Understanding Personality Theories and Influences

Hello folks, so we are back with human behavior and the topic today is personality. So here's one of those topics in which the word personality means different thing in everyday use. In everyday use we say someone has a personality means that they have positive or admirable qualities. But in terms of psychology, personality simply means some characteristic set of behaviors which are relatively stable in a person across time and across situations and also along dimensions by which we can differentiate people so we want to find characteristic patterns of repetitive behavior which are different between different people which are relatively stable across time so these are key thing that we are talking about. Personality, historically, is influenced by psychodynamic theory, which focused on non-conscious sort of patterns. The idea was that your conscious self-awareness is not relevant. to understanding what habits and structures are present in your makeup. So that's one side of it. Then the behaviorist influence was felt on personality with an emphasis on trying to identify patterns of behavior and an under-emphasis on what's going on mentally inside you, what thoughts and ideas are you having. So in a sense, both of these are... de-emphasizing how it feels consciously to be you in favor of more objective or outsider views of patterns that are there and that's something in a sense that we find continue to find in personality theories major ones today as well although when we look at humanist personality theories we will switch perspective and talk about lived experience of people as being central to understanding personality or defining. So you'll find a lot of variation in the key personality theories. I think part of the reason is that different personality theories start off with different questions and they rely on different methods and therefore they reach very different kinds of conclusions and it's hard to sort of mix and match concepts across different personality theories because they are really different from one another but you can to some extent extend trade theories on to cognitive theories and we look at do exactly that we look at social cognitive learning so starting with the oldest theory of personality which is psychodynamic theory which is linked to the name of Sigmund Freud and it's got huge influence on everyday thinking. So when we think about, when somebody says, you know, I took out my, I actually felt annoyed about that guy but I took it out, it was displaced aggression. That's a psychodynamic theoretical question or, you know, when you say someone's got repressed feelings that's why they are the way that they are again, those are coming from dying. psychodynamic ideas. The word dynamic here refers to the distribution and flow of energy. It doesn't mean dynamic in the sense of aggressive or ambitious. It means flow of energy. And Freudian theory is developed at a time, as I said, when classical physics was in its heyday. And classical physics was all about... how forces are flowing, how they are counterbalanced. They made those steel bridges at that time and they knew how to distribute the weight and the force of a train passing through and they made very stable structures. And Freud's theory, in a sense, extends that sort of idea to human beings. The idea is that there is instinctive energies that are attempting to flow and there are other constraints. society demands of society. And your personality is really a structure to balance these counter-aimed forces. And sometimes you will, when you don't balance them properly, you'll find destructive habits or something like that. So that's the fundamental Freudian idea. We'll go over the history, but most psychodynamic theories these days would not necessarily subscribe to a lot of... Freudian ideas, but they would all agree, one, that there is an unconscious instinctive layer, which is a source of energy in all of us. And we are consciously not aware of how this structure is impacting us. So we are not good observers of ourselves. These all modern psychodynamic theories would also lead to this idea. Second idea that they would all agree with is that the nature of your early relationship with parents, early childhood experiences are very fundamental to how this structure of allowing instinctive energies to flow or diverting them or blocking them, this entire structure is set into place in early childhood and therefore early childhood experiences are very central to the adult personality. So going back to Freud's traditional theory. His ideas were that you have, as I said, three fundamental structures of your personality. The first one he called the id, which is present in birth and it is the sort of the instinctive engine of human beings. It is where all your instinctive energies are stored and they are trying to flow out into behavior. And the id operates according to the pleasure principle. Your instinctive sort of actions are to get immediate pleasure, immediate gratification. If you're hungry, you eat right now. If you're angry, you attack a person immediately. And Freud suggested that we are not aware because this would cause this awareness of the truth of our own. instinctive or animalistic nature would be so disturbing if we're not consciously aware that this level exists in us and so our introspection about ourselves is incomplete misleading and you will actually your nature will reveal itself in disguised forms sometimes in dreams sometimes in a creative process like art sometimes in a myth mistakes like slips of the tongue. So when you say you're a moron, I mean I'm marvelous. That would be an example. And so one of the processes that is a part of the id, that id is capable of symbolization. So id wants immediate gratification. It's locked. It can't do it and it will Soothe itself by imagining carrying out those actions. But even that imagination would be disturbing for you, a conscious part of you. So even those fantasizations appear in a disguised form. So your dreams are your kid's wish fulfillment in a disguised form. Your daydreams are sort of semi-disguised versions. or what your kid really wants. And as I said, it is about instinctive basic behaviors. One form of energy that Freud suggested makes the kid active, more or less active, is the amount of libido, or this would be sexual energy that it has. So Freud initially thought that the primary form of that the id energy of sensations the id wants to feel is pleasure and therefore he suggested libido is the fundamental energy that is that characterizes the id and in all its instinctive energy later i mean freud is working in the 1800s middle to late 1800s early 1900s and then the first world war happens the most civilized peoples of Europe stand, you know, for four or five years 100 meters from each other and kill each other by millions. These are people from all walks of life. So people with no previous apparent desire for killing and murder. So Freud sort of reshakes his ideas as a result of this. And he says, yes, there's libido. We have a built-in instinctive desire for seeking pleasure. But he also says, yes, we have mortido. We have instinctive desires for destruction. controlling and destroying others also. And he gives these, yes, these also, this is a late part of Freud's ideas, but these also are part of our overall instinctive makeup. So that's the id, causes fantasies, wish fulfillments, unbidden thoughts, which gives you, it makes you uncomfortable or makes you embarrassed in some cases. may even when it is blocked and it's diverted into an unusual psychological pathway it may give you physical symptoms so people sometimes report you know paralysis or pain in a part of the body for which there's no physical reason and freudian theorists would say this is because the energy is being blocked and it's and it's paralyzing a body part because of it your second is the ego. This is the conscious part of who you are. This is what you think, what you feel, what you're interested in. And ego's job really is to act as a balancing point between the desires for immediate fulfillment or immediate destruction, instinctive animalistic urges, and your superego, which is your conscience, your internalization of social norms and social rules. So ego is playing a balancing game and ego operates according to the reality principle, unlike the id which is the pleasure principle. Ego operates according to the reality principle. It understands what society needs and what id energies or desires can be allowed to flow and not allowed to flow. So it follows common sense, it follows reason and it is the part that you are conscious of. and it develops a little bit after the kid does. Then you have the superego which is your internalization of morality, of parental authority, of conscience. It's the last to develop and ego is what makes you feel proud and satisfied for holding up certain values of achieving certain things that you value, it also makes you feel intensely guilty or shameful if you fall short of these parental or social moral standards. And, you know, so basically you're in the ego, and you're feeling bad about something. The reason why Freud had these different structures is to think about it. You know, let's say you do something. So, you had to study, you said, go to the mountains, revision, I'm having a party with my friend. So you party with your friends and then you feel bad afterwards. So Freud would say that's really strange. You decided to do something. If you enjoyed it and you chose to do it, why are you feeling bad? So it's these contradictions that we find in ourselves that Freud suggested is because there are these different structures. Now, the goal of the ego is to get the balance right. If the ego sort of, in a sense... allows the id energy to flow too much, you will have people who are selfish, people who are immoral, people who seek out exactly what they want and desire without any thought to impact on others and the like. If you follow the superego too much, you will have a person who is excessively moralistic, rigid, bossy. not able to even allow the slightest harmless pleasure, no indulgence in any of that. And that, again, is a problem, this problem, problemistic sort of tendency to go towards. And ego is trying to find a middle ground here. Freud also suggested that ego has a number of tools available to achieve this balancing. Act. And these we call defense mechanisms or about ego defense mechanisms. Fundamentally, all of these defense mechanisms in one shape or the other distort reality because reality would, to recognize our own id nature would be too disturbing, too upsetting and too guilt provoking from super ego. So ego defense mechanisms sort of protect. ego and get the job done also by distorting reality in particular ways and by doing so protect us against tension, conflict and anxiety and so on. The first of these is, well, there are a number of them, but we go over the major ones. First of these is repression. In repression, ego removes the recognition of certain desires from conscious experience. So you basically lose memories of what you did at a certain point because your behavior was motivated by things that the ego, instincts that the ego would not like to work into. You can do it deliberately, of course, you can just put away an embarrassing moment that you did something, how to remember, try not to recall it. But it happens unconsciously as well. Ego will rearrange consciousness to leave out memories. So think of the times when you were very badly embarrassed. Chances are you can't remember a lot of those things. And Freud would say it's because they've been repressed. Or think of if any of you have written a diary. Read your earlier diaries and I assure you, you'll find a lot of the stuff there cringeworthy. Did I really like that? Was I thinking that? What an idiot. The point is you've forgotten it and Freud would say it's been repressed. Think of a book that you found really moving when you read when you were still young and you read it now and you say that's just embarrassing, right? all be examples of repression, the loss of memories, cutting off of memories because the behaviors in them are influenced by it desires and we are now, we can recognize them if they embarrass us like that. So that's the first one. Second one is projection. In projection, something, an it impulse that you're feeling. towards another person is perceived by you as them feeling that impulse towards you. Feeling is on their side, but you are perceived that they have that feeling towards you. So the obvious examples of something like this would be people who are very aggressive, who have nasty intentions towards others. perceive themselves to be acting in self-defense or in reaction to something. So, you know, you cut someone's finger, why did you cut it? He was looking at me. And his, his, okay, look, look at me, look at me, how does he look at me? Obviously, he wanted to do it, I just did it first. That would be, Freud would say that projection or in sexual intention, right? So, you know, oh, you know, look at the way she's breathing and looking at me. Obviously, she's attracted. That would be a classic example of projection. And the idea here is that acknowledging your feelings would make you guilty, harm your self-image. So what happens when these feelings filter from it into consciousness is that it recognizes, projects them onto the other person. this is what they're feeling towards us and now the behavior becomes more justified because you are responding in some way to someone else's behavior. Again you can take examples of collective politics consists of a lot of this a lot of projection happening. That's the projection idea at the heart of it is what you are feeling towards the other person is consciously perceived as them feeling that same way towards you therefore justifying what you do This should remind you of something that we've studied earlier which are mirror neurons. If you recall, we talked about emotions, we talked about mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are a part of a set of neurons in the temporal lobe that become activated when we carry out a deliberate behavior or when we see someone else carry out a deliberate behavior. In other words, our understanding of other people's motivations for their behavior are very deeply influenced by our own motivations for certain. So mirror neurons would be, in a sense, the kind of mechanism that Freud is suggesting his projection is based on. We understand other people's motives by using our own motives. That would be it. another way of putting the same. Okay, now we move to the third kind of defense mechanism which is displacement. In displacement, an energy that was directed, that wanted certain behavior directed towards some individual is deflected. and A, into a new behavior or a new object. So let's say you have an argument, we're all trapped in our house, you have an argument with your parents and you go up in a huff upstairs and slam your