PERSONALITY & INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

PERSONALITY & INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES CHAPTER NINE

Personality • The pattern of enduring characteristics that produce consistency & individuality in a given person.

Psychodynamic • Approaches that assume that personality is motivated by inner forces and conflicts about which people have little awareness and over which they have no control.

Psychoanalytic Theory • Freud’s theory that unconscious forces act as determinants of personality.

Unconscious • A part of personality that contains the memories, knowledge, beliefs, feelings, urges, drives, and instincts of which the individual is not aware.

Id • The raw, unorganized, inborn part of personality whose sole purpose is to reduce tension created by primitive drives related to hunger, sex, aggression, and irrational impulses.

Superego • According to Freud, the final personality structure to develop; it represents the rights and wrongs of society as handed down by a person’s parents, teachers, and other important figures.

Psychosexual stages • Development periods that children pass through during which they encounter conflicts between the demands of society and their own sexual urges.

Fixations • Conflicts or concerns that persist beyond the development period in which they first occur.

Oral Stage • According to Freud, a stage from birth to age 12 to 18 months, in which an infant’s center of pleasure is the mouth.

Anal stage • According to Freud, a stage from 12 to 18 months to three years of age in which a child’s pleasure is centered on the anus.

Phallic Stage • According to Freud, a period beginning around age three during which the child’s pleasure focuses on the genitals.

Oedipal Conflict • A child’s sexual interest in his or her opposite sex parent, typically resolved through identification with the same-sex parent.

Identification • The process of wanting to be like another person as much as possible, imitating that person’s behavior and adopting similar beliefs and values.

Latency period • According to Freud, the period between the phallic stage and puberty during which children’s sexual concerns are temporarily put aside.

Genital Stage • According to Freud, the period from puberty until death, marked by mature sexual behavior.

Defense Mechanisms • Freud theory, unconscious strategies that people use to reduce anxiety by concealing the source of the anxiety from themselves & others

Repression • Primary defense mechanism in which unacceptable or un pleasant id impulses are pushed back into the unconscious

Neo-Freudian Psychoanalysts • Psychoanalysts who were trained in traditional Freudian theory, but who later rejected some of its major points

Collective Unconscious • According to Jung, a common set of ideas, feelings, images, & symbols that we inherit from our ancestors, the whole human rule, and even animal ancestors from the distant past

Archetypes • JUNG: universal symbolic representation of a particular person, object, or experiences (Good & Evil)

Inferiority Complex • A problem affecting adults who have not been able to overcome the feelings of inferiority that they developed as children, when they were small & limited in their knowledge about the world

PERSONALITY & INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES