Chapter 3 : Adler

Book:

• Overview of Individual Psychology
  • individual psychology presents an optimistic view of people while resting heavily on the notion of social interest, that is, a feeling of oneness with all humankind
  • Freud reduced all motivation to sex and aggression
  • Adler saw people as being motivated mostly by social influences and by their striving for superiority or success
  • Freud assumed that people have little or no choice in shaping their personality
  • Adler believed that people are largely respon- sible for who they are
  • Freud’s assumption that present behavior is caused by past experiences was directly opposed to Adler’s notion that present behavior is shaped by people’s view of the future
  • in contrast to Freud, who placed very heavy emphasis on unconscious components of behavior, Adler believed that psychologically healthy people are usually aware of what they are doing and why they are doing it
• Biography of Alfred Adler
  • Competed with his brother even when famous
  • Became a physician because of his experiences with death
  • not great friends with Freud; also said that physical deficiencies—not sex— formed the foundation for human motivation (diff from Freud)
• Introduction to Adlerian Theory
  1. The one dynamic force behind people’s behavior is the striving for success or superiority.
  2. People’s subjective perceptions shape their behavior and personality.
  3. Personality is unified and self-consistent.
  4. The value of all human activity must be seen from the viewpoint of social interest.
  5. The self-consistent personality structure develops into a person’s style of life.
  6. Style of life is molded by people’s creative power.
• Striving for Success or Superiority
  • The Final Goal
  • The Striving Force as Compensation
  • Striving for Personal Superiority
  • Striving for Success
• Subjective Perceptions
  • Fictionalism
  • Physical Inferiorities
• Unity and Self-Consistency of Personality
  • Organ Dialect
  • Conscious and Unconscious
• Social Interest
  • Origins of Social Interest
  • Importance of Social Interest
• Style of Life
• Creative Power
• Abnormal Development
  • General Description
  • External Factors in Maladjustment - Exaggerated Physical Deficiencies
    • Pampered Style of Life
    • Neglected Style of Life
  • Safeguarding Tendencies - Excuses
    • Aggression
    • Withdrawal
  • Masculine Protest - Origins of the Masculine Protest
    • Adler, Freud, and the Masculine Protest
  • Applications of Individual Psychology - Family Constellation
    • Early Recollections
    • Dreams
    • Psychotherapy
  • Related Research

Mini Lecture:

• Human beings propelled by the Striving Force for Superiority
  • 1) Push to overcome inferiority
  • 2) Pull toward becoming a whole and complete person
  • Pull towards whole makes you feel inferior but then push makes you work harder
• Adler Personal Life
  • Physical weakness + poor health
  • Felt less capable than brother, but driven as a result
  • Trying to strive for improvement
• Unhealthy Superiority: Personal Superiority
  • seeks validation by insisting others notice his accomplishments
  • doesn’t care who he hurts to get that validation
  • looks for compliments and admiration
  • tries to bring the attention back to himself
• Healthy Superiority (Success)
  • measuring accomplishments according to their own feelings of satisfaction and growth
  • innate but must be developed; At birth a potential not an actuality
  • Children early as 4/5 start looking for final goal to lead them to superiority. - Final goal comes about as result of creative power
    • Creativity works in conjunction with heredity (brains/skills/talents) + environment (opportunities/encouragement/feedback) to help create final goal
  • Final goal shapes our behaviors (result of trying to reach this final goal) and hence creates personality
• Final Goal
  • two possibilities for Final Goal: striving for Personal Superiority (which is unhealthy) or striving for Success (which is healthy)
• 4/5 yo’s with Preliminary Goals
  • “Fictions”: ideas that have no objective reality to them

Preliminary goals guide a person’s life regardless of their ability to provide what the person thinks these Goals will provide. They will build on these further (“style of life”).

Law of the Low Doorway

• Your Goals toward Superiority are ineffective, but you can’t see past your rigidity and you continue to use them
• to achieve Superiority, you must be able to adjust your Goals in response to the feedback you’re getting - you need to learn from your experiences

Healthy Superiority

• absolute support towards a child’s growth AND a model for a constructive response to disappointment and “failure”
• Contrast that to an environment in which a child striving for Superiority encounters jeering and put-downs. Such a child may actually work extra hard to prove his abilities and reach success. Unfortunately, he is angry and resentful for the lack of encouragement in his life, and he will replicate that model of human interaction as he moves toward Personal Superiority.

Chapter 4

TBD

Chapter 2 : Freud

Mini Lecture

• Freud’s theory focuses on intrapsychic development - looking at how we carry issues from the past and how these issues affect our behaviors today as adults.
• Freud’s theory = Psychoanalytic theory != Psychodynamic = June
• Freud: the human mind has 3 levels of awareness:
  • the Conscious - thoughts and feelings we can articulate
  • the Preconscious - holding area for Unconscious thoughts that seek expression at the Conscious
  • the Unconscious
    • hidden sexual and aggressive impulses - particularly the kind of feelings and thoughts that we don’t want to acknowledge in our lives
• Freud aligned with Darwin: we are genetically designed to seek survival
  • 2 Unconscious motivations pushes to growth or survival
  • Motivation 1: Eros - libido; procreate/survive
  • Motivation 2: Thanatos - life destroying
    • seek sex (survival). “Kill off competitors”
• Freudian theory: in order to push an anxiety-producing thought back into the Unconscious, the average person will say and/or do things so frantically that his (or her) behavior can be inappropriate or self-destructive
• cathected: spending a lot of your life-giving energy pushing these feelings back down into the Unconscious
• The more your libido is cathected, the less life-giving energy you have available to move forward in your life