door shut. Now you didn't have an argument with the door, you had the argument with the parents, but the violent action is directed towards the door, not towards the parents. And we can all see why. that it would be invariably guilty and major violation of social norms for you to be physically aggressive towards men but you can do it towards the door. So over here this was a displaced aggression from a person to a animate object but of course it can happen between people as well. So therefore the famous saying that a person had a hard time at work with his boss and he comes home and becomes aggressive or abusive to her. spouse or his children. So that again would be a bad kind of displacement and anger there is unleashed towards another person. But you can have a good displacement as well and the good displacement is called sublimation. Sublimation is when you divert id energies into a socially acceptable or creative behavior or object. So for Freud, most creative work, painting, writing, poetry are all displaced in energy. The desire that you're feeling towards someone is converted perhaps into expression of that desire in poetry or a novel or a painting. And that would be a creative expression and therefore sublimation. Aggressive energy also. When you're playing a competitive team like football, hockey or something like that, Freud would say there's a lot of aggression. And people are playing football and suddenly one of them launches a very cruel challenge. And you get a yellow card. Suddenly Freud would say the real face of what's going on underneath has come out. Aggression instead of being diverted into skillful behavior in testing each other. has come out more directly in the form of directly hitting or kicking someone. And that's why you've broken the rules of the game because the rule was to stick within sublimation. So those would be the kind of things that sublimation would consist of where you are displacing id energies from their intended behavior or target. onto a new behavior or target. If it's still unacceptable, that simple displacement, instead of your boss, you're angry at your children. Or if you create, if you divert them to an action or an object that is socially more acceptable, that would be sublimation, which is a subform, a subtype of displacement. And for Freud, successful ego defense mechanism. Successful ego balancing act involves a lot of sublimation. I mean, primarily can use a lot of sublimation. you've got a very very good uh ego defense mechanism good good form of ego um then you have regression another defense mechanism regression is we'll just go a little bit later and talk about the freudian theories of development personality development but in general regression means that when you're challenged by ego energy you revert to a more an earlier stage of development to become infantile as a response and the purpose of becoming infantile is in a sense you by becoming infant you deny that those instincts exist in you and you that sort of removes the embarrassment or removes the guilt my favorite example of regression Observing regression is, you know, you go to a restaurant or you're walking around somewhere and you see a newly married couple. They come to eat. They have chairs. You sit with them on the table and have a chair. Then you're listening to what's happening. And here's what newly married couples are typically doing or people who just start growing out of it. Saying, would you like to eat that? No, I don't want to. You want to? Go on, go on. You can have some more. Wouldn't you like some sweeties? So where is this childishness coming from? The Freudian explanation here is that these are people who are having to deal with expressing sexual desire, attraction and desire, and that's potentially guilt-provoking in their superego. And the way they respond to it is they withdraw to it. childlike pattern of behavior and of course children don't have sexual desires so children can interact with each other and show affection to each other guilt-free without it being tinged by sexual desires so that would be an example of a regression of people acting childishly to that similarly you know in a lot of professional situations people will start acting childishly And the idea here is again that they are hiding from their aggression and conflict by moving to a childlike state. In more extreme forms, Freudian theory claims, this stresses so much that you don't go to an infantile pattern, a juvenile pattern. You go to an infant pattern. You become babyish, you become helpless, you can't feed or dress yourself anymore. And when this happens, Freud would say this is what happens in what we call a nervous breakdown. A person who can't talk for a couple of days, can't feed themselves, becomes completely wild in terms of how they talk. This is also called a brief psychotic episode. Here, it is called a nervous breakdown. Freudian theory would claim that this is under stress of some kind of ill energy. you have gone beyond the childish stage to an infancy stage and you in effect become a baby. That's an extreme defensive reaction. That would be their expression. But the regression is generally adopting the mannerisms and self-awareness of an earlier stage of life so as to avoid the embarrassment or the guilt of acknowledging adult situations or adult feelings that you find yourself in. Then you have reaction formation. In reaction formation, the defense mechanism of reaction formation, sometimes this can be mixed in with what is another name for it is denial. Denial and reaction formation would be a sort of a more extreme form of denial. In denial, you just don't acknowledge that something exists. So you have, you know, with a... partner who's mistreating you or cheating on you or something like that, just close your eyes over here. Reaction formation, in a sense, related to that, a more extreme version of that, this is when you consciously recognize your feelings as being the opposite of what they actually are. to acknowledge your true feelings would be so embarrassing that you consciously perceive them as the opposite of what they are. So someone, their spouse is misbehaving towards them or being possessive, very possessive, addicted to the editorial. And they say, see, that's proof of how much he loves you. Rather than acknowledge that this is annoying, aggressive, threatening, you are, you know... seeing it as love, which is the opposite of what it is. Again, Freud would suggest the problem here is that to acknowledge the realities would be so disturbing that the opposite is recognized as what it is. I, you know, there's a story I tell about, this was in... Canada and this was a doing some translations the transcripts of a phone tap from drug dealer he was a Punjabi drug dealer and his wife is talking on the phone with a friend and she's saying really such as a tragic line to read immigrated, she has no contact or social support, all she has is this worthless fellow. What can she do except say he loves me and everything, those bad things that happen are not that. In reality he loves me. So that's reaction formation. Typically we have a lot of reaction formation, a lot of misrecognition of emotions. in close relationships of all kinds. So, you know, when you're going out with someone and all your friends are saying, this person's a jerk. And you say, no, he's lovely, he's very nice. And then you break up and three months later, you're saying, my God, what a jerk he was, or she was. So what happened, what Freud would suggest, again, this was you emerge from reaction formation. Similarly, typically, we don't, we can't, we have a lot of reaction formation towards our parents. parents and children very often. They can, they're just, you know, that's the way they are, we love them. If you use reaction formation defense mechanism a lot, what is compromised is your ability to perceive reality. To perceive an emotion as the opposite, you know, this person is doing this means that he loves me. Basically, you have to fundamentally misrecognize reality. So excessive amounts of reaction formation means that they are unable to view reality clearly, which is why, you know, children typically are very poor biographers of their parents because they just don't have that, they have too much reaction formation to have clarity of observation to actually recognize their parents as the person that they actually are. Similarly, for public, widely adored public figures, you know, what was Qadri Agam Mohamuddin Jinnah really like as a person? Can we see? I mean, didn't do so well in his personal relationships is what I'd say, but, you know, our emotions towards the person are designed to be very positive and we're recognizing everything related to that as being very positive. Again, that would be reaction formation found in close relationships, particularly when you don't have options and the stress. which includes all kinds of family relationships, your parents and so on, and also on widely adored public figures, you tend to have reaction formation. Then you have a final one, which is splitting. In splitting, this is meant to be very central to extreme examples of splitting, are said to be at the heart of borderline personality disorder, which we'll talk about perhaps later. In splitting, Freud said it particularly happens if you have an abusive relationship with your parents. Parents have an abusive relationship towards you. So parents and mothers are, you know, they are the source of all comfort and happiness in the world. So you have a lot of positive ideas. And if the same person mistreats you, it becomes very difficult to reconcile these two images. And Freud suggests that the child reacts by splitting up. and having two mental representations of the parent, the good parent and the bad parent. And then they tend to use this extreme split with everybody in their life. So the idea would be, typically most people have kind of a running average of people that they know. He's got these good qualities, these bad qualities. Overall, fairly positive. Or overall, negative. But the point is they're able to integrate these two and act accordingly according to that combination. People who use splitting have two separate images and they switch from one to the other. So for this person, for one month or two months, you know, you're the best person, they're best friend, you're so much fun, you're so exciting to be with. And then without you doing anything, you're a nasty person, I don't like you, don't hang out with me, don't stay away from me. They've gone from one to the other without an explanation on your part. And the idea of Freudianity would be that this person has excessive dependency on... splitting as a defense mechanism and they can't integrate the full reality positive and negative about relationships in their lives and the people in their life so these are the structures in ego superego superego being the last river it is there at birth and you have defense mechanisms by which the ego balances the social conscience and morality of the superego with the instinctive desires of the id does a balancing act by doing displacement or sometimes by just projection or regression or whatever now where do these stages come from um freud's idea of the development of personalities was that personality develops as id energy flows and he suggested that each Stage of life, id energy has a primary focus, primary part of the body in which it attempts to flow. And each stage is a result of the challenge that exists to this id energy flow. We start with the oral stage, a newborn baby's primary source of pleasure and satisfaction the world is feeding. So the oral stage is the child's... the sort of challenge here for the child in terms of what happened in their growth in them is do they get fed as and when they need can they summon the caregiver when they're hungry can they indicate when they are satiated and they're finished or are they fed when they don't want to or overfed or something like that so this balancing act would be the challenge of the oral stage and for Freud this is so the id energies are primarily flowing through the mouth which is a source of pleasure and what the first for the baby this is the first sort of hint of realization that the world is not themselves that the world has its own priorities sometimes it responds to their kind sometimes not sometimes it he tries to feed them, they're not hungry, feed them too much and they're not hungry. And the resolution of the oral stage for Freud is when the child works out a workable pattern of signaling, when they are successfully able to signal when they are hungry, successfully able to signal when they're not, they're not overfed too much, they're not tried to be fed when they aren't hungry, and you work out these workable arrangements. You have a resolution of the oral stage. It energy now moves on because the pleasure is flowing as and when needed and affected through the mouth. Now if this balance isn't achieved, if you are fed when you don't want to or not fed when you want to or not fed when you do want to, when this sort of uneven pattern occurs, then you have what Freud calls oral fixation. For long after the oral stage is supposed to be over, you have an adult whose pleasure focus, whose id energy focus is predominantly the mouth or excessively to an excessive degree the mouth. This is someone with oral fixation. So this would be someone for example who choose pens when they're nervous or smokes or has a tendency to eat when they are nervous. or Freud would say certain kinds of eating disorders also. And these, he says, would all be, would date back to a failure to establish a comfortable pattern in the early stages to do with feeding. So notice, this is the kind of idea that suggested that, that's for psychodynamic theory suggests that, that personality is critically dependent on initial early experiences with your parents. So someone with the oral fixation would, for example, take up a job like teaching, which involves lecturing or smoke or something like that. That's the idea that Freud would suggest. And fixing people's desire to be excessively aggressive by the mouth or bad habits like overeating or smoking would involve in Freudian therapy, going back and trying to look at why this... oral stage was not properly resolved. Next stage for Freud is the inner stage where the child is now a little bit older and being toilet trained and for the first time the child has to learn to withhold its satisfaction and pleasure at the whim of, at the request or desire or order of someone outside themselves. So they now have to manage it. energy flow with regard to outside requirements and needs. Parents saying oh god you've done the potty again, I told you to do it in the bathroom, not here. That's the sort of thing. So they are being made, children are being made to feel guilty about relieving themselves. Boy, feels good to do it right here, right now, right? But their mother is making them feel ashamed they did something bad. punishments and crying. So this for Freud is