What is the role of the unconscious?
There are vast parts of the mind that are inaccessible to conscious awareness. Any traumatic events or memories from childhood are repressed into the unconscious mind and kept there.
What is the Id?
- governed by the pleasure principle
- consist of primal urges
- operates on instinct, present at birth
What is the ego?
- governed by the reality principle
- tames the id
- balances the demands of the superego
- justifies which part of the personality to rely on
What is the superego?
- governed by the morality principle
- our sense of right and wrong
- internalised parent or “inner voice”
What are defence mechanisms?
They’re used by the ego in order to cope with the conflicting demands of the other two parts of the personality,
- Repression: occurs when a traumatic memory is forced out of conscious awareness and into the unconscious mind.
- Denial: involves a refusal to accept yhe truth or reality of a situation, acting as though nothing distressing has happened.
- Displacement: is when feelings towards a regret individual cannot be expressed directly and are therefore transferred onto someone/something else.
What is the Oedipus complex (aka the first motherfucker)
- boys relinquish their unconscious desire for their mother and internalise their castration anxiety towards their father.
What is the oral stage?
- 0-2 yo
- focus on the mouth
- the infant experiences pleasure through their mouth, particularly sucking and biting.
- oral fixation: may engage in behaviours like nail-biting and smoking.
What is the anal stage?
- 2-3 y/os
- focus on the anus (lol)
- the child becomes aware of the reality principle imposed by the parents,, they must undergo potty training in order to control their bowel movements: during his stage the ego develops.
- anal retentive: obsessive perfectionist
- anal explosive: messy and thoughtless
What is the phallic stage?
- 3-6 year olds
- Focus on genitals
- main feature is the Oedipal complex in which boys must overcome their sexual desire for their mother by identifying with their father (superego is developed).
- phallic fixation may manifest in reckless or narcissistic behaviours (aka ur a dickhead).
What is the latency stage?
- 6-puberty
- the sexual energy which has driven the previous stages becomes latent, so the individual can focus on the world around them and form relationships.
What is the genital stage?
- puberty+
- focus on forming heterosexual relationships
- culminates with the psychosexual energy taking residence in the genitals, to be directed towards the formation of an adult relationship.
- a person who becomes fixated at the genital stage my struggle with forming heterosexual relationships (ha! You Gaybo!)
STRENGTH OF PSYCHODYNAMICS: FREUD IS INFLUENTIAL
- evidence is highly clinical rather than empirical
- few would deny that there are unconscious motives and demonstrable defence mechanisms.
- these existential realities have allowed Freudian theory to maintain some hold on psychotherapeutic techniques, like psychoanalysis, which are still used today.
LIMITATION OF PSYCHODYNAMICS: GENDER BIAS (with a kind of positive spin)
- his obsession with the Oedipus complex was highly androcentric, and many would claim this makes them irrelevant to understanding females.
- but female psychoanalysts like Melanie Klein have shown that even gender-biased theories can be adapted to provide useful insights into female behaviour.
- ergo, while Freud’s original theory expresses a gender bias, his work can be developed in a way that it applies to women
LIMITATION OF PSYCHODYNAMICS: CULTURE BIAS
- All of Freud’s patients were from the Viennese middle class, and his universal generalisations were based on his highly unrepresentative sample.
- lacks population validity and generalisability
