Transcript for:
Personality Theory Lecture

okay so today we're going to talk about personality theory in the last section before the final so with personality theory each personality theory is based on a school of thought and remember when we beginning a master we talked about the school of thought there were psychodynamic and humanistic and behaviorism he also talked about functionalism and structuralism which we don't talk about today usually that's not part of the school of thought when it comes to personality theory so we're going to start with the psychodynamic theorists and so the psychodynamic school of thought and the most common or popular person most well-known person under the psychodynamic theory is Freud and Freud's theory is called psychoanalytic so under psychodynamic we have psychoanalytic and the theory or the author of that is Freud okay so when we talk about personnel line to talk about your personality is basically a unique but stable way that you interact that you think and act and feel okay so it's unique to you and that everybody's personality is a little bit different but it's relatively stable most of our personalities especially when we get into adulthood don't change much they can't change we're not born with our personality but for the most part they're pretty stable and consistent so if you're normally a calm person then whatever the situation may bring you're going to relatively be a calm person it doesn't mean a hundred percent of the time but in most situations if that's part of your personality you know part of the characteristic of your personality because we have different characteristics of our personality calmness may be another reliable responsible these are like characteristics of who we are and again they're relatively stable chef's of dr. Freud when we talk about Freud in his psychoanalytic theory he says that there are three parts of the mind and these three parts of the mind are like an iceberg so we have the tip of the iceberg is above the surface above the water coin and the larger part of the iceberg is below the surface and so if it's below the surface it's that part the bigger part is the part that kind of directs the iceberg tells the X you know the iceberg where it's gonna go what's gonna happen it's all controlled by the part below the surface and that's how fluid saw our mind he saw above the surface that the top part above the surface is called your conscious awareness your conscious awareness is that what you're thinking about right now anything that's on your mind right now your thoughts your feelings no matter what it is if it's currently in your mind then it's your conscious awareness remember when we talked about memory we talked about working memory and your working memory is your conscious awareness so anything that you're working on now your thoughts your feelings everything is in your conscious awareness now just below the surface is called the pre conscious the preconscious and the reason it's below the surface is because it's part of our memory the pre conscious memory is the part of the memory that we can get to it's the part of the memory that you can pull into your conscious awareness so you can take it from the preconscious just below the surface up into your conscious awareness so if I asked you what you had for dinner last night and you could remember then you're taking that information from your preconscious and putting it into your conscious awareness the larger part of the iceberg down here is your unconscious and the unconscious is the part of the iceberg again that controls us but the part that we can't get you it's the part of our memory that we are unaware of it's there for a meaning that everything was in our memory everything you can remember everything was in there we just couldn't get to it because it puts in your unconscious you can't get to it again it's the larger part but and it's so it's controlling us it's having a great effect on us excuse me according to Freud but we can't get to it and is where later on you know next week or the week after when we talk about things that cause abnormal behavior and the therapy techniques that for use to bring the unconsciousness up to our conscious awareness because inner unconscious are often things that make us so uncomfortable that we don't like that we don't want to remember we don't want to deal with issues we don't want to deal with it's all down here in our unconscious mind and so we when we learn when we talk about therapy at the end of the semester we'll talk about how to bring that to the surface so that we can deal with it and cope with it now Torrey believe that that as far as our personality goes there are three structures of the personality the many different parts of the personality that affect who we are and how we present ourselves to the world and the different characteristics that we have the first part is the it'd the it'd it's just ID if you can't see that on the video the it is down here the it is what we'll work with and like our instincts - our instincts that were born with Saxon aggression or what he called libido and aggression we're born with and they're part of the it and the it uses these instincts to its advantage because the the the whole idea of the end is it works on what we call the pleasure principle I want pleasure I'm seeking pleasure I want it now I'm gonna do whatever it takes to get pleasure and if I have to use aggression then that's what I'm gonna do because the it is very self-centered very narcissistic it's all about the everything about the end is the only important thing out there on the planet it's just me me me me me me me and maybe you know people don't like that that are just what we did they're not always that easy to get along with then during childhood the ego develops and the ego is both in our conscious awareness it works above the surface and below the surface the ego works on its egao or if you can't see that the ego works on the ring the principal the ego is all about how to