the first time the id energy has to be restrained due to external requirements and this is the beginning of the development of the ego, the conscious part that knows outside reality and now it needs to manage, try to manage instead of immediate gratification of any need you have. balancing act that is happening. And for Freud, this involves a great deal of emotional upheaval. So you are, when you are toilet trained, you need to feel guilty about having an accident. You are feeling the unrestrained, overwhelming guilt and shame that only a child can feel. That is, it's completely unrestrained, overwhelming. You don't have any justification for this. None of the usual self-serving, self-defense mechanisms are there. So the child just feels miserable during this training. And a successful resolution of this would be the child learning to balance its desires with external demands of the world. And Freud would suggest... or rather he identifies something very interesting which is linked to this. Let's say we talk about another kind of learning. Let's say we talk about human behavior and what you're learning here. My guess is, you know, it's really, I think I'm doing a good job. So it's a good course. You find it really interesting. You learn a lot of things. But if I test you one year on, you would have forgotten a lot of what you learned here, right? But not be particularly guilty about it. Now compare that. Freud said, where most of you were toilet trained like 18, 19 years ago. Suppose you had a forgetting episode. You soiled yourself right now. How much shame and guilt would you be feeling? My guess is a lot more than forgetting psychology. In fact, it would be overwhelming. People are just in tears when something like this happens. Why? Freud would say this, he calls this an inigo. In Ego, this is a little segment of the child's emotions on being toilet trained which are still buried deep down. So you lose track of your toilet training and you feel this actual original shame, guilt, embarrassment that you felt as a child while being toilet trained. That little child's learning signal is still buried deep inside you. And Freud coils these. little pieces of childlike emotions which are related to some early learning. He calls them imigo. The word is from biology. When a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, then some caterpillar cells remain in the butterfly. Those are called imagial cells. They are cells from an earlier structure, bodily structure. So Freud suggests that we also carry within ourselves imagial emotions. leftover emotions from early stage environment. Think about when you lose a parent, right? Very adult, mature people will break down and cry when that happens. And Freud again would say that those are imaginal feelings. It's a little boy inside a person who's lost their mother or father and that's what you've got. Those are the emotions, non-adult, childlike emotions that are in there that you're seeing. So that's the... sort of inner state in that you learn to curve in energy for the first time to try and balance them with social requirements. And if you fail, if you don't do it properly, you will have some kind of a fixation, inner state fixation. People will either be excessively sort of observant of social requirements and suppress their own desires too much. So excessively obsessive, neat, very sort of not allowing themselves or other people around them to gain relief or pleasure. Very authoritative, very rule-based, completely rule-driven, right? Not laid-back, relaxed people at all, but always on edge. So too much imposition of... societal demands and not they're often very poor recognizers of their own deeds and desires and poor at communicating them or you can be the other way around a person who is very messy disorganized uncaring so too much following of one's own pleasure needs and not enough heeding of society's realities and and the result of this will be a weak ego In either of these cases, there will be a weaker goer, a person who is not good at balancing the two very well. If you allow too many identities to flow, your ability to recognize reality is poor. People will think poorly of you. You will say, no, he doesn't think you are a good person. No, you don't think so. You are a very big loser. So that's the kind of misbalance that would occur with an anal fixation. Next stage, most controversial of Freud, was the Oedipal stage or phallic stage, phallus. refers to the male sexual organ. Freud suggested that after the anal stage, child now is paying a lot of attention to the mother because she's a signal for what society wants. And the child at this stage realizes that although she is the center of his universe, the male child we talked about, the mother is the center of his universe, actually in her life, someone comes before the child. So someone is... higher in the order of importance for her compared to him and that's the father and for uh for freud so a child just as all other needs are directed towards the mother their first needs for love and pleasure are also detected towards mothers this is what freudian brain for children's male children sexually desire their mothers or will say it sounds like they say things like i want to grow up and marry you right so that's that's the sort of thing that we're talking about and then realize that oh okay she's actually married already and you know i come second not even first right so now this causes jealousy uh competition and at this stage freud suggests the child sort of thinks says well what makes this person more worth this my mother is the most important person in the world to me i am not the most important person in the world to her what makes that person the most worthy, more worthy of her love than me, right? And at that stage, children decide that they want to internalize the qualities of the father. And this for Freud is the beginning of the super ego, when they start acting like father saying, oh, you shouldn't do that, papa says, that's not what, boys don't do that. That's the kind of internalization of social requirements of authority. of rules which starts and that's the superego layer. And when the child goes into the superego formation, they join the latency stage. And they keep on internalizing, the superego keeps developing until they reach the adult stage where they actually have their own adult sexual relationships with other partners. So this is the stage, oral, anal, oedipal stage. Freud classically... claimed that he had no idea what happened to girls. The Oedipal state that I'm talking about, I've described as son's attraction towards the mother and then competition and jealousy and the decision to internalize, to become the father themselves. What happens with girls, Freud claimed he had no idea, he was reluctant. He thought because they don't have that same kind of competition, in the same way they will have a weaker super-ego. The super-ego will not develop to the same extent. But that was classical Freudian theory. Remember, Freud is very much a part of Victorian age. Now, there are other variations of psychodynamic theory. Perhaps very well known is Carl Jung, who was a disciple of Freud, and a close friend, early developer of psychodynamic theory. theory with Freud, but they have a huge falling out in argument over the nature of the unconscious and Jung's went out and had his own theories, also socioeconomically. So they follow a lot in the psychos, Freudian theories, but there is one fundamental difference. For Jung, a significant part of the id is not unique to individuals, but consists of structures that are unique to himself. collectively shared and triggered also by group presence. So there are kinds of impulses that we feel only when we are members of a group and it's because all members of the group have that shared internal structures and parts of it. And these include sort of images, symbols and memories which have become a part of our internal structure through evolutionary history. Although I don't think Jung talks about evolution. directly but he's saying we share these because of our shared survival challenges as human beings which amounts to the same thing now these memories symbols and images include uh things like um the mandala the circle of life as a feeling of being connected and being one with the universe around you that that that you feel sometimes very often you know in your with music or with Sufi literature or experiences or sometimes when you're traveling through nature you're in the middle of a forest and you're walking and you see a good and suddenly you feel you're at one with the universe Jung would say that certainly that's the mandala and it's comes of being a part of a shared powerful collective group as well that we are one and this moment we are one is Pakistan Pakistani or one is Muslim that again would be that same mandala collective or you can have what he calls the earth mother a internal sort of feelings evoked by certain maternal symbols in the world or features wherever you see them being collective archetypes for Jung suggested these are very strongly evoked in in collective situations. They're very powerful for explaining things like advertising or marketing or political work. So this is way before any of you were born, I suppose. Prime Minister in India was Indira Gandhi and she was considered a nobody and she was Nehru's daughter, but nobody thought she had any political abilities and there were big shots in the Congress and they said, let's have her as a figurehead while we figure out which one of us is. going to rule. They appointed her prime minister. She was a young woman at the time, but she immediately started appearing in Jalsas, walking slowly, dressed in a sari, covering her head as a much older woman. And this formed an immediate, very powerful bond with the electorate. It evoked their devotion, their love, which they would feel towards mother. And Jung would say, by behaving in a particular way, she had successfully tapped into the archetype. the earth mother archetype. It's quite strange when you see it happening in front of your eyes. My grandmother who's already very old at that time once went, my father and I were in a political meeting, Jalsatam, and so she was walking in sort of holding my father's hand and you know This crowd just parted in front of her and spontaneously started shouting, Maaji Zindabad, Maaji Zindabad. So, and there was an intensity of emotion on their faces, which was, you know, very, I still remember it, I was only five, six years at the time. So, very powerful emotions, collective emotions that can be evoked in Trikkiwe. Then there is the archetype. So, all of these... structures and characters are called archetypes in Jungian theory. Another archetype is the hero, our sort of evocation of devotion towards a powerful virile male figure. Again, we can think of lots of... Imran Khan is a classic example, right? Notice when he, in his election, when he... there was a podium, he'd always jump off it. but he's jumping on, he's leaping on and leaping off. He's over 70, I think, pretty much. So why do that? It shows impatience, vigor, energy, bravery, right? And by showing that, he attracts devotion, hero worship from the crowd. It's a part of successful political leadership is evoking collective... emotions towards yourself and Jung would suggest you do that by tapping into one of these collective archetypes. A lot of advertising is based on the same sort of thing. And then there's of course shadow or the predator. We've always also throughout our history humans have been victims of predators also. So we have this archetype of someone unseen who's out to get us which is at the heart of our paranoia. conspiracy theories, these sort of constant searching, feeling, suddenly feeling hot and cold, that someone is looking at me, someone is following me, someone is following me, this person is out to get me, that sensation would be the predator accessing the predator. So these are Jungian ideas, they're very interesting reading, empirical evidence for them is patchy, but certainly I think reading them helps you think creatively about groups and about symbolism and about... I know a lot of advertisers read Jung with great interest because it gives them ideas about what to use and what not to use in terms of their imagery. The modern version, moving along to another variants of psychodynamic theory, the modern version of this is the object relations. In object relations school, you carry on with the idea that we have an id layer which is instinctive, but its fundamental needs are not pleasure-seeking or destruction, not libido or motido, but the need to form relationships with others and also the opposite need to be independent. When you try and form relationships, you are faced with separation and losses. When you try and be independent, you are faced with loneliness and sense of lack of self-worth. So this is sort of the backwards and forwards sort of thing that the sort of counterbalancing desires it has and the ego is trying to adjust these. So, you know, you... find a feel attachment with someone and you reach out to them you form a relationship and then they lose interest in you and you feel injured and hurt and how do you react to that do you seek someone else do you seek um just close off on yourself and say that that's not i'm not going to make that mistake again um what do you do in order to keep that relationship that you found do you pretend to be someone other than they are do you show your true self or your false self So these are the kind of challenges that the object relations school talks about. The name object relations, what it says is, what it refers to is, that these tendencies that we have to seek out, not seek out, be hurt, pretend to be someone else, these are based on, again, our early childhood experiences, where we formed mental images, mental objects of these significant people in our lives, mothers, parents, siblings, and we react. or behave with those internalized figures. So our view of our parents may actually have been fundamentally mistaken. The point is that's what we internalize. In order to maintain a relationship, you just have to swallow your pride and do whatever they want. And we use these templates of relationships with others in our later life. So if you're very wary of going into relationships, you know, the independence versus dependency need you had your fingers burnt where you had a lot of affection towards some unparental figure and they had no time for you or something rejected your affections and or some in some way or didn't find you worthy for some reason and now you are you are very or you're sort of dismissive or you are easily injured or something that that's another idea that the object relations school works with and the idea is we are our personality is a series of behavior patterns that we've fallen into with our mental representations with our templates of what people are like and that's how we behave with other than that personality and again they have certain different