Brief Lecture Notes for Unit 3 (revised August 22, 2005)
See main textbook chapters 10-12, especially chapter 10.
Overview
Breaking this word into its component parts should give you an idea what this is going to be about. "Psycho" (as in psychology) refers, of course, to the mind or to internal mental processes. "Dynamic" means, in this context, conflict - often explosive conflict (the word dynamite comes from the same root). Hence, this school of thought emphasizes internal conflicts within the personality or between different aspects of the self.
The key idea in this school of thought is that of unconscious conflict or unconscious determinism. Most of who we are, according to this approach, is fixed early in life (perhaps as early as age five) and controlled largely by factors outside of our conscious awareness. Under normal conditions, insight into our true motives and emotional responses is limited; we are blind to much of the reality of who we are, and this fact shapes our behavior in ways we only infrequently recognize.
Besides the emphasis on unconscious determinism, Freud viewed the human being as a dynamic system -- changing rather than static.
Freud's pessimism about human nature and the human condition is also a hallmark of his thinking. The world, Freud once wrote, is anake (a Greek word meaning "a lack") -- unable, in the final analysis, to meet all our needs. Interestingly, many religious thinkers throughout the ages have drawn the same conclusion and have gone on from there to draw theological conclusions about reality, yet Freud was implacably hostile to religion. Apparently he did not recognize this as a contradiction in his thinking -- intriguing to me as a religious person. (When two people can start at the same point and reach diametrically opposed conclusions, something unusual is occurring.)
The structure of personality, as seen from within this school of thought, involves two different elements.
a. The first involves the notion of three different levels of consciousness: the conscious mind (what you are currently thinking, feeling, experiencing); the preconscious mind (memories that are not in current awareness but can be readily recalled); and the unconscious mind (memories that cannot, under normal conditions, be brought to awareness directly or voluntarily). These two parts of the mind together comprise only about 10% of one's total mental contents. Most of the mind, from the psychodynamic perspective, is unconscious.
b. The other involves three personality structures: the id, ego, and superego.
(1) The id is the repository of the instinctive (inherited or innate) drives, motives, needs, and emotions; as the original system of the personality, it operates on the basis of the pleasure principle ("is this pleasant or unpleasant? do I want this?") and attempts to meet needs by way of the primary process (essentially equivalent to wish fulfillment or fantasy; note that the id, like a young child, has no capacity to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and hence no effective means of meeting its own needs).
We know little of the id directly, because it does not normally enter our conscious awareness in an undisguised form. We recognize it primarily by analogies: it is prelogical, impersonal, and uncontrollable. We often experience the id as something that "happens to us" or "takes control of us", excusing eruptions of the id with depersonalizing or distancing language like "I wasn't myself yesterday" or "I don't know what came over me". German (Freud's native language) is even more explicit in this regard, linguistically depersonalizing the biological drives: where we would say in English "I [i.e., the ego] am hungry", a German speaker would say es hungert mich [literally, "it hungers me"].
(2) The ego is the rational, or "executive", part of the personality; it operates on the basis of the reality principle ("is this realistic/rational or unrealistic/irrational? will this course of action be effective?") and attempts to meet needs by way of the secondary process (essentially equivalent to developing and implementing plans and strategies and goals). The ego, unlike the id, can tolerate delayed gratification and can make short-term sacrifices in the services of long-term gains.
It's important to remember that the ego evolves from or is generated from the id, and never becomes completely separate from it. Technically, it exists for the purpose of forwarding or satisfying the aims of the id; although it has to frustrate them in the short run at times, it is never inherently opposed to them. All of this contributes to the colloquial use of the word "ego" to represent selfishness or arrogance, even though from a technical Freudian perspective, these are id functions, not ego functions.
(3) The superego consists of the conscience and the ego ideal or idealized self; it operates on the basis of the moral principle ("is this right or wrong? can this action be ethically justified?"). Annoyingly for people like me who value intellectual symmetry, there is no tertiary process... but there should be, for the sake of completeness.
Many analysts differentiate between the conscience and the ego-ideal (self-sentiment) as two separate and distinct aspects of the superego. Both originally develop, Freud thought, through the child's introjection of parental ideas (taking them in and making them his or her own, so that what was originally external eventually becomes internal). Note that this is the opposite of the process of projection, in which something internal is wrongly attributed to an external cause (e.g., being a suspicious person, I think of others as being suspicious towards me). The main functions of the ego are to inhibit morally inappropriate impulses of the id, to persuade the ego to substitute moral or ideal goals for purely utilitarian ones or to modify utilitarian reasoning to incorporate ethical values, and to strive for perfection. Many of Freud's followers, Tournier among them, emphasized that the contents of the superego can be repressed as surely as the impulses of the id.
