Personality Psychology

Conscious and Unconscious

Is the connection between Id and external restraint (reality or law)

Logical side of personality that monitors and conrols behavior, making plans and organizing.

Reality principle considers consequences for actions and desires self-preservation over all things 

Internalized parental influences on our life. The standards,  morals, or conscience side of the personality. 

Seeks perfection or ideal image

Fear of a real danger in the external world

The fear that ones inner impulses cannot be controlled

The fear that retribuioons of one's own conscience

Conscious- immediate awareness Example: aware of your where about right now

Subconscious- retrieval of stored memory Example: social secerity number

Unconscious-deeply hidden screts, desires, and wishes

Reality - considers consequences for actions and desires self preservation over all things

Pleasure- the need to avoid tension, discomfort and pain

the goal of defenses is to alleviate anxiety, even to the point of distorting reality 

Blocking a wish or desire fom conscious expression 

Example: Being unaware of deep seaed hostilities towards ones parents

Refusing to believe a reality 

Ex: refusing to believe that one hase a terminal illness

Attributing an unconscious impulse, attitude or behavior to another

Ex: blaming another for your act or thing that someone is our to get you

Expression an impuls by its opposite

Ex: treating someone who you dont like in a friendly manner

Returning to an earlier form of expressing an impulse

Ex: Resuming bedwetting after one has long since stopped 

Dealing with an emotion intellectually to aviod emotional concern 

Ex: Aguing "everyone else does it, so I dont have to feel guilty " 

Modeling behavior after someone else 

Ex: Imitating one's mother or father 

Satisfying an impulse with a subtitute object 

ex: scapegoating 

Rechanneling an impulse into a more socially desirable outlet

Ex: satisfying sexual curiosity by researching sexual behaviors

Age: birth - 1 yr old

Personality is preoccupied with issues of giving and taking, dependncy and compliance.

attitudes swings between optimism and pessimism.

ambivalence in relations = dont know if you want imtimacy

admire strength and leadership in other. tend to be too trusing and evny others success, narcissistic and manipulated.

tend to develop habits: alcohoism and smoking

Characteristics caused from over indulence as infant 

Age: 2-3

Fixated Personality: Pleasure from maintaining or expelling feces due to body control and 1st experience with         authority or work "No". Children are cocmpliant or rellious.

Characteristics: Perfectionist, needs consistent routines, stickler for precision, stingy, orderly, controls others

Darkside: sadistic, enjoys inflicting pain, crueltly (likes to watch people and animals suffer)

Age: 4-5

Critical time period for sexual, gender and edo identity 

Problems: Oedipal Complex. Develop unconscious pleasure/ desire for mom not sexual but neediness; feels threatened by dad and develop castration anxiety but eventually identifies, but dont identify with dad but with mom her would develope homosexual preference or to a lesser extent: effeminate characteristics

Age: 4-6

Critical time period for sexual,, gender and ego identity

Sees mom as rival for fathers attention. If she identfies with mom it is out of fear of abandonment or loss of love. If identifies with dad then she develops tomboy attributes, masculine characteristics. 

Oedipal Complex Outcomes:

1. Overly femininne to conquer men with sexual trapping 

2. Emasculates men via ridicule or humiliation

Females have greater need for differentiation than males because moms have more influence on both. Males naturally separate by identifing with dad. 

Females never really separate from mom making them yearn for indenpendence and self-autonomy.

Age: 7-12

Sexual impules are repressed

Ages: 13 or later

Rebirth of sexual and aggressive desires. Pleasure shifts to acceptable love objects rather than our parents.

Mature people satisfy needs in socially acceptable ways.

Fixation- creates excessive needs characteristic of an earlier stage

Caused by 3 things:

1. excessive frustration

2. excessive indulgence (getting everything your way)

3.unconscious conflict