Book Overview

• Overview of Psychoanalytic Theory
  • Sex and Aggression are really popular
  • Freud’s proselytizers were very good at spreading it
  • Freud is a really good speaker
• Biography of Sigmund Freud
• Levels of Mental Life
  • Unconscious
  • Preconscious
  • Conscious
• Provinces of the Mind
  • The Id
  • The Ego
  • The Superego
• Dynamics of Personality
  • Drives
    • Sex
    • Aggression
  • Anxiety
• Defense Mechanisms
  • First talked about it in 1926.
  • Normal but can lead to compulsive/neurotic behavior.
  • Principal Defense Mechanisms:
    • Repression
    • Reaction Formation
    • Displacement
    • Fixation
    • Regression
    • Projection
    • Introjection
    • Sublimation
• Stages of Development
  • Infantile Period
    • Oral Phase
    • Anal Phase
    • Phallic Phase
      • Female Oedipus Complex
      • Male Oedipus Complex
  • Latency Period
  • Genital Period
  • Maturity
• Applications of Psychoanalytic Theory
  • Freud’s Early Therapeutic Technique
  • Freud’s Later Therapeutic Technique
  • Dream Analysis
  • Freudian Slips
• Related Research
  • Unconscious Mental Processing
  • Pleasure and the Id, Inhibition and the Ego
  • Repression, Inhibition, and Defense Mechanisms
  • Research on Dreams
• Critique of Freud
  • Did Freud Understand Women, Gender, and Sexuality?
  • Was Freud a Scientist?
• Concept of Humanity
• Key Terms and Concepts

Sigmund Freud

• people searching for a magic drug to lessen pain, he found cocaine
• tied to psychoanalysis

Chapter 1

• word “personality” originated from the Latin persona
• personality: a pattern of relatively permanent traits and unique characteristics that give both consistency and individuality to a person’s behavior
• Traits: contribute to individual differences in behavior, consistency of behavior over time, and stability of behavior across situations
• Characteristics: unique qualities of an individual that include such attributes as temperament, physique, and intelligence
• taxonomy : a classification of things according to their natural relationships

Theoretical Perspectives on Personality:

• Psychodynamic Theories
  • importance of early childhood experience and on relationships with parents as guiding forces that shape personality development
  • traditionally used dream inter- pretation to uncover the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and impulses as a main form of treatment of neurosis and mental illness.
  • After Freud, these theorists moved away from the importance of sexuality and more toward social and cultural forces.
• Humanistic-Existential Theories
  • people strive toward meaning, growth, well-being, happi- ness, and psychological health
  • Existential theorists assume that not only are we driven by a search for meaning, but also that negative experiences such as failure, awareness of death, death of a loved one, and anxiety, are part of the human condition and can foster psychological growth
• Dispositional Theories
  • unique and long-term tendencies to behave in particular ways are the essence of our personality
  • five main trait dimensions in human personality
• Biological-Evolutionary Theories
  • Behavior, thought, feelings, and personality are influenced by differences in basic genetic, epigenetic, and neurological systems between individuals.
• Learning-(Social) Cognitive Theories
  • All behaviors are learned through association and/or its consequences (whether it is reinforced or punished). To shape desired behavior we have to understand and then establish the conditions that bring about those particular behaviors.

psychology of science :look at personal traits of scientists. The psychology of science studies both science and the behavior of scientists;

Dimensions for a Concept of Humanity: Personality theories differ on basic issues concerning the nature of humanity

1. determinism versus free choice
2. pessimism versus optimism
3. causality versus teleology
   • causality holds that behavior is a function of past experiences, whereas teleology is an explanation of behavior in terms of future goals or purposes
4. conscious versus unconscious determinants of behavior
5. biological versus social influences on per- sonality
6. uniqueness versus similarities

reliability: of a measuring instrument is the extent to which it yields consistent results.

Validity : the degree to which an instrument measures what it is supposed to measure.

• Personality psychologists are concerned with two types of validity:
  1. construct validity - Construct validity is the extent to which an instrument measures some hypothetical construct
     • Constructs such as extraversion, aggressiveness, intelligence, and emotional stability have no physi- cal existence; they are hypothetical constructs that should relate to observable behavior.
     • Three important types of construct validity: - convergent validity - A measuring instrument has convergent construct validity to the extent that scores on that instrument correlate highly (converge) with scores on a variety of valid measures of that same construct
       • divergent validity - An inventory has divergent construct validity if it has low or insignificant correlations with other inventories that do not measure that construct
         • For example, an inventory purporting to measure extraversion should not be highly correlated with social desirability, emotional stability, honesty, or self-esteem.
       • discriminant validity - an inventory has discriminant validity if it discriminates between two groups of people known to be different.
         • For example, a personality inventory measuring extraversion should yield higher scores for people known to be extraverted than for people known to be introverted
  2. predictive validity - extent that a test predicts some future behavior

Quotes / test probably sourced from https://www.amazon.com/Duane-P-Schultz-Theories-Personality/dp/B00HTK3WWM