It's not unusual for there to be conflict between the goals, demands, and action strategies of the different personality structures. (Id: "I'm starving! Steal some food for me!" Ego: "But if I did that, you'd go to jail, and you wouldn't like that." Superego: "And besides, stealing is wrong.") This produces anxiety, and it's one of the ego's main jobs to handle (attempt to moderate, reduce, manage, or eliminate) anxiety. Oftentimes it can do so. When the ego cannot successfully manage anxiety, the resulting anxiety state is said to be traumatic. Some people are better able to manage anxiety than others, a personality variable known as ego strength.
The id, ego, and superego are not to be thought of as mannikins, homunculi, or autonomous selves which operate the personality. They are names for psychological processes that are normally, to a reasonable extent, integrated. Usually they work together in a team fashion under the ego's leadership. However, it is true that the ego often fails in its task of integrating these disparate parts of the personality. Freud often described the ego as a charioteer trying to control two strong horses (the id and the superego), each of which can seek to run in an opposite direction from the other. In a very general way, the id can be thought of as the biological component of personality, the ego as the psychological (or cognitive) component, and the superego as the social (and/or the transcendent) component. Beyond this, be careful about unduly reifying these three aspects of the self as if they were separate personalities.
In terms of 16PF language, one can think of the relative strength of the different components of the personality in the following way: Factor C measures the strength of the ego, Factor F of the id, and Factor G of the superego. Thus, we might think of a C+ F- G- individual as dour but utilitarian, a C- F+ G- person as being hedonistic and amoral, a C- F- G+ person as being a moralist or idealist, and so forth.
The inborn instincts (or drives) are central to the dynamics of personality. The sum total of the instincts constitute the amount of psychological energy available to the personality. As noted above, the id is the reservoir of this energy and is thus the seat of the instincts.
An instinct has four elements: a source, an aim, an object, and an impetus. The source is the bodily condition (underlying need); note that for Freud, as a reductionist, all needs are ultimately physical. (Seemingly nonphysical needs are disguised, symbolic expressions of physical, instinctive needs.) The aim is, invariably, the elimination or reduction of the need. While both source and aim are genetically determined, the object is not. The flexibility and complexity of human personality stems from the fact that if a given object is not available or not realistically attainable (an ego judgment) or not deemed ethically appropriate (a superego judgment), a substitute object -- often a very indirect one -- can be substituted (instinct displacement). "Object", to Freud, means not just a physical entity, but the entire behavior pattern associated with an attempt to achieve the aim of the instinct. Impetus means the strength, magnitude, or intensity of the instinct.
When the energy of an instinct is more or less permanently displaced, the resulting behavior is said to be instinct derivative. To Freud (again, in his reductionism and general pessimism), all adult interests, preferences, tastes, habits, traits, values, and attitudes are instinct derivatives. This is another way of saying that we do not encounter the id directly, but only in a form disguised by the ego.
Instincts can be categorized as either life instincts (eros or libido) or death instincts (thanatos or aggression). Some behaviors represent a fusion of both, for instance, eating. Note that many of us eat when we are happy (libidinal source) and when we are angry (aggressive source). This is one reason why it's so difficult to lose weight! Any unmet need can lead to eating behavior as its object.
Since the total amount of energy available to the personality is fixed, different components of the personality have to compete for energy. The investment of energy in an object is known as cathexis (see section below for more details). The fact that it requires energy to change a cathexis leads to a certain degree of psychological inertia; this is responsible in part for the consistency of personality.
Because the ego is so much more effective than the id in meeting needs, as the ego develops it can accumulate a surplus of unused energy that can be invested in derivative activities and interests. The energy of the hunger drive, for instance, can come to include such secondary cathexes as an interest in collecting recipes, visiting unusual restaurants, studying the history of cultural changes in culinary techniques, and so forth.
