It starts around 12 years of age and ends with the climax of puberty. Sexual interests re-awaken at this time (there were sexual interests before, but they were dormant and repressed from the phallic stage).
      • Suddenly, the opposite gender now seems attractive
• 8.7 Exposing the Unconscious (p. 117)
  • Freud believed that the unconscious manifested itself in many ways
  • 8.7.1 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901)
    • In that book he analyzed:
      • Parapraxes
        • Memory loss
        • Speech slips (the famous "Freudian slip")
        • Accidents
      • In all of those cases, Freud maintained that the unconscious was expressing itself
  • Motley (1983) believed that anxiety was the cause of speech slips
    • He set up an experimental situation where men were made anxious be either a painful cue or a sexually suggestive cue (See Figure 8.3 below)
    • The research showed that men who were exposed to either of those two stimuli made more speech slips

• 8.7.2 Dreams
• Freud’s analysis of dreams began when he undertook his own psychoanalysis following the death of his father in 1896. Fitfully and haltingly, he tackled his own symptoms (one was that he hated to travel) through the analysis of his own dreams. It was during this time that he first realized the importance of the unconscious and began to work out the details of the Oedipus Complex. Eventually, Freud came to believe that the unconscious generated dreams and that “A dream is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish” (Freud, 1900, p. 183, original italics). The interpretation of dreams became a major focus of his therapeutic work. But, dreams could not be interpreted in terms of their face content or what Freud called their manifest content. Instead, interpretation depended on teasing out the latent (or symbolic) content, much of which was sexual. Thus, Freud provided a long list for translating dreams from their manifest content to their latent content. Here are some examples:

  Manifest Content	Latent Content
  King and Queen	Father and Mother
  Any long object	A penis, a man
  Any container	A vagina, a woman
  Climbing stairs	Engaging in sexual intercourse
  Balconies	Breasts
  Taking a trip	Death or dying

• Freud described dreams as the “royal road to the unconscious.”
  Modern dream research has not supported much of Freud’s theorizing, especially his idea of latent content. Schwartz (2000) argued that modern dream research and theorizing is remarkably similar to that of the 19th century scientists who worked before Freud’s theories of dreaming disrupted that continuity. Domhoff (2019) defended his neurocognitive theory of dreams and compared and contrasted it with Freud’s and three other modern competing theories: activation-synthesis, memory-consolidation, and threat simulation theories. Today, dreaming is studied via brain imaging techniques, cerebral dysfunctions, and brain lesions that affect recall of dreams. Very few contemporary psychologists still support Freud’s theory of dreaming.
• Box 8.4 The Theorist and the Theory: Freud's Own Oedipal Crisis
  • Freud's life was likely the source of parts of his theory:
• His relationship with his parents
  • Ambivalent to his father
  • Worshipful of his mother
• World War I and thanatos
  • He needed to explain human violence
• 8.8 Assessment from the Psychoanalytic Perspective (p. 119)
• Projective Techniques
  • Ambiguous stimuli
    • TAT is another example of a projective technique
  • Rorschach Inkblot Test
    • Uses 10 cards with ambiguous, symmetrical figures
    • Five are black and white or gray
    • Two use black and red ink
    • Three use pastel colors
  • Administration
    • One on one
  • Scoring
  • Controversial
• 8.9 Problems in Behavior, and Behavior Change, from the Psychoanalytic Perspective (p. 120)
  
  • 8.9.1Origins of Problems
    • Adverse childhood experiences
    • Overstrong fixation
    • Repression of drives and urges
    • Overly punitive superego
    • Buried trauma
  • Seduction Theory and Oedipus
    • During Freud’s first years of meeting with patients, he was struck by how often they all seemed to recall incidents of seduction by adults from their childhood years. In his early theorizing he argued that such incidents were responsible for the problems his patients were exhibiting.
    • Later, however, he pulled back from that extreme position disbelieving that such high levels of child molestation could possibly exist. In the place of actual molestation Freud substituted a central role in his theorizing for childhood sexuality as a biologically based instinct.
    • In other words, he began to believe that his patients’ problems were still sexually based, but only symbolically (at least for the majority of his patients). Much of his later theorizing, especially the Oedipus Complex was based upon the premise that children possessed unconscious sexual motivations from a very early age.
      
