AP Psychology

Module 56 – Freud’s Psychoanalytic Perspective: Exploring the Unconscious

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

Psychodynamic theories of personality view our behavior as emerging from the interaction between the conscious and unconscious mind, including associated motives and conflicts. These theories are descended from Freud’s historical psychoanalytic theory, but the modern-day approaches differ in important ways.

The Neo-Freudian and Psychodynamic Theorists

FOCUS QUESTION: Which of Freud’s ideas did his followers accept or reject?

Freud’s writings were controversial, but they soon attracted followers, mostly young, ambitious physicians who formed an inner circle around their strong-minded leader. These pioneering psychoanalysts, whom we often call neo-Freudians, accepted Freud’s basic ideas: the personality structures of id, ego, and superego; the importance of the unconscious; the shaping of personality in childhood; and the dynamics of anxiety and the defense mechanisms. But they broke off from Freud in two important ways. First, they placed more emphasis on the conscious mind’s role in interpreting experience and in coping with the environment. And second, they doubted that sex and aggression were all-consuming motivations. Instead, they tended to emphasize loftier motives and social interactions.

Alfred Adler and Karen Horney [HORN-eye], for example, agreed with Freud that child hood is important. But they believed that childhood social, not sexual, tensions are crucial for personality formation (Ferguson, 2003). Adler (who had proposed the still-popular idea of the inferiority complex) himself struggled to overcome childhood illnesses and accidents, and he believed that much of our behavior is driven by efforts to conquer childhood inferiority feelings that trigger our strivings for superiority and power. Horney said childhood anxiety triggers our desire for love and security. She also countered Freud’s assumptions, arising as they did in his conservative culture, that women have weak superegos and suffer “penis envy,” and she attempted to balance the bias she detected in his masculine view of psychology.

Carl Jung – Freud’s disciple-turned-dissenter – placed less emphasis on social factors and agreed with Freud that the unconscious exerts a powerful influence. But to Jung [Yoong], the unconscious contains more than our repressed thoughts and feelings. He believed we also have a collective unconscious, a common reservoir of images, or archetypes, derived from our species’ universal experiences. Jung said that the collective unconscious explains why, for many people, spiritual concerns are deeply rooted and why people in different cultures share certain myths and images, such as mother as a symbol of nurturance. (Most of today’s psychodynamic psychologists discount the idea of inherited experiences. But many psychodynamic and other psychological theorists do believe that our shared evolutionary history shaped some universal dispositions.)

Some of Freud’s ideas have been incorporated into the diversity of modern perspectives that make up psychodynamic theory. “Most contemporary [psychodynamic] theorists and therapists are not wedded to the idea that sex is the basis of personality,” noted Drew Westen (1996). They “do not talk about ids and egos, and do not go around classifying their patients as oral, anal, or phallic characters.” What they do assume, with Freud and with much support from to day’s psychological science, is that much of our mental life is unconscious. With Freud, they also assume that we often struggle with inner conflicts among our wishes, fears, and values, and that childhood shapes our personality and ways of becoming attached to others.

Assessing Unconscious Processes

FOCUS QUESTION: What are projective tests, how are they used, and what are some criticisms of them?

Personality assessment tools are useful to those who study personality or provide therapy. Such tools differ because they are tailored to specific theories. How might psychodynamic clinicians attempt to assess personality characteristics?

The first requirement would be S0111e sort of a road into the unconscious, to unearth the residue of early childhood experiences, to move beneath surface pretensions and reveal hidden conflicts and impulses. Objective assessment tools, such as agree-disagree or true-false questionnaires, would be inadequate because they would merely tap the conscious surface.

Projective tests aim to provide this “psychological X-ray” by asking test-takers to describe an ambiguous stimulus or tell a story about it. Henry Murray in traduced one such test, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), in which a person views an ambiguous picture and then makes up a story about it (FIGURE 56.1). The clinician may presume that any hopes, desires, and fears that people see in the ambiguous image are projections of their own inner feelings or conflicts.

The most widely used projective test left some blots on the name of Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach [ROAR-shock]. He based his famous Rorschach inkblot test, in which people describe what they see in a series of inkblots (FIGURE 56.2), on a childhood game. He and his friends would drip ink on a paper, fold it, and then say what they saw in the resulting blot (Sdorow, 2005). Do you see predatory animals or weapons? Perhaps you have aggressive tendencies. But is this a reasonable assumption?