views about how things develop so one idea for example is that boys because they're different from their mothers develop self boundaries earlier that this is who i really am is what she wants me to be but it's different so they have a self boundary much earlier girls are because they're female are treated more by their mothers as extensions of themselves and also they have difficulty telling um you know yes because i'm a woman doesn't mean i need to feel like that i actually feel differently so these recognitions come later and therefore their self identity boundaries tend to be later developing and that's one of the sort of ideas or claims of object relations school in terms of the kind of challenges that happen which result in personalities being one way or another way but they carry through the idea that there is a it there's an unconscious part of you which you are not capable of sensing that there is ego defense mechanisms and ego is trying to maintain a balancing act of some sort so those are the psychodynamic theories, if we want to assess them, there's one major, you know, critique of psychodynamic theory, the Freudian theory in particular, classic Freudian theory, that it doesn't have the falsifiability criteria which is a requirement for scientific theories, right? So if Freud said, well, I don't remember having any sexual feelings towards the other, Freud would say, I use the test. Or you say, oh yeah, actually I do remember. Yeah, they're there. So either way, the theory is proved. That's the classic kind of falsifiability problem. Also, Freud, the theories have been criticized because the primary method that Freud used in his case study is a small number of patients from which he extracted a universal theory of human personality. And that's a very problematic empirical technique here. too small a sample. Furthermore, his theory is entirely based on his patients. So he's theorizing from clinical subjects, not well-adjusted people as to what personality is and how it forms. Finally, in terms of critique, Freud based his views on patients'retrospective accounts of what their childhood were like. So Freud is saying initial relations... with the mother is all important. And how does he know about his client's relationship with the mothers? Well, the clients very often in their 30s and 40s are remembering back their childhood. So we know that there's a lot of inaccuracy in retrospective accounts. Anybody who's kept a diary knows that you think there's a great continuity in what you thought and felt 5, 6, 7 years back, but in fact there isn't. You read a very strange person writing this. I have no idea who it is, even though I don't feel a sense of this country. But there's a lot of inaccuracy. We remember things very much filled in with what we think now rather than what originally happened. There's a lot of inaccuracy that happens. Also, Freud was not particularly respectful of even what people remembered. So some of his clients would say that remember they were sexually abused by adults and Freud would sort of bully them into believing that that had just been their imagination. that they had been feeling that sexual desire. So that's a, even with the inaccuracy that goes in retrospective and accounts, there were major issues with the way Freud worked. Finally, there are, you know, there's a lot of illusions of causality when you look at things retrospectively. This happened afterwards, this happened just before, so this must have been caused by that. That's a logical fallacy. But retrospective accounts are very prone to these kinds of theoretical developments. This happened after this, it must have happened because of this. And you find a lot of that in psychodynamic theories as well in terms of the theory of development that I just talked about. In the theory of super ego, where do we come from? What happened before that? So there's those kinds of problems as well. Having said all of that, a number of concepts developed by psychodynamic theory have been validated, empirically supported. So it's well known now that we are, we have unconscious mechanisms of various thoughts that influence our behavior and thinking patterns that we have no introspective awareness of. We can be primed to remember certain words and so on. So similarly, things like displacement of projection. Freud, whatever you think of his theory, was a very, very acute and accurate observer of human nature. So his idea that people, when they claim this person is behaving like this towards me or has this intention towards me, he was acute enough to realize, actually, it's the other way around. You're feeling that way towards them. And very often that's right. And not surprisingly, as I said, we found mechanisms for projection of Bellucci-Ameri. Similarly, displacement. You get angry at one person and you see it in that and then you take it out on an object or another person like that. These are very true, sort of very accurate human observations. Even if you discount the theory that connected for them, I think these observations are certainly very cogent, very accurate, very acute. Okay, so that is psychodynamic theory. The next sort of modern and major theory are the trait based theories and these the key technique associated with them for Freudian theory the key technique was projective tests to give people you look at their dreams and you try and read what it is happening or you give them an obscure image to look at like an inkblot and say what picture do you see here and the idea here is with the obscure side so those are called projective measurement techniques they give people vague or obscure images to describe and you read their id impulses from the descriptions they give in contrast to this trade theories are primarily based on objective tests also called inventories. So you ask a series of people a series of questions about their patterns of thought and behavior. How would you behave in this way? How do you behave in this way? And looking at their answers you identify sort of statistical patterns in the way they think, feel or behave. So the claim of trait theories is that we are not patternless. We are formed of sets of habits, both behavioral and mental habits. And we can study those patterns or crystallizations or structures and come to a measurement of what the person is like and compare them with others. And you do this using objective tests and inventories. Trade theory has a number of people who originated. Very early on you have Allport in the US in the 1920s. And Allport, unlike Freud who looks at patients and case studies, Allport sort of, again, interviews people broadly, but not patients. He's looking at well-adjusted people. He writes letters to people, asking them questions and reads their responses. He looks at literary characters that people have written about. So that's his data collection techniques. And he decides that people have series of patterns to them. And it's the same pattern. It's not that everyone has a different pattern. There are 5-10 patterns. And they are in different permutations and combinations with everyone. He calls some of those patterns secondary traits. So something like the music that you enjoy or the kind of clothes that you wear or the book or the set of boxes that you're really mad about these days. Those would be your secondary traits. and then more long-lasting patterns he calls central traits. So let's say there's a person who comes in, then third, fourth year they're like, no, I'm going to be a PhD, then I'm going to go for this job, this person is showing a variety of secondary traits. But Allport would say they're showing the same central trait which is indecisiveness. First they go from one place to another, then from another to another. So the temporary choices are their secondary traits and the secondary traits are pointing towards the central trait which is the fundamental behavioral characteristic of the gap. So Allport said you have these bunch of... Everybody is identified by a couple of central traits and then they have series of secondary traits which are sub-components of the central traits. Less long-lasting than central traits. Central traits are much more long-lasting. Allport also suggested that some unique people, very unusual people, are marked by what he calls cardinal traits. Cardinal traits, he says, is these are people who have one overall pattern to which all other habits and behaviors they have is subordinate. This person is marked by one overwhelming feature that defines their entire personality. So in literary characters, for example, he talks about Hamlet. He says, you know, Hamlet is intelligent, he's eloquent, he's brave, but at the end of the day, all of those are negated by the fact that he's indecisive. He can't make up his mind. That's for him. Hamlet's cardinal trait is indecisiveness and all other traits are small. He would suggest that Gandhi had the overwhelming cardinal trait of nonviolence and all his other behaviours are variations. So, Alport talked about most people have secondary and central traits, small set of people have cardinal traits that are debatable. Where do they come from? So Allport is certainly perfectly happy with the idea that traits come from patterns of reinforcement. So for one child, one set of behaviors are reinforced and then those behaviors get fixed in and they become a trait. But he says that over time the person becomes capable of reinforcing themselves. So someone who's become an extrovert now doesn't actually need other people to be responding positively. They get their own enjoyment out of it. And so Allport would say that even though traits come from learning theory, patterns of reinforcements, in an adult, they have become, they have achieved functional autonomy. They are now internally complete and you can no longer change a person's personality by reinforcing a different set of behaviors. that internalizes their personality traits. That's classic trait theory. These days, people would be much, as we'll go on to see, are much more focused on traits being significantly biologically determined. They are to a high degree heritable, is what we'll say. But before we get to that, we want to briefly talk about Hans Isink. Isink is sort of a part... contemporary of Freud. They're both based in Vienna. Later on, they both during the Second World War. before the Second World War, they both moved to the UK. Isaac sort of finds Freudian theory absolute nonsense, scientifically. He says scientific theory, psychological theory must be scientific. To be scientific, they must be disprovable, empirical and disprovable. So he invents, in a sense, an objective test or personality inventory. So he doesn't go with the Freudian theory. He says, no. people probably have traits. In other words, people have sets of habits that they have, sets of behaviors that they have, and they have behaviors that they repeat, and those form habits. He further suggests that people's habits are not independent of each other. Habits themselves come in linked patterns, and he calls those linked patterns traits. Finally, he says traits themselves don't occur randomly, they occur in packets themselves and he calls that dimension. So he says, I'm going to ask people a lot of questions over how they behave, feel and think. And if there really are these hierarchies that they have behaviors, they very likely do those behaviors. Statistically, some of behaviors co-occur together, form clumps called habits. some habits who occur together forming some clumps called traits. If this is happening, it should reveal us itself in these statistical interconnections between how they answer multiple sets of questions. So, he says, if I find no such internal correlation between how people answer questions, it's an empirical test. If they don't answer that way, it means there's no such thing as traits. We are just imagining people having traits. because we notice certain behaviors about them and then we say that extrovert is actually on average he says either this is the case we are just imagining traits if traits do exist they should show themselves in consistent statistical patterns in which people answer questions about themselves how they answer questions on inventories so he opens up a personality theory trait based personality theory to disgroup. That's his first scientific step that he says this is what we have to do. Second, he says, okay, by the way, so he does that and he invents basically a statistical technique called factor analysis. So factor analysis is degree to which your one data point is predictive of set of other data points. In other words, how many of your data points are inter correlated. And Isink finds that in fact people show statistical patterns in how, in the way they answer questions about themselves, I would act this way, I would act that way. Their answers show a statistical pattern. Clumps of behaviors tend to co-occur in habits, clumps of habits tend to co-occur as traits, clumps of traits co-occur as damage. And Isink, using his data... ...techniques with this factor analysis techniques identifies what he calls three major dimensions introversion, extroversion, whether you are introverted or extroverted, neuroticism, to what degree are you prone to negativity of feeling and psychoticism. So we'll talk about we'll talk about the big five that he just he identified Isaac identified but there's a second point which he tapped on. He said, okay, so why is this person talkative and friendly? Because they're extroverted, okay? How do we know they're extroverted? Because they're talkative and friendly. Now, he said, this will not do. This is what he calls a circularity of explanation. A extroverted person talks to people who are friendly. A friend talks to people because they're extroverted. And he said, no, you've got to independently demonstrate. there's such a thing as extroversion. So what he does is he identifies people as being extroverted or introverted, neurotic or non-neurotic, and he tests them in a variety of independent ways. And he finds that in fact, he can independently verify that these people are genuinely different from them. There's something almost at the physiological level different in the responses that people are giving. And that shows us that there are different kinds of people. So for example, there's a famous lemon drop test. Put a drop of lemon on the tongue of introverts. They produce a lot more saliva in response. Their bodies are highly reactive. And there's a whole host of other tests which shows independently that these dimensions of personality are seen to form physiologically distinct patterns. And now we, having demonstrated their independence, their existence independently, now we can say this person talks a lot because they're extroverted. We know they're extroverted because of their physiology. not just because they talk a lot, so we're not circularly, we've got independent content. Okay, so let's take a break here and we will continue with the ideas of personality a little bit later. Thanks a lot, take care.