deal with society what I need to do what am i dealing with what's the reality and the it work alignment but the ego develops during childhood and the part of the egos job is to control the end because if we're just want to begin we're kind of out of control and we need you know we need some reality testing and that's the ego job is to give the it some reality testing and that's why it works on the reality principle the third part of the personality the first structure is called the super ego the super-ego is also in our conscious awareness and our unconscious awareness the super-ego develops in childhood the super-ego is your morals your values the super-ego is that my voice inside your head that says don't do that don't do that you'll get in trouble don't do that and it usually sounds like your parents telling you don't do that you'll get in trouble it's a breaking the rules don't break the rules don't break the rules so the super-ego is a very controlled and all about black and white right now I love the worlds no matter what follow the rules follow the little swallowing rules that's what the super-ego is all about now if you're just one big super-ego then you're gonna be a little uptight maybe a little controlling a little obsessive-compulsive and that might not be such a good way to be either so the other part of the egos job is to control or get the super-ego to lighten up a little bit okay so the ego works as kind of a mediator between the ED and the super Rika because it's working with reality it's working with what's the reality of life what am i dealing with what's in my conscious awareness the end once pleasure wants it now the super-ego wants control control control these two live in the city who are kind of like fighting against each other that you don't usually go together so the egos job is to mediate the truth to get them to come to an agreement to get us to be calm and to be able to survive if we cannot if the ego cannot find a good compromise between the super-ego and the head then we become neurotic and buy neurotic treatment you know have a psychological problem or psychological disorder he talked about neurosis and psychosis when the next section William - abnormal psych we'll talk a little bit more about this but psychosis is out of touch with reality and neurotic is any other abnormal behavior so he if we don't have a good ego strength and we talk about this in psychology somebody has a good ego strength can mediate between the N and the super-ego if we don't have a good ego strength then the secret or the it kind of takes over we become neurotic we have some sort of psychological disorder and again we have this anxiety down here in our unconscious mind things that were born with some aggression that causes us some anxiety as we grow up because you know society doesn't like our aggression and tries to control our aggression and then anything that happens to us that gets pushed down here in our unconscious mind can cause us some anxiety as well things that we don't like that make us feel uncomfortable we push down in our unconscious mind so we don't have to deal with it and so the ego to kind of deal with all the anxiety that can be down in here it can be the it can be causing the anxiety the super-ego we can be can be hot feeling because you know control control oh the rules all uptight about that so the ego uses what are called defense mechanisms defense mechanisms are used to kind of help the ego control the it in the super-ego to deal with them so that we don't become neurotic and to reduce anxiety there's several different defense mechanisms they again they prevent us from having the threatening thoughts get into our conscious awareness so again the egos job is to control to protect our conscious awareness and uses defense mechanisms to protect us our conscious awareness from anything that may be causing anxiety to keep these things out of our conscious awareness so there's a pickup 19 defense mechanisms we're just gonna talk about a few of them repression is one repression is just I can't remember didn't happen don't know anything about it we just kind of push it down and push it down children use this a lot when something is uncomfortable for them they just push it down in their unconscious awareness and so like when I've done therapy with children and they will do something or something will happen and they'll say you know tell me about that I don't know I don't remember I don't know I don't know because if it makes them feel uncomfortable or anxious which is the things I have to bring up in therapy they want to push it down in their unconscious mind they don't want to be aware but it makes them feel uncomfortable so they just repress it rationalization is a common one that it's used at extension rationalization alot it rationalize their behavior I'm not an alcoholic I don't drink before 5 o'clock I'm not an alcoholic I get up and go to work every day so how can I be an alcoholic so they just rationalize their behavior so then for them it just doesn't exist I'm not having a problem with alcohol I guess I drink every day and yes I start drinking from you know the time I you know get up in the morning but I go to work every day and make you my job so I'm not an alcoholic that's rationalization you know justifying our behavior reasoning for what we do let's see displacement this is when we are angry or except with one thing but we can't be angry upset with that so we just place it and put it somewhere else so you have a fight with your spouse and you kick the dog never stops the fight with your employer you come home and yell at your spouse you just place it you put it somewhere else we do this with grief remember we talked about grief in the last section we talked about developmental psych and when we get angry we're not supposed to be angry at the person that died although grief always causes anger but and we're really angry at a person who died for leaving us but we displace it we we put it somewhere else we to our loved ones