  • 8.9.2 Behavior Change
  • Freud's therapy is a form of insight therapy
    • Meaning, patients work to discover unconscious motivations
    • They do so via free association
      • Imagine yourself spending 50 minutes in a room with someone you barely know, someone who refuses to engage in normal conversation with you. Such was the original design behind Freudian psychoanalysis.
      • Because Freud failed to provide the normal and usual responses of conversation, patients eventually began to talk without expecting verbal responses in return.
      • That one-sided patient monologue was free association.
    • Patients often showed resistance and transference
      • Two important concepts related to free association are resistance and transference.
      • Freud noted that when patients began to speak less freely about a topic he assumed that was because they were nearing the source of their problem.
      • Paradoxically, patients seemed more reluctant to free associate the closer they came to what Freud considered the root of their problem.
      • Thus, he believed that resistance was a good sign of progress in therapy.
      • He also noticed that patients seemed to transfer their problems from the actual source (e.g., another person) to the therapist, often seeing the therapist as the source of the ideas that distressed them. Again, Freud saw transference as a normal and necessary part of the therapeutic process.
    • Countertransference
      • Therapists of all stripes must not develop personal feelings about their patients or clients
      • In other words, they must realize that their relationship with their patients or clients is professional, not personal
      • Every year, the American Psychological Association publishes a list of therapists who have lost their licenses because of ethical issues
      • Many of those therapists failed to keep personal distance between themselves and their patients or clients. They may have, for instance, had a sexual relationship with a client, an obvious breach of the therapeutic relationship
        
