Week 3

Question 1

Explain how we are prisoners of our unconscious

Answer 1

We can’t be blamed or held responsible for our behaviours or attitudes as they have been shaped by time and relationships that we have no control over.

Question 2

How has the influence of a century of psychoanalytic thought shaped our culture?

Answer 2

It has created a self-centred, narcissistic culture that seeks therapy and cure for what are basic elements of human experience.

Question 3

3 physical structures of psyche

Answer 3

1. ID.
2. ego.
3. superego

Question 4

Id

Answer 4

Childlike, deviant.

Question 5

Ego (2)

Answer 5

Negotiates between id and superego.

Social citizen responding and acting in the world.

Question 6

Superego

Answer 6

Moral authority, conscience, shrieking internal parent figure, judgement, impossible to live up to.

Question 7

Eros/Libido (3)

Answer 7

• Pleasure drive; ‘libidinal reservoir’ - murky lake of desires and sexual needs.
• narcissistic.
• establish and maintain unities.

Question 8

Thanatos (3)

Answer 8

• Our desire to see the world burn, would rather die than spend another minute in it.
• dissolve connections and thus destroy or consume things.
• ultimate aim is to convert living into dead.

Question 9

Defence mechanisms

Answer 9

The ways we protect ourselves by ‘spinning out intricate symbolic cobwebs’.

Question 10

What are the 5 stages of psychosexual development?

Answer 10

1. Oral.
2. Anal.
3. Phallic.
4. Latency.
5. Genital.

Question 11

Oral stage (4)

Answer 11

• 0 -1 years.
• pleasure centred around mouth - stems from breastfeeding.
• id centred stage of development.
• stunted at oral age - prefer oral sex.

Question 12

Anal stage (5)

Answer 12

• 1 - 3 years.
• Pleasure centred around anal region.
• Toilet training - gain control over bowel movements.
• aggressive parents approach = prim, proper, cheap, neat people.
• liberal approach = progressive, tolerant, left wing people.

Question 13

Phallic stage (4)

Answer 13

• 4 - 6 years.
• pleasure around genitals.
• Oedipus and Electra complexes.
• always have some unresolved conflict from this stage.

Question 14

Oedipus and Electra complexes

Answer 14

A desire for sexual involvement with the parent of the opposite sex and a consequent sense of rivalry with the parent of the same sex.
Electra = girls.

Question 15

Latency stage (3)

Answer 15

• 7 - 11 years.
• period of sexual dormancy - develop non-sexual relations/friends.
• Oedipus/Electra conflicts are sunk into consciousness.

Question 16

Genital stage

Answer 16

• 12 - 18 years.
• Puberty to adulthood; a new focus on genitals as biological maturity nears.
• mature relationships, love and sex.

Question 17

Herbert Marcuses thoughts on psychonanalytic concepts

Answer 17

All psychoanalytic concepts suggest that the external (cultural, social, political, economic, historical contexts) changes and shapes the internal (the physical): drives are malleable.

Question 18

Herbert Marcuses two principles

Answer 18

1. The pleasure principle.

2. The reality principle.

Question 19

The pleasure principle (4)

Answer 19

• immediate satisfaction.
• pleasure.
• joy (play).
• receptiveness.
• absence of repression.

Question 20

The reality principle (5)

Answer 20

• delayed satisfaction.
• restraint of pleasure.
• toil (work).
• productiveness.
• security.

Question 21

Freud - what does the unconscious consist of?

Answer 21

Repressed desires ‘forgotten’ by the self.

Question 22

‘Self is barred access to …

Answer 22

Unconscious forms of knowing, thinking and feeling through acts of repression.’

Question 23

What does the unconscious explain in terms of public life?

Answer 23

Why our personal/public life is filled with anxiety, conflict and tension.

Question 24

Are culture/civilisation, superego/authority forces of repression?

Answer 24

Yes!

Question 25

2 characteristics of unconscious

Answer 25

1. Wholly pleasure seeking. | 2. Radically indifferent to reality, logic, contradiction, time.

Question 26

What does it mean the the unconscious is indifferent to contradiction?

Answer 26

That beliefs, desires, wishes and impulses exist in the unconscious without contradiction - one can simultaneously love and hate parents, desire and loathe siblings, accept and reject friends.

Question 27

Christopher Lasch - what does the narcissist depend on?

Answer 27

Others to validate self-esteem.

Question 28

Are narcissists normally extroverted or introverted?

Answer 28

Extroverted.

Question 29

How can the insecurity of a narcissist be overcome?

Answer 29

By seeing 'his grandiose self' reflected in the attention of others.