Sometimes cathexes are threatening to the ego and/or to the superego, in which case the ego handles the threat by generating anticathexes to oppose them. These are the root of the so-called defense mechanisms that represent the mind's way of handling anxiety that cannot be addressed by purely conscious rational means. Defense mechanisms all involve a partial distortion of reality and an unconscious motivational base. They are universal; we all have them, but some of us find it necessary to invest more energy in them than others, and different people utilize different forms of defense mechanisms more than others. Because it requires energy to maintain the anticathexes that underlie the defense mechanisms, they lead to behavioral rigidity and neurotic symptomatology. Mental health in Freud's model is defined as a relative freedom from needless or excessive anticathexes, which releases energy for constructive, present-oriented activity (Lieben und Arbeiten). Common defense mechanisms include repression, projection, reaction formation (replacing an unconscious motive in consciousness by an exaggerated form of its opposite), and regression (reverting temporarily to an earlier or more primitive -- that is, more id- and less ego-driven -- means of coping with reality).
Personality difficulties from the standpoint of this school of thought, stem from the overuse of defense mechanisms and primarily from the repression of anxiety. Repression results from traumatic anxiety and has a short-term benefit (protects the integrity of the ego), but is problematic because it is self-maintaining. Memories and motivations that are repressed do not vanish, but continue to influence present-day behavior in indirect, symbolic, and often symptomatic ways. We may often be unaware of these elements of our behavior, and even when aware of them may well be at a loss to explain them.
If repression is the problem, then finding a way to undo or eliminate repressions is the heart of the solution. Access to unconscious material can be gained through free association, analysis of dreams, and analysis of transference reactions.
The latter represent a projection of unconscious, repressed motives onto the "blank slate" of (in this case) the therapeutic relationship. Any strong but inexplicable emotional reaction of any sort (e.g., to a person, group, event, experience) is presumably a transference reaction. Transference reactions are universal (remember the first "crush" you had on someone in middle school? or the way you respond, for good or ill, to authority figures today?), but are frequently problematic (impede reality-based responses). They can be recognized by their intensity and irrationality and general imperviousness to conscious, voluntary control. The therapist, of course, needs to keep her/himself from manifesting corresponding (counter-transference) reactions, but needs instead to remain neutral and analytical in the therapeutic process.
Elimination of repression leads to insight (awareness of the original unconscious roots of present-day problems) and catharsis (an emotional "reliving" of early childhood conflicts), which together give the individual an opportunity to work through old problems on a conscious level, this time with the advantages of adulthood (e.g., greater ego strength, a larger set of potential solution approaches or strategies).
This school of thought can be criticized in numerous ways. It relies heavily on unobservable, hypothetical constructs (the unconscious mind is, of course, unobservable by definition). As a form of therapy, it is lengthy and costly, and tends to benefit mostly people with certain characteristics (introspection, verbal skill, a moderate level of psychological disturbance). It is (rightly or wrongly) pessimistic about human nature, may diminish human responsibility and accountability, and (at least in the original formulation) is rather misogynistic.
Developmental aspects
As an illustration of Freud's developmental structure, we will examine a psychodynamic model of gender identification. The purpose of this model is not simply to understand how children come to identify with same-sex gender models and gender roles, but also to explain behavioral, personality, and relational differences between the sexes.
Freud believed -- quite sensibly, it seems to me -- that the amount of emotional energy (his term was libidinal, which does not refer only to sexuality in a narrow sense, but rather, to all forms of emotional energy of whatever sort) in the personality is basically a fixed quantity. Certainly we all know from experience that our time, and our other resources, are finite and limited: to choose to invest in certain activities, relationships, or commitments means that we must pass others by. (Some students, who try to take an overload at the university while holding down two jobs and raising a family, seem not to understand this point.) He used the term cathexis to refer to the process of investing emotional energy in a given situation, task, object, or relationship. (The plural is cathexes, the verb form is cathect.) At one level or in one sense, life is all about making and breaking cathexes: deciding how to invest the emotional energy we have, or put more simply, deciding how to prioritize and make choices, how to choose a certain kind of life.
Consider the situation of an involuntary job loss: to deal productively with such a situation, one must first let go (decathect) from the old job and old vocational identity, which usually means a grieving process; then, one must find a new source of vocational identity to which one can re-establish a relationship (recathect). Note that both processes take time and have a natural rhythm of their own that can't easily be rushed; there is an old counseling saying that goes, "You don't push the river, the river carries you." Note also that in healthy people, there is not a rush to prematurely recathect (e.g., the ill-advised job choice, the "rebound" relationship, the "I'll show them" choice made out of spite), but rather, a willingness to engage a rather ambiguous process that lies in between decathexis and recathexis. Between these two processes of "saying goodbye" and "saying hello" is an in-between state that William Bridges calls the "neutral zone". At these times, certainty and stability are at a minimum (no clear cathexis), but possibility and opportunity are at a maximum (emotional energy is freed up from the previous cathexis, and can be invested in a variety of different ways).