The idea was that your conscious self-awareness is not relevant. to understanding what habits and structures are present in your makeup. So that's one side of it. Then the behaviorist influence was felt on personality with an emphasis on trying to identify patterns of behavior and an under-emphasis on what's going on mentally inside you, what thoughts and ideas are you having.

So in a sense, both of these are... de-emphasizing how it feels consciously to be you in favor of more objective or outsider views of patterns that are there and that's something in a sense that we find continue to find in personality theories major ones today as well although when we look at humanist personality theories we will switch perspective and talk about lived experience of people as being central to understanding personality or defining. So you'll find a lot of variation in the key personality theories. I think part of the reason is that different personality theories start off with different questions and they rely on different methods and therefore they reach very different kinds of conclusions and it's hard to sort of mix and match concepts across different personality theories because they are really different from one another but you can to some extent extend trade theories on to cognitive theories and we look at do exactly that we look at social cognitive learning so starting with the oldest theory of personality which is psychodynamic theory which is linked to the name of Sigmund Freud and it's got huge influence on everyday thinking. So when we think about, when somebody says, you know, I took out my, I actually felt annoyed about that guy but I took it out, it was displaced aggression.

That's a psychodynamic theoretical question or, you know, when you say someone's got repressed feelings that's why they are the way that they are again, those are coming from dying. psychodynamic ideas. The word dynamic here refers to the distribution and flow of energy.

It doesn't mean dynamic in the sense of aggressive or ambitious. It means flow of energy. And Freudian theory is developed at a time, as I said, when classical physics was in its heyday. And classical physics was all about... how forces are flowing, how they are counterbalanced.

They made those steel bridges at that time and they knew how to distribute the weight and the force of a train passing through and they made very stable structures. And Freud's theory, in a sense, extends that sort of idea to human beings. The idea is that there is instinctive energies that are attempting to flow and there are other constraints. society demands of society. And your personality is really a structure to balance these counter-aimed forces.

And sometimes you will, when you don't balance them properly, you'll find destructive habits or something like that. So that's the fundamental Freudian idea. We'll go over the history, but most psychodynamic theories these days would not necessarily subscribe to a lot of...

Freudian ideas, but they would all agree, one, that there is an unconscious instinctive layer, which is a source of energy in all of us. And we are consciously not aware of how this structure is impacting us. So we are not good observers of ourselves.

These all modern psychodynamic theories would also lead to this idea. Second idea that they would all agree with is that the nature of your early relationship with parents, early childhood experiences are very fundamental to how this structure of allowing instinctive energies to flow or diverting them or blocking them, this entire structure is set into place in early childhood and therefore early childhood experiences are very central to the adult personality. So going back to Freud's traditional theory. His ideas were that you have, as I said, three fundamental structures of your personality. The first one he called the id, which is present in birth and it is the sort of the instinctive engine of human beings.

It is where all your instinctive energies are stored and they are trying to flow out into behavior. And the id operates according to the pleasure principle. Your instinctive sort of actions are to get immediate pleasure, immediate gratification.

If you're hungry, you eat right now. If you're angry, you attack a person immediately. And Freud suggested that we are not aware because this would cause this awareness of the truth of our own. instinctive or animalistic nature would be so disturbing if we're not consciously aware that this level exists in us and so our introspection about ourselves is incomplete misleading and you will actually your nature will reveal itself in disguised forms sometimes in dreams sometimes in a creative process like art sometimes in a myth mistakes like slips of the tongue.

So when you say you're a moron, I mean I'm marvelous. That would be an example. And so one of the processes that is a part of the id, that id is capable of symbolization.

So id wants immediate gratification. It's locked. It can't do it and it will Soothe itself by imagining carrying out those actions. But even that imagination would be disturbing for you, a conscious part of you. So even those fantasizations appear in a disguised form.

So your dreams are your kid's wish fulfillment in a disguised form. Your daydreams are sort of semi-disguised versions. or what your kid really wants.

And as I said, it is about instinctive basic behaviors. One form of energy that Freud suggested makes the kid active, more or less active, is the amount of libido, or this would be sexual energy that it has. So Freud initially thought that the primary form of that the id energy of sensations the id wants to feel is pleasure and therefore he suggested libido is the fundamental energy that is that characterizes the id and in all its instinctive energy later i mean freud is working in the 1800s middle to late 1800s early 1900s and then the first world war happens the most civilized peoples of Europe stand, you know, for four or five years 100 meters from each other and kill each other by millions. These are people from all walks of life. So people with no previous apparent desire for killing and murder.

So Freud sort of reshakes his ideas as a result of this. And he says, yes, there's libido. We have a built-in instinctive desire for seeking pleasure. But he also says, yes, we have mortido. We have instinctive desires for destruction.

controlling and destroying others also. And he gives these, yes, these also, this is a late part of Freud's ideas, but these also are part of our overall instinctive makeup. So that's the id, causes fantasies, wish fulfillments, unbidden thoughts, which gives you, it makes you uncomfortable or makes you embarrassed in some cases. may even when it is blocked and it's diverted into an unusual psychological pathway it may give you physical symptoms so people sometimes report you know paralysis or pain in a part of the body for which there's no physical reason and freudian theorists would say this is because the energy is being blocked and it's and it's paralyzing a body part because of it your second is the ego. This is the conscious part of who you are.

This is what you think, what you feel, what you're interested in. And ego's job really is to act as a balancing point between the desires for immediate fulfillment or immediate destruction, instinctive animalistic urges, and your superego, which is your conscience, your internalization of social norms and social rules. So ego is playing a balancing game and ego operates according to the reality principle, unlike the id which is the pleasure principle.

Ego operates according to the reality principle. It understands what society needs and what id energies or desires can be allowed to flow and not allowed to flow. So it follows common sense, it follows reason and it is the part that you are conscious of.

and it develops a little bit after the kid does. Then you have the superego which is your internalization of morality, of parental authority, of conscience. It's the last to develop and ego is what makes you feel proud and satisfied for holding up certain values of achieving certain things that you value, it also makes you feel intensely guilty or shameful if you fall short of these parental or social moral standards. And, you know, so basically you're in the ego, and you're feeling bad about something.

The reason why Freud had these different structures is to think about it. You know, let's say you do something. So, you had to study, you said, go to the mountains, revision, I'm having a party with my friend.

So you party with your friends and then you feel bad afterwards. So Freud would say that's really strange. You decided to do something. If you enjoyed it and you chose to do it, why are you feeling bad? So it's these contradictions that we find in ourselves that Freud suggested is because there are these different structures.

Now, the goal of the ego is to get the balance right. If the ego sort of, in a sense... allows the id energy to flow too much, you will have people who are selfish, people who are immoral, people who seek out exactly what they want and desire without any thought to impact on others and the like.

If you follow the superego too much, you will have a person who is excessively moralistic, rigid, bossy. not able to even allow the slightest harmless pleasure, no indulgence in any of that. And that, again, is a problem, this problem, problemistic sort of tendency to go towards. And ego is trying to find a middle ground here.

Freud also suggested that ego has a number of tools available to achieve this balancing. Act. And these we call defense mechanisms or about ego defense mechanisms. Fundamentally, all of these defense mechanisms in one shape or the other distort reality because reality would, to recognize our own id nature would be too disturbing, too upsetting and too guilt provoking from super ego. So ego defense mechanisms sort of protect.

ego and get the job done also by distorting reality in particular ways and by doing so protect us against tension, conflict and anxiety and so on. The first of these is, well, there are a number of them, but we go over the major ones. First of these is repression.

In repression, ego removes the recognition of certain desires from conscious experience. So you basically lose memories of what you did at a certain point because your behavior was motivated by things that the ego, instincts that the ego would not like to work into. You can do it deliberately, of course, you can just put away an embarrassing moment that you did something, how to remember, try not to recall it.

But it happens unconsciously as well. Ego will rearrange consciousness to leave out memories. So think of the times when you were very badly embarrassed. Chances are you can't remember a lot of those things. And Freud would say it's because they've been repressed.

Or think of if any of you have written a diary. Read your earlier diaries and I assure you, you'll find a lot of the stuff there cringeworthy. Did I really like that? Was I thinking that? What an idiot.

The point is you've forgotten it and Freud would say it's been repressed. Think of a book that you found really moving when you read when you were still young and you read it now and you say that's just embarrassing, right? all be examples of repression, the loss of memories, cutting off of memories because the behaviors in them are influenced by it desires and we are now, we can recognize them if they embarrass us like that. So that's the first one. Second one is projection.

In projection, something, an it impulse that you're feeling. towards another person is perceived by you as them feeling that impulse towards you. Feeling is on their side, but you are perceived that they have that feeling towards you. So the obvious examples of something like this would be people who are very aggressive, who have nasty intentions towards others. perceive themselves to be acting in self-defense or in reaction to something.

So, you know, you cut someone's finger, why did you cut it? He was looking at me. And his, his, okay, look, look at me, look at me, how does he look at me?

Obviously, he wanted to do it, I just did it first. That would be, Freud would say that projection or in sexual intention, right? So, you know, oh, you know, look at the way she's breathing and looking at me. Obviously, she's attracted. That would be a classic example of projection.

And the idea here is that acknowledging your feelings would make you guilty, harm your self-image. So what happens when these feelings filter from it into consciousness is that it recognizes, projects them onto the other person. this is what they're feeling towards us and now the behavior becomes more justified because you are responding in some way to someone else's behavior.

Again you can take examples of collective politics consists of a lot of this a lot of projection happening. That's the projection idea at the heart of it is what you are feeling towards the other person is consciously perceived as them feeling that same way towards you therefore justifying what you do This should remind you of something that we've studied earlier which are mirror neurons. If you recall, we talked about emotions, we talked about mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are a part of a set of neurons in the temporal lobe that become activated when we carry out a deliberate behavior or when we see someone else carry out a deliberate behavior. In other words, our understanding of other people's motivations for their behavior are very deeply influenced by our own motivations for certain.

So mirror neurons would be, in a sense, the kind of mechanism that Freud is suggesting his projection is based on. We understand other people's motives by using our own motives. That would be it. another way of putting the same.

Okay, now we move to the third kind of defense mechanism which is displacement. In displacement, an energy that was directed, that wanted certain behavior directed towards some individual is deflected. and A, into a new behavior or a new object.

So let's say you have an argument, we're all trapped in our house, you have an argument with your parents and you go up in a huff upstairs and slam your door shut. Now you didn't have an argument with the door, you had the argument with the parents, but the violent action is directed towards the door, not towards the parents. And we can all see why. that it would be invariably guilty and major violation of social norms for you to be physically aggressive towards men but you can do it towards the door.

So over here this was a displaced aggression from a person to a animate object but of course it can happen between people as well. So therefore the famous saying that a person had a hard time at work with his boss and he comes home and becomes aggressive or abusive to her. spouse or his children.