  • 8.9.3 Does Psychoanalytic Therapy Work?
    • Psychoanalytic therapy requires long periods of time, is expensive, and may be painful to its patients
    • Interestingly, Freud (Breuer & Freud, 1895, p. 305) told his patients that he was happy with his therapeutic results “if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”
    • Modern psychoanalytic therapists focus on whether their patients achieve insight
• Box 8.5 Repression, Disclosure, and Physical Health
  • Is there a psychological cost to repression?
  • Does disclosing deeply hidden events lead to better overall health?
  • These are some of the questions coming from Freud's defense mechanism of repression
  • The answers are mixed:
    • In the short term disclosure may be painful and not helpful
    • But, in the long term disclosure may be beneficial to health
• 8.10 Problems and Prospects for the Psychoanalytic Perspective (p. 122)
• Problems
  • Ambiguous definitions (e.g., what or where is the libido)
  • Metaphorical approach (how should be read Freud?)
    • FYI, I asked one of my boys when he was four who he was going to marry. His response? Mom!
  • Defense mechanisms (and much of the rest of Freud's theory) is too flexible, thus I can explain nearly anything, sometimes even things that are diametrically in opposition
  • Overreliance on a few, carefully selected case studies
  • Mixing facts with inferences
• Still a viable theory for many
  • Physiological model for repression (as memory retrieval problems)
  • Id as infant's human nature
  • Ego as a restraint
  • Superego introduction to societal norms
• Why still popular
  • First personality theory
    • Being first leads to longevity of ideas
  • Addresses questions of interest:
    • Do childhood experiences shape adult behavior?
    • What does it mean to be mentally healthy?
    • How aware are we of our motivations?
    • Intuitively attractive theory
• Points to Remember
  • Freud’s topographical model assumes three regions of mind: the conscious, the preconscious (ordinary memory), and the unconscious (a part of mind that isn’t accessible to consciousness). The unconscious holds threatening or unacceptable ideas and urges.
  • Freud’s structural model assumes three facets of personality.
  • The id (the original part) is the source of all energy. It follows the pleasure principle (that all needs should be immediately gratified), exists only in the unconscious, and uses primary-process thinking (primitive and separate from reality).
  • The ego eventually develops because the id ignores the demands of the external world, and those demands cannot adaptively be ignored. Ego follows the reality principle (that behavior must take into account external reality), operates in all three regions of the mind, and tries to see that id impulses are gratified in a realistic way. The ego uses secondary-process (reality-based) thought.
  • The third facet, superego, is a representation of rules by which parents reward and punish the child. It has two parts: ego ideal is standards of moral perfection; conscience is a representation of behaviors that are considered bad. Both function in all three regions of the mind. Once the superego develops, the ego must mediate among id, superego, and reality.
  • Id impulses form two categories: life instincts aim for self-preservation and sexual pleasure; death instincts are self-destructive and may turn outward as aggression.
  • Evidence of a death instinct may exist in cell biology in the form of apoptosis. Catharsis is the emotional release resulting from the release of an impulse.
  • Anxiety is a warning signal to the ego.
  • Reality anxiety is fear of a threat in the world.
  • Neurotic anxiety is fear that id impulses will get out of control and get you in trouble.
  • Moral anxiety is fear of violating the superego’s moral code.
  • The ego deals with anxiety (and sometimes prevents it from arising) by employing defense mechanisms.
  • The basic defense is repression—forcing id impulses and other threatening material out of consciousness.
  • Denial is a refusal to acknowledge the reality of something that lies outside the mind.
  • Other defenses, which typically act along with repression, are projection (attributing an unacceptable impulse to someone else), rationalization (developing an acceptable but incorrect explanation for your action), intellectualization (separating your thoughts from your feelings and allowing the thoughts but not the feelings to be in awareness), displacement (shifting an impulse from one target to another, usually a safer one), and sublimation (transforming an unacceptable impulse to an acceptable one).
  • Freud argued that child development proceeds through psychosexual stages and that adult personality is influenced by how crises are resolved at each stage.
  • In the oral stage, sexuality centers on the mouth, and the crisis involves being weaned. In the anal stage, sexuality centers on the anus, and the crisis involves toilet training.
  • In the phallic stage, sexuality centers on the genitals, and the crisis experienced there (which results in Oedipal and Electra complexes) involves lust for the opposite-sex parent and fear of and rivalry with the same-sex parent.
  • The latency period is a calm interval with no serious conflict.
  • The genital period is maturity, in which genital sexuality shifts from selfish narcissism to mutual sharing.
  • The psychoanalytic orientation holds that the unconscious is the key to personality.
  • Freud believed the unconscious reveals itself in many ways in day-to-day life.
  • Parapraxes are acts of forgetting and slips of the tongue and pen that occur when unconscious desires cause you to act in a way other than as you consciously intend.
  • The unconscious is also revealed in dreams, which have manifest content (what’s in the dream) and latent content (the determinants of the dream, many of which are unconscious).
  • The unconscious can also be revealed more formally, through projective assessment techniques such as the Rorschach inkblot test.
  • Projective techniques allow the person’s unconscious to release symbolic versions of threatening material while describing ambiguous stimuli.
  • The Rorschach is controversial, in that its reliability and validity have not been well supported by research evidence.
  • In the psychoanalytic view, behavioral problems may derive from fixations (unresolved conflicts during psychosexual development), from a general repression of libido, or from repressed traumas.
  • An important aspect of psychoanalytic therapy is free association, saying whatever comes to mind without censoring it in any way. This approach typically produces an incomplete matrix of symbolic meanings from which other elements can be inferred.
  • People in therapy often display resistance, which implies that the ego is trying to defend itself against something the therapy is starting to touch on. Often, the person in therapy displays transference, displacing onto the therapist unacceptable feelings that actually pertain to someone else.
  • The goal of the therapy is insight, an emotional experiencing of previously unconscious parts of personality.
  • Research on the effectiveness of psychoanalytic therapy has produced mixed results. Even in the absence of strong support for the usefulness of psychoanalytic therapy, many people continue to undertake it because they believe it provides benefits that are not adequately assessed by the measures used in outcome research.