Clinicians’ and critics’ answers differ. Some clinicians cherish the Rorschach, even offering Rorschach -based assessments of criminals’ violence potential to judges. Others view it as a helpful diagnostic tool, a source of suggestive leads, or an icebreaker and a revealing interview technique. The Society for Personality Assessment (2005) commends “its responsible use” (which would not include inferring past childhood sexual abuse) . And-in response to past criticisms of test scoring and interpretation (Sechrest et a1., 1998)-a research-based, computer-aided tool has been designed to improve agreement among raters and enhance the test’s validity (Erdberg, 1990; Emer, 2003).

But the evidence is insufficient to its revilers, who insist the Rorschach is no emotional MRI. They argue that only a few of the many Rorschach-derived scores, such as ones for hostility and anxiety, have demonstrated validity-predicting what they are supposed to predict (Wood, 2006). Moreover, they say, these tests do not yield consistent results-they are not reliable. Inkblot assessments diagnose many normal adults as pathological (Wood et al., 2003, 2006, 2010). Alternative projective assessment techniques fare little better. “Even seasoned professionals can be fooled by their intuitions and their faith in tools that lack strong evidence of effectiveness,” warned Scott Lilienfeld, James Wood, and Howard Garb (2001). “When a substantial body of research den10nstrates that old intuitions are wrong, it is time to adopt new ways of thinking.”

The Modern Unconscious Mind

FOCUS QUESTION: How has modern research developed our understanding of the unconscious?

Freud was right about a big idea that underlies today’s psychodynamic thinking: We indeed have limited access to all that goes on in our minds (Erdelyi, 1985, 1988, 2006; Norman, 2010). Our two-track mind has a vast out-of-sight realm.

Nevertheless, many of today’s research psychologists now think of the unconscious not as seething passions and repressive censoring but as cooler information processing that occurs without our awareness. To these researchers, the unconscious also involves

More than we realize, we fly on autopilot. Our lives are guided by off-screen, out-of-sight, unconscious information processing. The unconscious mind is huge. This understanding of unconscious information processing is more like the pre-Freudian view of an underground, unattended stream of thought from which spontaneous behavior and creative ideas surface (Bargh & Morsella, 2008).

Research has also supported Freud’s idea of our unconscious defense mechanisms. For example, Roy Baumeister and his colleagues (1998) found that people tend to see their foibles and attitudes in others, a phenomenon that Freud called projection and that today’s researchers call the false consensus effect, the tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs and behaviors. People who cheat on their taxes or break speed limits tend to think many others do likewise. People who are happy, kind, and trustworthy tend to see others as the same (Wood et al., 2010).

Evidence also confirms the unconscious mechanisms that defend self-esteem, such as reaction formation. Defense mechanisms, Baumeister concluded, are motivated less by the seething impulses that Freud presumed than by our need to protect our self-image.

Finally, recent history has supported Freud’s idea that we unconsciously defend ourselves against anxiety. Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski (1997) proposed that one source of anxiety is “the terror resulting from our awareness of vulnerability and death.” Nearly 300 experiments testing their terror-management theory show that thinking about one’s mortality – for example, by writing a short essay on dying and its associated emotions-provokes various terror-management defenses (Burke et al., 2010). For example, death anxiety increases contempt for others and esteem for oneself (Koole et al., 2006) .

Faced with a threatening world, people act not only to enhance their self-esteem but also to adhere more strongly to worldviews that answer questions about life’s meaning. The prospect of death promotes religious sentiments, and deep religious convictions enable people to be less defensive – less likely to rise in defense of their worldview – when reminded of death Gonas & Fischer, 2006; Norenzayan & Hansen, 2006). Moreover, when contemplating death, people cleave to close relationships (Mikulincer et al., 2003). The events of 9/11 – a striking experience of the terror of death – led trapped World Trade Center occupants to spend their last moments calling loved ones, and led most Americans to reach out to family and friends.

Before You Move On

ASK YOURSELF: What understanding and impressions of Freud did you bring to this unit? Are you surprised to find that some of his ideas (especially the big idea of our unconscious mind) had merit?

TEST YOURSELF: What methods have been used by psychodynamic clinicians to assess unconscious processes?