So that again would be a bad kind of displacement and anger there is unleashed towards another person. But you can have a good displacement as well and the good displacement is called sublimation. Sublimation is when you divert id energies into a socially acceptable or creative behavior or object. So for Freud, most creative work, painting, writing, poetry are all displaced in energy. The desire that you're feeling towards someone is converted perhaps into expression of that desire in poetry or a novel or a painting.

And that would be a creative expression and therefore sublimation. Aggressive energy also. When you're playing a competitive team like football, hockey or something like that, Freud would say there's a lot of aggression.

And people are playing football and suddenly one of them launches a very cruel challenge. And you get a yellow card. Suddenly Freud would say the real face of what's going on underneath has come out. Aggression instead of being diverted into skillful behavior in testing each other. has come out more directly in the form of directly hitting or kicking someone.

And that's why you've broken the rules of the game because the rule was to stick within sublimation. So those would be the kind of things that sublimation would consist of where you are displacing id energies from their intended behavior or target. onto a new behavior or target.

If it's still unacceptable, that simple displacement, instead of your boss, you're angry at your children. Or if you create, if you divert them to an action or an object that is socially more acceptable, that would be sublimation, which is a subform, a subtype of displacement. And for Freud, successful ego defense mechanism. Successful ego balancing act involves a lot of sublimation. I mean, primarily can use a lot of sublimation.

you've got a very very good uh ego defense mechanism good good form of ego um then you have regression another defense mechanism regression is we'll just go a little bit later and talk about the freudian theories of development personality development but in general regression means that when you're challenged by ego energy you revert to a more an earlier stage of development to become infantile as a response and the purpose of becoming infantile is in a sense you by becoming infant you deny that those instincts exist in you and you that sort of removes the embarrassment or removes the guilt my favorite example of regression Observing regression is, you know, you go to a restaurant or you're walking around somewhere and you see a newly married couple. They come to eat. They have chairs. You sit with them on the table and have a chair.

Then you're listening to what's happening. And here's what newly married couples are typically doing or people who just start growing out of it. Saying, would you like to eat that?

No, I don't want to. You want to? Go on, go on.

You can have some more. Wouldn't you like some sweeties? So where is this childishness coming from?

The Freudian explanation here is that these are people who are having to deal with expressing sexual desire, attraction and desire, and that's potentially guilt-provoking in their superego. And the way they respond to it is they withdraw to it. childlike pattern of behavior and of course children don't have sexual desires so children can interact with each other and show affection to each other guilt-free without it being tinged by sexual desires so that would be an example of a regression of people acting childishly to that similarly you know in a lot of professional situations people will start acting childishly And the idea here is again that they are hiding from their aggression and conflict by moving to a childlike state. In more extreme forms, Freudian theory claims, this stresses so much that you don't go to an infantile pattern, a juvenile pattern.

You go to an infant pattern. You become babyish, you become helpless, you can't feed or dress yourself anymore. And when this happens, Freud would say this is what happens in what we call a nervous breakdown. A person who can't talk for a couple of days, can't feed themselves, becomes completely wild in terms of how they talk. This is also called a brief psychotic episode.

Here, it is called a nervous breakdown. Freudian theory would claim that this is under stress of some kind of ill energy. you have gone beyond the childish stage to an infancy stage and you in effect become a baby. That's an extreme defensive reaction. That would be their expression.

But the regression is generally adopting the mannerisms and self-awareness of an earlier stage of life so as to avoid the embarrassment or the guilt of acknowledging adult situations or adult feelings that you find yourself in. Then you have reaction formation. In reaction formation, the defense mechanism of reaction formation, sometimes this can be mixed in with what is another name for it is denial.

Denial and reaction formation would be a sort of a more extreme form of denial. In denial, you just don't acknowledge that something exists. So you have, you know, with a... partner who's mistreating you or cheating on you or something like that, just close your eyes over here. Reaction formation, in a sense, related to that, a more extreme version of that, this is when you consciously recognize your feelings as being the opposite of what they actually are.

to acknowledge your true feelings would be so embarrassing that you consciously perceive them as the opposite of what they are. So someone, their spouse is misbehaving towards them or being possessive, very possessive, addicted to the editorial. And they say, see, that's proof of how much he loves you.

Rather than acknowledge that this is annoying, aggressive, threatening, you are, you know... seeing it as love, which is the opposite of what it is. Again, Freud would suggest the problem here is that to acknowledge the realities would be so disturbing that the opposite is recognized as what it is. I, you know, there's a story I tell about, this was in...

Canada and this was a doing some translations the transcripts of a phone tap from drug dealer he was a Punjabi drug dealer and his wife is talking on the phone with a friend and she's saying really such as a tragic line to read immigrated, she has no contact or social support, all she has is this worthless fellow. What can she do except say he loves me and everything, those bad things that happen are not that. In reality he loves me.

So that's reaction formation. Typically we have a lot of reaction formation, a lot of misrecognition of emotions. in close relationships of all kinds. So, you know, when you're going out with someone and all your friends are saying, this person's a jerk. And you say, no, he's lovely, he's very nice.

And then you break up and three months later, you're saying, my God, what a jerk he was, or she was. So what happened, what Freud would suggest, again, this was you emerge from reaction formation. Similarly, typically, we don't, we can't, we have a lot of reaction formation towards our parents.

parents and children very often. They can, they're just, you know, that's the way they are, we love them. If you use reaction formation defense mechanism a lot, what is compromised is your ability to perceive reality. To perceive an emotion as the opposite, you know, this person is doing this means that he loves me. Basically, you have to fundamentally misrecognize reality.

So excessive amounts of reaction formation means that they are unable to view reality clearly, which is why, you know, children typically are very poor biographers of their parents because they just don't have that, they have too much reaction formation to have clarity of observation to actually recognize their parents as the person that they actually are. Similarly, for public, widely adored public figures, you know, what was Qadri Agam Mohamuddin Jinnah really like as a person? Can we see?

I mean, didn't do so well in his personal relationships is what I'd say, but, you know, our emotions towards the person are designed to be very positive and we're recognizing everything related to that as being very positive. Again, that would be reaction formation found in close relationships, particularly when you don't have options and the stress. which includes all kinds of family relationships, your parents and so on, and also on widely adored public figures, you tend to have reaction formation. Then you have a final one, which is splitting.

In splitting, this is meant to be very central to extreme examples of splitting, are said to be at the heart of borderline personality disorder, which we'll talk about perhaps later. In splitting, Freud said it particularly happens if you have an abusive relationship with your parents. Parents have an abusive relationship towards you.

So parents and mothers are, you know, they are the source of all comfort and happiness in the world. So you have a lot of positive ideas. And if the same person mistreats you, it becomes very difficult to reconcile these two images.

And Freud suggests that the child reacts by splitting up. and having two mental representations of the parent, the good parent and the bad parent. And then they tend to use this extreme split with everybody in their life. So the idea would be, typically most people have kind of a running average of people that they know. He's got these good qualities, these bad qualities.

Overall, fairly positive. Or overall, negative. But the point is they're able to integrate these two and act accordingly according to that combination.

People who use splitting have two separate images and they switch from one to the other. So for this person, for one month or two months, you know, you're the best person, they're best friend, you're so much fun, you're so exciting to be with. And then without you doing anything, you're a nasty person, I don't like you, don't hang out with me, don't stay away from me. They've gone from one to the other without an explanation on your part. And the idea of Freudianity would be that this person has excessive dependency on...

splitting as a defense mechanism and they can't integrate the full reality positive and negative about relationships in their lives and the people in their life so these are the structures in ego superego superego being the last river it is there at birth and you have defense mechanisms by which the ego balances the social conscience and morality of the superego with the instinctive desires of the id does a balancing act by doing displacement or sometimes by just projection or regression or whatever now where do these stages come from um freud's idea of the development of personalities was that personality develops as id energy flows and he suggested that each Stage of life, id energy has a primary focus, primary part of the body in which it attempts to flow. And each stage is a result of the challenge that exists to this id energy flow. We start with the oral stage, a newborn baby's primary source of pleasure and satisfaction the world is feeding.

So the oral stage is the child's... the sort of challenge here for the child in terms of what happened in their growth in them is do they get fed as and when they need can they summon the caregiver when they're hungry can they indicate when they are satiated and they're finished or are they fed when they don't want to or overfed or something like that so this balancing act would be the challenge of the oral stage and for Freud this is so the id energies are primarily flowing through the mouth which is a source of pleasure and what the first for the baby this is the first sort of hint of realization that the world is not themselves that the world has its own priorities sometimes it responds to their kind sometimes not sometimes it he tries to feed them, they're not hungry, feed them too much and they're not hungry. And the resolution of the oral stage for Freud is when the child works out a workable pattern of signaling, when they are successfully able to signal when they are hungry, successfully able to signal when they're not, they're not overfed too much, they're not tried to be fed when they aren't hungry, and you work out these workable arrangements. You have a resolution of the oral stage.

It energy now moves on because the pleasure is flowing as and when needed and affected through the mouth. Now if this balance isn't achieved, if you are fed when you don't want to or not fed when you want to or not fed when you do want to, when this sort of uneven pattern occurs, then you have what Freud calls oral fixation. For long after the oral stage is supposed to be over, you have an adult whose pleasure focus, whose id energy focus is predominantly the mouth or excessively to an excessive degree the mouth. This is someone with oral fixation. So this would be someone for example who choose pens when they're nervous or smokes or has a tendency to eat when they are nervous.

or Freud would say certain kinds of eating disorders also. And these, he says, would all be, would date back to a failure to establish a comfortable pattern in the early stages to do with feeding. So notice, this is the kind of idea that suggested that, that's for psychodynamic theory suggests that, that personality is critically dependent on initial early experiences with your parents.

So someone with the oral fixation would, for example, take up a job like teaching, which involves lecturing or smoke or something like that. That's the idea that Freud would suggest. And fixing people's desire to be excessively aggressive by the mouth or bad habits like overeating or smoking would involve in Freudian therapy, going back and trying to look at why this...

oral stage was not properly resolved. Next stage for Freud is the inner stage where the child is now a little bit older and being toilet trained and for the first time the child has to learn to withhold its satisfaction and pleasure at the whim of, at the request or desire or order of someone outside themselves. So they now have to manage it. energy flow with regard to outside requirements and needs. Parents saying oh god you've done the potty again, I told you to do it in the bathroom, not here.

That's the sort of thing. So they are being made, children are being made to feel guilty about relieving themselves. Boy, feels good to do it right here, right now, right?

But their mother is making them feel ashamed they did something bad. punishments and crying. So this for Freud is the first time the id energy has to be restrained due to external requirements and this is the beginning of the development of the ego, the conscious part that knows outside reality and now it needs to manage, try to manage instead of immediate gratification of any need you have.

balancing act that is happening. And for Freud, this involves a great deal of emotional upheaval. So you are, when you are toilet trained, you need to feel guilty about having an accident.