KEY TERMS

• Anal stage: The second stage of development, centered on issues in toilet training.
• Anxiety: A feeling warning the ego that something bad is about to happen.
• Apoptosis: Biologically programmed cell death.
• Castration anxiety: A boy’s fear (during the phallic stage) that his father will perceive him as a rival and castrate him.
• Catharsis: The release of emotional tension.
• Conscience: The part of the superego that punishes violations of moral standards.
• Conscious: The part of the mind that holds what one is currently aware of.
• Current concerns: Preoccupations in one’s current waking life.
• Death instincts (Thanatos): Self-destructive instincts, often turned outward as aggression.
• Defense mechanism: An ego-protective strategy to hide threats from yourself and thereby reduce anxiety.
• Denial: A refusal to believe that some real condition exists.
• Displacement: The shifting of an impulse from its original target to a different one.
• Ego: The rational part of the personality that deals pragmatically with reality.
• Ego ideal: The part of the superego that represents perfection and rewards for good behavior.
• Ego strength: The ability of the ego to function despite competing demands of id, superego, and reality.
• Erogenous zone: A sexually responsive area of the body.
• Fixation: The condition of being partly stuck in a stage of psychosexual development.
• Free association: A therapy procedure of saying without hesitation whatever comes to mind.
• Genital stage: The final stage of development, characterized by mature and mutual sexual involvement with another.
• Id: The original, primitive component of personality, the source of all energy.
• Identification: Developing feelings of similarity to, and connectedness with, another person.
• Insight: An emotional re-experiencing of earlier conflicts in one’s life that occurs during therapy.
• Intellectualization: The process of thinking about something clinically and without emotion.
• Introjection: Absorbing the values of one’s parents into one’s superego.
• Latency period: The period in which the crises of the phallic stage give way to a temporary calm.
• Latent content: The underlying sources of symbolic dream images.
• Libido: The collective energy of the life instincts.
• Life instincts or sexual instincts (Eros): Survival and sexual instincts.
• Manifest content: The images that make up the dream experience as it is recalled.
• Moral anxiety: The fear of behaving in conflict with the superego’s moral code.
• Neurotic anxiety: The fear that your id impulses will get out of control and get you into trouble.
• Oedipus complex: The mix of desire for the opposite-sex parent and fear of or hatred for the other parent.
• Oral stage: The first stage of psychosexual development, in which oral needs create a crisis over weaning.
• Parapraxis: A slip of the tongue, behavior, or memory.
• Penis envy: A girl’s envy of males, from feelings of having been castrated.
• Phallic stage: The third stage of development, in which a crisis occurs over sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent.
• Pleasure principle: The idea that impulses should be gratified immediately.
• Preconscious: The region of the mind that corresponds to ordinary memory.
• Primary process: The id process that creates an unconscious image of a desired object.
• Projection: Ascribing a threatening urge or quality in yourself to someone else.
• Projective techniques: An assessment in which you project from the unconscious onto ambiguous stimuli.
• Rationalization: Finding a plausible but incorrect explanation for an unacceptable action or event.
• Reality anxiety: The fear caused by real danger in the world.
• Reality principle: The idea that actions must take into account the constraints of external reality.
• Reality testing: The ego’s checking to see whether plans will work before they are put into action.
• Regression: A return to a mode of coping from an earlier developmental stage.
• Repression: The process of preventing an idea or impulse from becoming conscious.
• Resistance: An attempt to avoid becoming conscious of threatening material in therapy.Rorschach inkblot test: A projective test that uses inkblots as ambiguous stimuli.
• Secondary process: The ego process of rationally seeking an object to satisfy a desire.
• Structural model: Freud’s model of three components of personality.
• Sublimation: Alteration of an id impulse into a socially acceptable act.
• Superego: The component of personality that seeks moral perfection.
• Topographical model: Freud’s model of three regions, or areas, of the mind.
• Transference: The displacement onto your therapist of feelings that are tied to an object of conflict.
• Unconscious: The region of the mind that’s not accessible to consciousness.
• Wish fulfillment: The creation of an unconscious image of a desired object.
  

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