we give it to the nurses or the doctors and that's displacement one of my favorite defense mechanisms is called sublimation sublimation is when we take something we want to do that's completely inappropriate and we turn it into something that is appropriate they would just like to people up and you know that would bring them a lot of pleasure they're in it satisfy their aggression anyway we can't do that some pretty girls really going crazy what are we gonna do we can't just cut people up so the ego makes it compromise and says okay we're going to become a surgeon you surgeons get to cut people up yes our surgeons socially acceptable so is that going to make this super-ego satisfied yes and is the it going to be satisfying because it gets to cut people up yes though everybody's happy the ego did a good job okay so that would be one of the defense mechanisms it would use called sublimation okay now how does our personality develop remember Freud believed that our personality developed in childhood that yes were born with the in but the ego and super-ego have to develop during childhood and so he came up with developmental stages and these developmental stages are called psychosexual stages the psychosexual stages of development and we talked about developmental sites in the previous section and we talked about Erikson stages of development his four psychosocial stages Piaget stages were the cognitive stages of development and for in stages are called psychosexual stages of development because for his stage at each stage he believed the libido which were born with one of the instincts that were born with needs to be satisfied in some way and we look to different ways to satisfy the libido and in each stage has its own way of trying to satisfy the libido and that that's what you know helps against about our personality going through each of these stages now the libido can get satisfied in a healthy way and we move on to the next stage or the libido can get satisfied in an unhealthy way and what Freud called fixation fixation is when you kind of are stuck at a stage you move on to the next stage he said you would you would go and you would move on but you would carry with you to some fixation from the previous stage if you were stuck there and you would be stuck there because you would get either too much or too little gratification and so you're still trying to satisfy that libido from that earlier stage it'll make a little more sense than I did to the stages okay so we're gonna go to the first stage the first stage is called the oral stage the oral stage starts at zero to about 18 months so about one and a half years it is the world stage and the oral stage the what the child is trying to do what they're how they're trying to satisfy their the Vito is to suck on everything so they can get satisfied Vito gets satisfied by sucking on everything so that's why it calls into oral stage and this is why you know when you're when you see a newborn baby they put everything in their mouth everything you hand them they put in their mouth they put their thumb in their mouth to put a little fist in their mouth everything goes in the mouth they want to suck on everything and Floyd said it's because they're trying to satisfy their libido with this oral oral everything oral now if you get fixated in the oral stage according to Freud you either got too much or too little gratification you move on to the second stage but you carry with you the characteristics of the oral stage so if somebody who let's say bites their fingernails you would say is orally fixated you're still putting your your hands in your mouth somebody who over eats they're still trying to gratify that oral you put everything in their mouth somebody who smokes somebody who drinks who alcoholic he would say is orally fixated you know they're still sucking on the bottle still trying to get that gratification and that's what be an example of oral fixation again you move on to the next stage but you're still throughout your life have this characteristic part of your personality of being orally fixated okay so that's the oral stage the second then second phase is called the anal and the anal phase is from about again one and a half to about I think it's just to about three to half years old the anal stage has to do with getting the libido satisfied why you know what happens during this stage is potty training most children you start potty training some about eighteen months to two years and so forth why he said that the way that the child is satisfying their libido is learning to control their bodily functions so that's what play training is all about right when you're potty training a child or when you guys were all being potty trained the goal of potty training was to teach you how to lower your bodily functions the idea was that you would you know you have to go pee when you're little you just go in your diaper don't look no beginner but when you're trying to potty train it's a matter of you feel the urge to go to the bathroom but you're taught to hold it hold it hold that bodily function in till you get to the toilet the proper place and then you can release it so it's all about controlling our bodily functions and that's what the anal stage is about now if you get fixated here then it's going to be a problem and maybe you've heard of a personality characteristic that somebody is anal this comes right from Freud stuff when you think of somebody who's anal you think of the personality clips or a stick that they're controlling they're uptight they're all control control control that comes right out of Ford stage that they were fixated in the anal stage still trying to control but not only now getting their gratification from just controlling their body but controlling all of their life and that would be a personality characteristic so you can see how the anal stage is affected the next stage is the phallic stage the phallic stage happens from about age four and so about five or six years old is when the