You are feeling the unrestrained, overwhelming guilt and shame that only a child can feel. That is, it's completely unrestrained, overwhelming. You don't have any justification for this.

None of the usual self-serving, self-defense mechanisms are there. So the child just feels miserable during this training. And a successful resolution of this would be the child learning to balance its desires with external demands of the world. And Freud would suggest...

or rather he identifies something very interesting which is linked to this. Let's say we talk about another kind of learning. Let's say we talk about human behavior and what you're learning here. My guess is, you know, it's really, I think I'm doing a good job.

So it's a good course. You find it really interesting. You learn a lot of things. But if I test you one year on, you would have forgotten a lot of what you learned here, right?

But not be particularly guilty about it. Now compare that. Freud said, where most of you were toilet trained like 18, 19 years ago. Suppose you had a forgetting episode. You soiled yourself right now.

How much shame and guilt would you be feeling? My guess is a lot more than forgetting psychology. In fact, it would be overwhelming.

People are just in tears when something like this happens. Why? Freud would say this, he calls this an inigo. In Ego, this is a little segment of the child's emotions on being toilet trained which are still buried deep down.

So you lose track of your toilet training and you feel this actual original shame, guilt, embarrassment that you felt as a child while being toilet trained. That little child's learning signal is still buried deep inside you. And Freud coils these.

little pieces of childlike emotions which are related to some early learning. He calls them imigo. The word is from biology.

When a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, then some caterpillar cells remain in the butterfly. Those are called imagial cells. They are cells from an earlier structure, bodily structure. So Freud suggests that we also carry within ourselves imagial emotions. leftover emotions from early stage environment.

Think about when you lose a parent, right? Very adult, mature people will break down and cry when that happens. And Freud again would say that those are imaginal feelings. It's a little boy inside a person who's lost their mother or father and that's what you've got. Those are the emotions, non-adult, childlike emotions that are in there that you're seeing.

So that's the... sort of inner state in that you learn to curve in energy for the first time to try and balance them with social requirements. And if you fail, if you don't do it properly, you will have some kind of a fixation, inner state fixation. People will either be excessively sort of observant of social requirements and suppress their own desires too much.

So excessively obsessive, neat, very sort of not allowing themselves or other people around them to gain relief or pleasure. Very authoritative, very rule-based, completely rule-driven, right? Not laid-back, relaxed people at all, but always on edge.

So too much imposition of... societal demands and not they're often very poor recognizers of their own deeds and desires and poor at communicating them or you can be the other way around a person who is very messy disorganized uncaring so too much following of one's own pleasure needs and not enough heeding of society's realities and and the result of this will be a weak ego In either of these cases, there will be a weaker goer, a person who is not good at balancing the two very well. If you allow too many identities to flow, your ability to recognize reality is poor.

People will think poorly of you. You will say, no, he doesn't think you are a good person. No, you don't think so.

You are a very big loser. So that's the kind of misbalance that would occur with an anal fixation. Next stage, most controversial of Freud, was the Oedipal stage or phallic stage, phallus.

refers to the male sexual organ. Freud suggested that after the anal stage, child now is paying a lot of attention to the mother because she's a signal for what society wants. And the child at this stage realizes that although she is the center of his universe, the male child we talked about, the mother is the center of his universe, actually in her life, someone comes before the child.

So someone is... higher in the order of importance for her compared to him and that's the father and for uh for freud so a child just as all other needs are directed towards the mother their first needs for love and pleasure are also detected towards mothers this is what freudian brain for children's male children sexually desire their mothers or will say it sounds like they say things like i want to grow up and marry you right so that's that's the sort of thing that we're talking about and then realize that oh okay she's actually married already and you know i come second not even first right so now this causes jealousy uh competition and at this stage freud suggests the child sort of thinks says well what makes this person more worth this my mother is the most important person in the world to me i am not the most important person in the world to her what makes that person the most worthy, more worthy of her love than me, right? And at that stage, children decide that they want to internalize the qualities of the father.

And this for Freud is the beginning of the super ego, when they start acting like father saying, oh, you shouldn't do that, papa says, that's not what, boys don't do that. That's the kind of internalization of social requirements of authority. of rules which starts and that's the superego layer.

And when the child goes into the superego formation, they join the latency stage. And they keep on internalizing, the superego keeps developing until they reach the adult stage where they actually have their own adult sexual relationships with other partners. So this is the stage, oral, anal, oedipal stage. Freud classically...

claimed that he had no idea what happened to girls. The Oedipal state that I'm talking about, I've described as son's attraction towards the mother and then competition and jealousy and the decision to internalize, to become the father themselves. What happens with girls, Freud claimed he had no idea, he was reluctant. He thought because they don't have that same kind of competition, in the same way they will have a weaker super-ego.

The super-ego will not develop to the same extent. But that was classical Freudian theory. Remember, Freud is very much a part of Victorian age. Now, there are other variations of psychodynamic theory.

Perhaps very well known is Carl Jung, who was a disciple of Freud, and a close friend, early developer of psychodynamic theory. theory with Freud, but they have a huge falling out in argument over the nature of the unconscious and Jung's went out and had his own theories, also socioeconomically. So they follow a lot in the psychos, Freudian theories, but there is one fundamental difference.

For Jung, a significant part of the id is not unique to individuals, but consists of structures that are unique to himself. collectively shared and triggered also by group presence. So there are kinds of impulses that we feel only when we are members of a group and it's because all members of the group have that shared internal structures and parts of it. And these include sort of images, symbols and memories which have become a part of our internal structure through evolutionary history. Although I don't think Jung talks about evolution.

directly but he's saying we share these because of our shared survival challenges as human beings which amounts to the same thing now these memories symbols and images include uh things like um the mandala the circle of life as a feeling of being connected and being one with the universe around you that that that you feel sometimes very often you know in your with music or with Sufi literature or experiences or sometimes when you're traveling through nature you're in the middle of a forest and you're walking and you see a good and suddenly you feel you're at one with the universe Jung would say that certainly that's the mandala and it's comes of being a part of a shared powerful collective group as well that we are one and this moment we are one is Pakistan Pakistani or one is Muslim that again would be that same mandala collective or you can have what he calls the earth mother a internal sort of feelings evoked by certain maternal symbols in the world or features wherever you see them being collective archetypes for Jung suggested these are very strongly evoked in in collective situations. They're very powerful for explaining things like advertising or marketing or political work. So this is way before any of you were born, I suppose.

Prime Minister in India was Indira Gandhi and she was considered a nobody and she was Nehru's daughter, but nobody thought she had any political abilities and there were big shots in the Congress and they said, let's have her as a figurehead while we figure out which one of us is. going to rule. They appointed her prime minister. She was a young woman at the time, but she immediately started appearing in Jalsas, walking slowly, dressed in a sari, covering her head as a much older woman.

And this formed an immediate, very powerful bond with the electorate. It evoked their devotion, their love, which they would feel towards mother. And Jung would say, by behaving in a particular way, she had successfully tapped into the archetype.

the earth mother archetype. It's quite strange when you see it happening in front of your eyes. My grandmother who's already very old at that time once went, my father and I were in a political meeting, Jalsatam, and so she was walking in sort of holding my father's hand and you know This crowd just parted in front of her and spontaneously started shouting, Maaji Zindabad, Maaji Zindabad. So, and there was an intensity of emotion on their faces, which was, you know, very, I still remember it, I was only five, six years at the time. So, very powerful emotions, collective emotions that can be evoked in Trikkiwe.

Then there is the archetype. So, all of these... structures and characters are called archetypes in Jungian theory.

Another archetype is the hero, our sort of evocation of devotion towards a powerful virile male figure. Again, we can think of lots of... Imran Khan is a classic example, right?

Notice when he, in his election, when he... there was a podium, he'd always jump off it. but he's jumping on, he's leaping on and leaping off. He's over 70, I think, pretty much. So why do that?

It shows impatience, vigor, energy, bravery, right? And by showing that, he attracts devotion, hero worship from the crowd. It's a part of successful political leadership is evoking collective... emotions towards yourself and Jung would suggest you do that by tapping into one of these collective archetypes. A lot of advertising is based on the same sort of thing.

And then there's of course shadow or the predator. We've always also throughout our history humans have been victims of predators also. So we have this archetype of someone unseen who's out to get us which is at the heart of our paranoia. conspiracy theories, these sort of constant searching, feeling, suddenly feeling hot and cold, that someone is looking at me, someone is following me, someone is following me, this person is out to get me, that sensation would be the predator accessing the predator.

So these are Jungian ideas, they're very interesting reading, empirical evidence for them is patchy, but certainly I think reading them helps you think creatively about groups and about symbolism and about... I know a lot of advertisers read Jung with great interest because it gives them ideas about what to use and what not to use in terms of their imagery. The modern version, moving along to another variants of psychodynamic theory, the modern version of this is the object relations.

In object relations school, you carry on with the idea that we have an id layer which is instinctive, but its fundamental needs are not pleasure-seeking or destruction, not libido or motido, but the need to form relationships with others and also the opposite need to be independent. When you try and form relationships, you are faced with separation and losses. When you try and be independent, you are faced with loneliness and sense of lack of self-worth.

So this is sort of the backwards and forwards sort of thing that the sort of counterbalancing desires it has and the ego is trying to adjust these. So, you know, you... find a feel attachment with someone and you reach out to them you form a relationship and then they lose interest in you and you feel injured and hurt and how do you react to that do you seek someone else do you seek um just close off on yourself and say that that's not i'm not going to make that mistake again um what do you do in order to keep that relationship that you found do you pretend to be someone other than they are do you show your true self or your false self So these are the kind of challenges that the object relations school talks about.

The name object relations, what it says is, what it refers to is, that these tendencies that we have to seek out, not seek out, be hurt, pretend to be someone else, these are based on, again, our early childhood experiences, where we formed mental images, mental objects of these significant people in our lives, mothers, parents, siblings, and we react. or behave with those internalized figures. So our view of our parents may actually have been fundamentally mistaken. The point is that's what we internalize. In order to maintain a relationship, you just have to swallow your pride and do whatever they want.

