Personality Flashcards
(42 cards)
Free Association
A method of of exploring the unconscious in which the person relaxes and says whatever comes to mind, no matter how trivial or embarrassing.
Personality
An individuals characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling and acting.
Psychoanalysis
Freud’s theory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts.
Unconscious
According to Freud, a reservoir of mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings and memories.
Id
Contains a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to Freud, arrives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives.
Ego
Mediates among the demands of the id, superego, and reality.
Superego
Represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgement (the conscience) and for future aspirations.
Psychosexual stages
The childhood stages of development (oral, anal, phalic, latency, genital) during which, the id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones.
Oedipus Complex
According to Freud, a boys sexual desires toward his mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father.
Identification
The process by which, according to Freud, children incorporate their parents values into their developing superegos.
Fixation
According to Freud, a lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, in which conflicts were unresolved.
Defense mechanisms
Tactics that reduce or redirect anxiety by distorting reality
Repression
The basic mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings and memories from consciousness.
Regression
Psychoanalytic defense mechanism in which an individual faced with anxiety retreats to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated
Reaction Formation
The ego unconsciously makes unacceptable impulses look like their opposites.
Projection
Psychoanalytic defense mechanism by which people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.
Rationalization
When we unconsciously generate self - justify in explanations to hide from ourselves the real reasons for our actions.
Displacement
Psychoanalytic defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggression impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person as when redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.
Denial
Defense mechanism by which people refuse to believe or even to perceive painful realities.
Collective unconscious
Carl Jung concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species history
Projective test
A personality test, such as the Rorschach or TAT that provides ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger projection of ones inner dynamics
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
In which people view ambiguous and then makeup stories about them
Rorschach inkblot test
Which people describe what they see in a series of inkblots
Terror-management theory
A theory of death-related anxiety; explores people’s emotional and behavioral responses to reminders of their impending death.
