Lecture 8: Personality models Flashcards
(19 cards)
Who was Carl Jung?
- 1875-1961 A swiss psychoanalyst inspired by Freud’s work, worked with Freud for many years
- Didn’t accept the Oedipal complex and other aspects of personality
- Split with Freud and started developing his own theory
What did Jung call the total personality?
The Psyche
What did Jung believe personality was made up of?
1) Ego
2) Personal unconscious
3) Collective unconscious
4) Archetypes
What are the two principles the psyche operates by?
The principle of equivalence: Activity increase in one part of the psyche, it decreases correspondingly in another part.
The principle of entropy: Drive to create balanced energies in the psyche so that we express more of ourselves in our behaviour.
- The development of personality needs to be balanced to allow the parts that make up the psyche to come into harmony.
What is the Ego (Jung)?
- Jung believed that the ego (or the self) is the unifying force in the psyche at the centre of our consciousness.
- Contains conscious thought and feelings about our past behaviour and memories of past experiences
- Responsible for our feelings of identity
What is the personal unconscious?
- Contains all personal experiences that have been blocked from our awareness
- Similar to Freud’s concept of unconscious, contains ‘unacceptable’ repressed material
- This material can be brought into consciousness in psychoanalysis or hypnosis.
What is the collective unconsciousness?
- There are structures of the unconscious mind that are shared among all humans
- Lies deep within the psyche, consists of innate inherited and universal instincts that goes beyond personal experiences
- Human’s are born with certain features and instincts that are stored within the collective unconsciousness (fear of the unknown).
What are archetypes?
- Universal themes or symbols within the collective unconscious, which can influence our current experiences.
What is the persona archetype?
- The masks and roles we adapt to deal with other people and to present ourselves to the world
- Helps us to disguise inner feelings and impulses and respond in socially appropriate ways
- It is adaptive but when used to the extremes, it may result in loss of our true selves
What is the shadow archetype?
- The dark side of our nature, consisting of repressed material in our personal unconsciousness and universal images of evil in our collective unconsciousness
What is the anima archetype?
- The feminine elements in the male psyche, consisting of inherited ideas of what constitutes a women.
- Consists of feminine qualities - emotionality, sensitivity, irrationality and moodiness
What is the animus archetype?
- The male element in the female psyche, derived from women’s evolutionary experiences of males and fathers
- Consists of masculine qualities - reason logic and social insensitivity.
- Anima/animus helps females and males to understand each other
What is the self archetype?
- Drives the process of individuation; the quest to create balance within the psyche, to accept ourselves and to reach our fullest potential.
How can archetypes influence real life situations?
- A man’s anima is likely to become activated in his relationship with a women
- Different archetypes become activated and influence us in different situations, allowing us to have predetermined ways of thinking about situations and dealing with objects and events.
What two personality types did Jung propose?
1) Extraversion
- an outgoing, candid and accommodating nature that adapts easily to a given situation and quickly forms attachments. Ventures forth with careless confidence into an unknown situation
2) Introversion
- a hesitant, reflective retiring nature that keeps itself to itself, shrinks from objects, is always slightly defensive and prefers to hide
Jung identified differences within introverts and extroverts and classified how people relate to the world, he proposed 4 approaches…
1) Sensing - Registering that something exists without evaluation
2) Thinking - Interpreting stimuli using reason and logic.
3) Feeling - Evaluating the value/worth of what has been presented
4) Intuitive: Relating to the world with minimum/reasoning; instead we form hunches.
What’s the difference between thinkers and feelers (Jung)?
Thinking and feeling are opposites; rational functions as they involve the cognitive processes used to form conclusions/make judgements
- Thinkers use logic and analysis
- Feelers use value, attitudes and beliefs.
How empirically valid is Jung’s theory?
- Its difficult to test, lacks scientific research (how would you test the shadow)
- Theory suggests the most crucial part of out unconscious (collective unconscious) is inherited and not shaped by our experience
- Criticised for being mystical
- Stereotypical view of femininity and masculinity
However… he developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to measure Jungian personality types
What is the Barnum effect in personality assessment?
- A problem with personality tests is that pp are provided with a report that tells them about their personality, which people endorse.
- Constantly exposed to different tests that are intended to measure and tell us about our personality.
- The tendency for people endorse, as uniquely their own, personality descriptions that are actually fake or so general that they can describe almost anyone as a psychological phenomenon