phallic say she'll think of preschoolers okay think of preschoolers at what age that they are and we believed that at this stage what happens is the phallic stage you know these schoolers that they he talked mostly about bullfights at this age when he came up with his theory and he was talking about how they fall in love with their mothers little boys fall in love with their mothers and they want to possess their mothers in all ways they want to replace their fathers get rid of their fathers and become the lover and all things to the mother like the father is so this is what little boys are you know they want to have sex with their mothers they want to again get rid of dad he's a problem and so he calls this the Oedipus complex it's not a stage the Oedipus complex remember who Oedipus why does anybody take a philosophy class and this was the guy who killed his father and married his mother and that's why Freud calls this the Oedipus complex and it's the correct spelling is OAD IP us okay oh you oh oh Edie IP us Oedipus but it's pronounced Oedipus so this little boy wants to is falling in love with mother and he wants to get rid of dad but then he looks at dad thinks okay boy God is bigger than me my dad is stronger than me and dad punishes me if dad knew what I wanted to do to mom dad what caught my penis and that's very frightening for the little boy who thought that dad would do this and me and according to for he believed that that's what little boys thought happened to mom's mom didn't have a penis somebody cut it off because Freud believed that oh you know that all about penis envy and you can really you know get into depth we're not gonna go into that mentioned death with Corey but that's what he thought so the little boy thinks okay I don't want dad to cut off my penis I don't want him to be mad about about what I'm thinking about mom so mom really likes that mom likes that a lot um so if I become life died then maybe mom will like me and love me in the same way that she loves that so then you see the little boy switching over and identifying Rico's identification with the father and then he starts falling the father around doing all the things the father does taking on the father's and morals and values and this is where the super-ego comes in and that's why your super-ego the little voice inside your head that tell you don't do that or get trouble don't you that's against the rules sounds like your parents because this is where it comes from this identification with the same-sex parent taking on all of their belief systems and morals their values okay now he says that little boys and little girls go through this the same he called it the Oedipus complex for both boys and girls so he said that little girls do the same thing they fall in love with their fathers they want to replace and get rid of their mom but they become afraid of mom so then they start identifying with mom so then the dad would like that in the same way dad likes mom and again this is the development all of these about it and you know stop doing that but for when he was doing you know treatment for women he would get these women that would come in that he would call hysterical and so in his treatment of them and we'll get when we get to treatment in a in a few more lectures he news hypnosis a lot because he believed hypnosis could bring the unconscious to the conscious awareness and that we needed to deal with all this stuff down here which was causing the abnormal behavior for these women that what he called hysteria that was the diagnosis that he gave them so what he did he would hypnotize them to bring to the surface and what he went hypnotized them they talked about being molested by their fathers yeah Freud you know his ideas were pretty much really outside the box he's the first one to come up with unconscious mind so people are saying okay so you're talking about unconscious mind something I'm not aware of your sex and aggression down there it's controlling my behavior I'm not aware of it people were already a little leery of his theories now we want to tell me that man rum two men are molesting their daughters and Freud had a daughter and he didn't feel the urge to molest her so instead what he thought is that these women weren't really molested it was their unconscious desire their in their libido down here that wanted black it didn't actually happen but that that's what they wanted but it created anxiety for them so they kept it down here in the unconscious mind and then through hypnosis it came to the surface we now know they're probably those women really were molested but you know for you to you know want to believe that and people weren't okay with that so that's how we came up with this whole idea the Oedipus complex in the phallic stage so I know it sounds a little odd but if you think about it do we see little boys and little girls around four years old falling in love with their currents yeah they say when I grow up I want to marry mommy when I grow up I want to marry daddy and I just love me so much I'm going to live here with you forever and you know couple on so it's old you know and then do we see the children changing and start identifying with the same-sex parent following them around wanting to do everything they do wanting to please them believing like they do their morals and values and their can the development of the super-ego so we see some of troy'd stuff occurring we don't believe that little boys want to have sex with their mothers and we don't believe that little girls want to have sex with their fathers before we did and it is a big basis of his theory but you know so this is how it kind of developed and got to this point now the next phase is latency the latency phase is from about age 6 to about age 10 or 11 so when you think of the latency stage think of elementary school-age children these kids are you know in elementary school now Freud believed that with all the upheaval with the Oedipus complex in the phallic stage that the libido goes dormant so that kids during this age they're just working on their identification they're working on continuing to develop their super-ego so all the sexual stuff little bit of stuff goes dormant this is why in elementary school you see little girls playing with little girls little boys playing little boys you know the other opposite sex has cookies and I want to be around them you know stay away from them because he says all that that is is done it's dormant you know it doesn't it doesn't count anymore and the genital stage is during adolescence the genital stage is when our libido or normal natural healthy libido comes back to the surface we are attracted to the opposite sex to age-appropriate people and that this is what happens during the genital stage and for Floyd this is the young he says that our personality is developed in childhood that for the most part you know the ego and super-ego are develop you know usually by the time you're five or six years old and so that that the big part of our personality is developed very early on and then that's what stays with us now again keep out through therapy we could change it so that if we get fixated in any of these stages we could go through therapy you know get it you know this unconscious stuck to the surface and then fix that and we'll talk more about that again when we get to the section on next week or the next time we'll do abnormal and then after that we'll do therapy on how to fix any problems that may occur a possum behavior so this is basically Freud's theory of personality how a personality is formed and developed and the different parts and the different structures of it okay one of her eight students was young young was a student of Freud so he again is under the psychodynamic theory it's Ju ng and Jung thought therefore we put too much emphasis on sexuality now he believed in the unconscious mind and he believed that the big part of our unconscious mind was what controlled our behavior and caused us to do and behave in certain ways but one of the interesting parts about Jung he was one of the first people to kind of combine religion and psychology together so if you if you're looking for that kind of theory and that kind of thought and then you want to look up Jung's theory now again Jung believed that your unconscious mind is a big part of it but he didn't believe in all the sexual stuff that Freud did but what he did believe when he added to the unconscious was what he called the collective unconscious the collective unconscious Jung believed was a collection of everything that's happened since the time man began so that we carry around in our unconscious mind all of our ancestors everything that's so back to caveman time all of that is there in our unconscious mind and that we have these it's your unconscious mind is shared by all people so we all have it because we all go back to you know the beginning of time the beginning of man and in the unconscious mind are what he called archetypes an archetype is symbolism of different things like one of the archetypes he has is called the the shadow is the dark side of human it's the side of us that is kind of you know has those negative thoughts that like we want to hurt other people most people have that thought you know I usually act on the thought thank goodness but we have that thought and that would be part of our archetype that's called the shadow what's Jung Yong Yong is probably the best known for is his idea about introvert and extrovert he believed that a lot of our archetypes were on a continuum so you have extrovert and introvert extrovert is somebody who needs a lot of attention and they need a lot of people around them they're very outgoing and you know they seek out other people introvert is the opposite they don't want a lot of people around them they like being alone it's not that they go off and live alone very few people could live in complete isolation but they don't need a lot of people around them they don't get their energy from being around other people they get it from them themselves and being alone and there's nothing our extrovert and introvert there's no right or wrong good or bad it's just a continuum and that most people are somewhere along this continuum so he says that male and female is like that that you know we have some people that are extreme males some people that are extreme females but most of us are somewhere in the middle so that was kind of Jung's theory another one of Freud's students was a blur they were controlled a lot by our unconscious mind but he believed in what he called this superiority complex that we were all trying to be superior to be the best we could be and that as children what happens is because we're smaller and it makes us feel inferior to all the adults we're striving to try to get that sense of inferiority I've been learning to go the way that we feel you know when we're small it limits our abilities that we have but it causes us to strive to be better to work to be better to become better to be superior now what Adler is most well known for is birth order he believed whether your firstborn middle child or last born affects your personality and who you become and what you become so when he looked at different people there's been a lot of extended research in this area to see does your birth order does where you know where you're born if your first middle or last one does that affect who you are and your personality simply because of three children and then they also looked as they're maybe you know seven children my coming there was five girls and so you know we got the middle to last the firstborn and you know you can kind of look at it that way some if there's a seven-year difference in research is showing that it's like then the child that's born after seven or let's say ten years they're like a first born again so there's all kinds of mixtures but we're just going to talk about the firstborn middle part and last one and then the only children if we were in class I would ask how