All our later relationships, and in fact all of our later cathexes whether relational or of some other type (e.g., vocational identity), are rooted in our first experience of cathecting emotional energy, our attachment relationship with (typically) our mother, or what Freud called the anaclitic cathexis. (The word "anaclitic" comes from a Greek word meaning "to lean upon"; hence, the idea is that of a pure dependency relationship.) From the standpoint of gender identity, the point at issue is that as infants, both boys and girls cathect primarily to the mother; but by age 5 or so (when gender identity is more or less fixed), while girls can retain this initial cathexis and build a gender identity around it, boys must find a way to break that cathexis and recathect around gender identification with the father. From this fundamental fact, Freud suggests, come many of the gender differences in behavior, personality, and outlook.
Freud's discussion of the Oepidal conflict or complex (in boys) and the Electra conflict or complex (in girls) is his attempt to explain the process by which infant anaclitic cathexis is transformed into school-age same-sex gender identification. In boys, the idea is that out of the original anaclitic cathexis (love for and need for the mother) comes a perception that the father is a rival for the mother's affections, leading to a (largely unconscious) desire to eliminate the father and solely possess the mother. However, the realization that the young boy's rival is stronger and more powerful generates anxiety that is resolved by repudiating (at least at a conscious level) the original anaclitic bond, "rejecting" the values and behaviors of femininity in favor of identifying with the father. This happens primarily through a process of introjection, by which the boy "copies" his father's behaviors and values, making them his own or taking the father as a role model. Whether correct or not, this model is at least easy to understand, unambiguous and without logical contradictions, and explains why boys must experience an extreme, even violent repudiation of their first attachment relationship (the anaclitic cathexis). Of the consequences of this, more in a moment: but note that the resolution of this conflict involves issues of power (or dominance-submission) -- the "vertical" relationship model that, later, comes to characterize most, if not all, male-male interactions throughout life. The young boy takes a one-down position (relinquishing his contest with the father) so that he can symbolically or vicariously share in his victory, and by modeling his behavior, can some day become "like" his father (marry someone who is "like" his mother, and so on). This is all at a purely unconscious level, of course, rendering empirical confirmation of the model difficult if not impossible. But it does, at least, predict the kinds of adult relationship patterns that really do usually occur.
Of the analogous process in girls, most contemporary psychologists would agree that Freud had great difficulty explaining the female experience. At best he was clueless, at worst misogynistic; at any rate, his explanations lack clarity and cohesion in the extreme. The primary problem is to explain, if the infant girl's primary attachment is to her mother, how the father enters the picture at all. To begin to view the mother as a rival for the father's affections (as Freud's model must presume), there must be a way for an attachment to the father to develop, but Freud's view of anaclitic cathexis leaves the father out of the picture entirely. Freud's attempts to explain this are weak at best. But regardless of the utility or ineffectiveness of his process model at this point, the end result is at least clear: girls end up identifying with the same adult with whom they had the original attachment relationship, which means that gender identity for girls involves an extension or elaboration of the anaclitic cathexis, not a rejection or repudiation of it. Thus, the female experience in childhood involves a sense of continuity, while the male experience involves a sense of radical discontinuity. Thus, female-female interactions tend to involve, not "vertical" issues of power, but "horizontal" issues of connectivity or inclusion.
Note that this model explains, not only gender identification as such, but a range of other gender differences, such as:
1. The greater vulnerability of males to psychological dysfunction. Because preschool boys undergo a trauma that preschool girls do not -- they have to give up their "first love" and turn their back on their infant source of security -- all males, Freud would say (using modern language that was not available to him in his day), experience a sort of subclinical post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They have had to survive a psychic shock (discontinuity) that is part of the universal male experience, but not that of the universal female experience. Hence, some stereotypically male characteristics (e.g., unemotionality) parallel, to a lesser degree, the symptoms of true clinical PTSD (e.g., emotional blunting or flattened affect). "Normal male alexithymia" is the term modern clinicians apply to this phenomenon. (Alexithymia means emotional blindness or difficulties in expressing emotionality.) Of course, most men are not clinically alexithymic. But many are subclinically so, at least compared to women -- or so the theory runs, though this remains a hotbed of controversy among modern clinicians.