And we use these templates of relationships with others in our later life. So if you're very wary of going into relationships, you know, the independence versus dependency need you had your fingers burnt where you had a lot of affection towards some unparental figure and they had no time for you or something rejected your affections and or some in some way or didn't find you worthy for some reason and now you are you are very or you're sort of dismissive or you are easily injured or something that that's another idea that the object relations school works with and the idea is we are our personality is a series of behavior patterns that we've fallen into with our mental representations with our templates of what people are like and that's how we behave with other than that personality and again they have certain different views about how things develop so one idea for example is that boys because they're different from their mothers develop self boundaries earlier that this is who i really am is what she wants me to be but it's different so they have a self boundary much earlier girls are because they're female are treated more by their mothers as extensions of themselves and also they have difficulty telling um you know yes because i'm a woman doesn't mean i need to feel like that i actually feel differently so these recognitions come later and therefore their self identity boundaries tend to be later developing and that's one of the sort of ideas or claims of object relations school in terms of the kind of challenges that happen which result in personalities being one way or another way but they carry through the idea that there is a it there's an unconscious part of you which you are not capable of sensing that there is ego defense mechanisms and ego is trying to maintain a balancing act of some sort so those are the psychodynamic theories, if we want to assess them, there's one major, you know, critique of psychodynamic theory, the Freudian theory in particular, classic Freudian theory, that it doesn't have the falsifiability criteria which is a requirement for scientific theories, right? So if Freud said, well, I don't remember having any sexual feelings towards the other, Freud would say, I use the test. Or you say, oh yeah, actually I do remember. Yeah, they're there.

So either way, the theory is proved. That's the classic kind of falsifiability problem. Also, Freud, the theories have been criticized because the primary method that Freud used in his case study is a small number of patients from which he extracted a universal theory of human personality.

And that's a very problematic empirical technique here. too small a sample. Furthermore, his theory is entirely based on his patients.

So he's theorizing from clinical subjects, not well-adjusted people as to what personality is and how it forms. Finally, in terms of critique, Freud based his views on patients'retrospective accounts of what their childhood were like. So Freud is saying initial relations...

with the mother is all important. And how does he know about his client's relationship with the mothers? Well, the clients very often in their 30s and 40s are remembering back their childhood.

So we know that there's a lot of inaccuracy in retrospective accounts. Anybody who's kept a diary knows that you think there's a great continuity in what you thought and felt 5, 6, 7 years back, but in fact there isn't. You read a very strange person writing this. I have no idea who it is, even though I don't feel a sense of this country.

But there's a lot of inaccuracy. We remember things very much filled in with what we think now rather than what originally happened. There's a lot of inaccuracy that happens. Also, Freud was not particularly respectful of even what people remembered. So some of his clients would say that remember they were sexually abused by adults and Freud would sort of bully them into believing that that had just been their imagination.

that they had been feeling that sexual desire. So that's a, even with the inaccuracy that goes in retrospective and accounts, there were major issues with the way Freud worked. Finally, there are, you know, there's a lot of illusions of causality when you look at things retrospectively.

This happened afterwards, this happened just before, so this must have been caused by that. That's a logical fallacy. But retrospective accounts are very prone to these kinds of theoretical developments. This happened after this, it must have happened because of this. And you find a lot of that in psychodynamic theories as well in terms of the theory of development that I just talked about.

In the theory of super ego, where do we come from? What happened before that? So there's those kinds of problems as well. Having said all of that, a number of concepts developed by psychodynamic theory have been validated, empirically supported.

So it's well known now that we are, we have unconscious mechanisms of various thoughts that influence our behavior and thinking patterns that we have no introspective awareness of. We can be primed to remember certain words and so on. So similarly, things like displacement of projection.

Freud, whatever you think of his theory, was a very, very acute and accurate observer of human nature. So his idea that people, when they claim this person is behaving like this towards me or has this intention towards me, he was acute enough to realize, actually, it's the other way around. You're feeling that way towards them.

And very often that's right. And not surprisingly, as I said, we found mechanisms for projection of Bellucci-Ameri. Similarly, displacement.

You get angry at one person and you see it in that and then you take it out on an object or another person like that. These are very true, sort of very accurate human observations. Even if you discount the theory that connected for them, I think these observations are certainly very cogent, very accurate, very acute. Okay, so that is psychodynamic theory.

The next sort of modern and major theory are the trait based theories and these the key technique associated with them for Freudian theory the key technique was projective tests to give people you look at their dreams and you try and read what it is happening or you give them an obscure image to look at like an inkblot and say what picture do you see here and the idea here is with the obscure side so those are called projective measurement techniques they give people vague or obscure images to describe and you read their id impulses from the descriptions they give in contrast to this trade theories are primarily based on objective tests also called inventories. So you ask a series of people a series of questions about their patterns of thought and behavior. How would you behave in this way? How do you behave in this way? And looking at their answers you identify sort of statistical patterns in the way they think, feel or behave.

So the claim of trait theories is that we are not patternless. We are formed of sets of habits, both behavioral and mental habits. And we can study those patterns or crystallizations or structures and come to a measurement of what the person is like and compare them with others.

And you do this using objective tests and inventories. Trade theory has a number of people who originated. Very early on you have Allport in the US in the 1920s.

And Allport, unlike Freud who looks at patients and case studies, Allport sort of, again, interviews people broadly, but not patients. He's looking at well-adjusted people. He writes letters to people, asking them questions and reads their responses. He looks at literary characters that people have written about. So that's his data collection techniques.

And he decides that people have series of patterns to them. And it's the same pattern. It's not that everyone has a different pattern. There are 5-10 patterns.

And they are in different permutations and combinations with everyone. He calls some of those patterns secondary traits. So something like the music that you enjoy or the kind of clothes that you wear or the book or the set of boxes that you're really mad about these days. Those would be your secondary traits. and then more long-lasting patterns he calls central traits.

So let's say there's a person who comes in, then third, fourth year they're like, no, I'm going to be a PhD, then I'm going to go for this job, this person is showing a variety of secondary traits. But Allport would say they're showing the same central trait which is indecisiveness. First they go from one place to another, then from another to another.

So the temporary choices are their secondary traits and the secondary traits are pointing towards the central trait which is the fundamental behavioral characteristic of the gap. So Allport said you have these bunch of... Everybody is identified by a couple of central traits and then they have series of secondary traits which are sub-components of the central traits.

Less long-lasting than central traits. Central traits are much more long-lasting. Allport also suggested that some unique people, very unusual people, are marked by what he calls cardinal traits. Cardinal traits, he says, is these are people who have one overall pattern to which all other habits and behaviors they have is subordinate. This person is marked by one overwhelming feature that defines their entire personality.

So in literary characters, for example, he talks about Hamlet. He says, you know, Hamlet is intelligent, he's eloquent, he's brave, but at the end of the day, all of those are negated by the fact that he's indecisive. He can't make up his mind. That's for him.

Hamlet's cardinal trait is indecisiveness and all other traits are small. He would suggest that Gandhi had the overwhelming cardinal trait of nonviolence and all his other behaviours are variations. So, Alport talked about most people have secondary and central traits, small set of people have cardinal traits that are debatable.

Where do they come from? So Allport is certainly perfectly happy with the idea that traits come from patterns of reinforcement. So for one child, one set of behaviors are reinforced and then those behaviors get fixed in and they become a trait. But he says that over time the person becomes capable of reinforcing themselves.

So someone who's become an extrovert now doesn't actually need other people to be responding positively. They get their own enjoyment out of it. And so Allport would say that even though traits come from learning theory, patterns of reinforcements, in an adult, they have become, they have achieved functional autonomy.

They are now internally complete and you can no longer change a person's personality by reinforcing a different set of behaviors. that internalizes their personality traits. That's classic trait theory. These days, people would be much, as we'll go on to see, are much more focused on traits being significantly biologically determined.

They are to a high degree heritable, is what we'll say. But before we get to that, we want to briefly talk about Hans Isink. Isink is sort of a part... contemporary of Freud. They're both based in Vienna.

Later on, they both during the Second World War. before the Second World War, they both moved to the UK. Isaac sort of finds Freudian theory absolute nonsense, scientifically. He says scientific theory, psychological theory must be scientific.

To be scientific, they must be disprovable, empirical and disprovable. So he invents, in a sense, an objective test or personality inventory. So he doesn't go with the Freudian theory. He says, no. people probably have traits. In other words, people have sets of habits that they have, sets of behaviors that they have, and they have behaviors that they repeat, and those form habits.

He further suggests that people's habits are not independent of each other. Habits themselves come in linked patterns, and he calls those linked patterns traits. Finally, he says traits themselves don't occur randomly, they occur in packets themselves and he calls that dimension. So he says, I'm going to ask people a lot of questions over how they behave, feel and think.

And if there really are these hierarchies that they have behaviors, they very likely do those behaviors. Statistically, some of behaviors co-occur together, form clumps called habits. some habits who occur together forming some clumps called traits. If this is happening, it should reveal us itself in these statistical interconnections between how they answer multiple sets of questions.

So, he says, if I find no such internal correlation between how people answer questions, it's an empirical test. If they don't answer that way, it means there's no such thing as traits. We are just imagining people having traits.

because we notice certain behaviors about them and then we say that extrovert is actually on average he says either this is the case we are just imagining traits if traits do exist they should show themselves in consistent statistical patterns in which people answer questions about themselves how they answer questions on inventories so he opens up a personality theory trait based personality theory to disgroup. That's his first scientific step that he says this is what we have to do. Second, he says, okay, by the way, so he does that and he invents basically a statistical technique called factor analysis.

So factor analysis is degree to which your one data point is predictive of set of other data points. In other words, how many of your data points are inter correlated. And Isink finds that in fact people show statistical patterns in how, in the way they answer questions about themselves, I would act this way, I would act that way.

Their answers show a statistical pattern. Clumps of behaviors tend to co-occur in habits, clumps of habits tend to co-occur as traits, clumps of traits co-occur as damage. And Isink, using his data... ...techniques with this factor analysis techniques identifies what he calls three major dimensions introversion, extroversion, whether you are introverted or extroverted, neuroticism, to what degree are you prone to negativity of feeling and psychoticism.

So we'll talk about we'll talk about the big five that he just he identified Isaac identified but there's a second point which he tapped on. He said, okay, so why is this person talkative and friendly? Because they're extroverted, okay? How do we know they're extroverted? Because they're talkative and friendly.

Now, he said, this will not do. This is what he calls a circularity of explanation. A extroverted person talks to people who are friendly. A friend talks to people because they're extroverted. And he said, no, you've got to independently demonstrate.

there's such a thing as extroversion. So what he does is he identifies people as being extroverted or introverted, neurotic or non-neurotic, and he tests them in a variety of independent ways. And he finds that in fact, he can independently verify that these people are genuinely different from them. There's something almost at the physiological level different in the responses that people are giving.

And that shows us that there are different kinds of people. So for example, there's a famous lemon drop test. Put a drop of lemon on the tongue of introverts.

They produce a lot more saliva in response. Their bodies are highly reactive. And there's a whole host of other tests which shows independently that these dimensions of personality are seen to form physiologically distinct patterns. And now we, having demonstrated their independence, their existence independently, now we can say this person talks a lot because they're extroverted.

We know they're extroverted because of their physiology. not just because they talk a lot, so we're not circularly, we've got independent content. Okay, so let's take a break here and we will continue with the ideas of personality a little bit later.

Thanks a lot, take care.

Transcript for:Understanding Personality Theories and Influences

Transcript for:
Understanding Personality Theories and Influences