many of you are for sports and what characteristics do you feel that you have based on the fact that you were there first now times you know with firstborns it's like they want their firstborn to hurry up hurry up and do it you hurry up and walk hurry up and talk hurry up and be the best kid hurry up and show the world that I'm a good parent and then I know I'm doing and I have raised great children and that everything is good so they push the first ones to hurry up the first Born's get a unique situation in that you know they're they get time alone with the parents once the second child comes along the second child never gets time alone with the parent because the first one is always going to be there so they have this unique opportunity they got attention they want to you know parents want them to do the best they get a lot of pressure put on them to be responsible to take care of younger siblings you're the first one lots of rules and consequences that first ones have to go through that later born stone it's one of the complaints of first forms you know that let's say the firstborn doesn't get stuff until they're you know 13 but then the younger ones come along and they get a cellphone at time not what do you mean you're getting wouldn't let me have a cell phone I can't believe you're doing this a parent like well whatever you know or you know they're not as uptight with it when the second and the third one comes along as they are with that firstborn everything has to be perfect with the firstborn a lot of pressure on the firstborn to succeed and to do well but again they get that individual time they get more responsibility as well then the second one comes along the second born child when they first come there the baby they're you know they get a lot of attention because you know they're the baby at that time but then once the baby actually comes to third child comes the second one's kind of just pushed it aside you're not the first born you're not our prize you're not our one we're showing out there and pushing out there to everybody you're not the baby that needs to be taken care of and the baby the baby so the middle corn kind of gets lost kind of gets pushed to the side and the Forgotten child is often the the middle child and then the last born of course is the baby and the baby will always be the baby I have parents coming in talking about their children and the baby the baby this time to find out the baby's ten years old but they're still referring to them as the baby because everybody takes care of the baby the baby is there that last one we don't want you to hurry up walk we don't want you to hurry up Kotaku wanna just stay the baby and every the parents will take care of you the older siblings take care of you so babies time to develop at a slower rate they walk later because they talk they're their need to talk they just point somebody gets on whatever it is that they need there's not enough pressure on them they can be relaxed they they're more you know again taken care of so they seem to be a little more spoiled there's usually more money by the time they that third point comes along and everybody's there to take care of them so the baby is that way just you know whatever happens people will be on the baby out so that's the first and there's usually a few but when I asked the other students how to kind of describe an only child they usually say that they're spoiled well the reality is only children have the characteristics of the first born and the last one because when you're a parent and you only have one child you need them to be great you need them to hurry up and walk and hurry up and talk and hurry up and show the world that I'm a good parent and be responsible because when I get all your it you're gonna be taking care of me so I need you to be able to do that and you have to succeed and show the world that I'm a good parent if I have three children and one of them to screw up it's like it's okay I'm still good price are two of them you know two good ones and so that shows that I'm their time but if I only have one and then they're a screw-up about what kind of parent am I then I raise the screw up and I own you know that's all I am and nobody's gonna be there to take care of me so then what's you know what's gonna happen so only children get all that push to be responsible to do well like the first ones do but yes with only children there's more money again if there's three children there's more time that parents have more time they're more adult like because again they're around adults more often and so often I'll have to tell parents upon their children you know your natural instinct okay so we're gonna play a game so if you only have one job you always let them go first and maybe when they're lower you let them win you're not doing only children any favors by doing that okay because when they go out there in the real world other kids aren't gonna let them win they don't always get to go first and they're gonna have problems with that when my daughter went to kindergarten our teacher can appear in Peach it was great and she called it the only child syndrome so like my daughter you know when she wanted to color she wasn't used to sharing the colors because it would just be her and so now she's at school she has to share she actually matted and I didn't put her hands for and so because she didn't want to share she didn't understand you know she didn't have as much like that so you have to teach your only children to share to not let them you know always go first and always get everything that they want because when they go out there in the real world that will do them a disservice so we have firstborn middle born last born and only children and according to Adler where you are how this happens for you is going to shape your personality in a different way okay so I'm going to end here we this is we just covered the psychodynamic theorists we're going to cover the other schools of thought as well in the second half of this lecture