2. The much greater intolerance in most societies for cross-gender role behavior in males vs. females. A grade school girl that "does boy things" (wears pants, likes sports, plays mostly with boys, acts "tough") gets called a "tomboy", and most parents view this with benign neglect as a normal personality variant and nothing to worry about. But a grade school girl that "does girl things" (wears dresses, likes dolls, plays mostly with girls, acts "tender") would set off alarm bells in the minds of nearly all parents -- "sissy" is by far the kindest term peers would apply. Why? In part, Freud would say, because the process of male gender identification requires a violent repudiation of the female experience (the anaclitic cathexis); the only way to cope with the tremendous loss of the maternal bond is to engage in a process of hostile rejection of it (a defense mechanism). (You may have noticed in your own life that one way to deal with wanting something you shouldn't have is to tell yourself how much you really don't want it. The deeper the conflict, the more violent -- and usually more unconscious -- this mechanism becomes.) Girls, who can develop gender identity though a much calmer, more integrated or assimilative process (building on the foundation of the original anaclitic cathexis), have no such need to repudiate masculinity. Or so the theory runs (there are other explanations for this gender bias in society that are not Freudian in character, of course).
3. Why adolescent boys and adolescent girls use opposite strategies of individuation (which extrapolate into adulthood as well). "Individuation" means the process of becoming separate from one's family of origin, of developing an independent or autonomous sense of self (note the links to Erikson's identity stage). Boys tend to individuate by withdrawing from parents, while girls tend to individuate by escalating interactions (usually conflictual ones) with parents. Why? Freud would say it's because boys learned at an early age to cut the ties, girls to establish and strengthen the ties (which makes it harder for females to individuate, since individuation does mean decathexis). So boys pull back (communicate less), girls intensify (communicate more). Note that this is the same pattern usually seen in adult male-female conflict situations: men cope by "stonewalling", women by "flooding" -- unfortunately, each person's coping strategy is the worst possible stress trigger for the other. "I don't want to talk about this" is the typical male response; "we have to talk about this" is the typical female response.
Psychodynamic personality assessment
The notion of projective measures of personality assessment are derived directly from the psychodynamic school of thought. Projective measures make use self-report, but in an opposite fashion from straightforward self-report inventories. Responses are unstructured and unconstrained, and items are often deliberately ambiguous. For instance, a subject is shown a picture and asked to tell a story about it; or is shown an inkblot and asked to describe what she sees; or is asked to complete an open-ended statement such as:
When I fail at a task, I usually...
Most people are...
Something I am ashamed of in my life is...
The biggest mistake anyone can make is...
Many "psychologically oriented" job interview questions are really disguised projective items. For instance, "Tell me about someone you admire" is really an indirect way of asking about your values, priorities, and self-perceptions (your ideal self).
These tools rely on the fact of projection (a defense mechanism) as noted above. Note also their connection to the notion of free association discussed earlier.
Note: Some material on neo-Freudianism (as covered in text chapter 12) will probably be included as time permits.
Study Guide 3
1. What is the key idea or concept that underlies the psychodynamic approach to personality?
2. What are three levels of consciousness? How do they differ?
3. What are three personality structures? How do they differ? Discuss: primary versus secondary process; the pleasure, reality, and moral principles.
4. What is the origin and significance of anxiety in Freud's view? What does it mean for anxiety to be traumatic? What causes traumatic anxiety? How is it addressed? How is the notion of ego strength related to these concepts?
5. What is meant by an instinct (drive)? What are four elements or components of an instinct? What is instinct displacement? An instinct derivative? What are two general types of instincts?
6. What is a cathexis? An anticathexis? What is a defefnse mechanism, and what are some illustrative types? What is repression and why does it occur? What are some of the costs associated with repression?
7. Discuss the nature and course of psychoanalytic treatment, including a discussion of free association, transference and counter-transference, insight, and catharsis.
8. What are some common criticisms of the Freudian model? What is meant by the notion of a hypothetical construct?
9. What is a projective tool? How do projective instruments differ from conventional self-report inventories?
10. What is a cathexis? Give some examples. How is personality development related to the processes of cathexis and decathexis?
11. What is the anaclitic cathexis, and what is its significance in personality formation? What is its relationship to the Oedipus and Electra complexes?
12. What is identification? Introjection? What roles do these processes play in personality formation?
13. How can these concepts be utilized to explain gender role differences in society? The greater vulnerability of males to psychological dysfunction? The greater intolerance in most societies for cross-gender role behavior in males versus females? The opposing strategies of individuation utilized by males versus females in adolescence and adulthood?