Your reading blog for this week is over Chapter 14. Your blog
should summarize this chapter.
Next, go out on the internet and research a topic of interest to you that you found in chapter 14. Report on what you found, and include at least 2 links to that information.
Next, go out on the internet and research a topic of interest to you that you found in chapter 14. Report on what you found, and include at least 2 links to that information.
This chapter is about unconscious motivation. Humans can have thoughts, feelings, and emotions that subjectively feel to be their own but is actually intorjected from another source. These thoughts, feelings, and emotions are there and are real but may not originate from the person at all. Hypnosis is an example of this. This shows that motivation can arise from something other than outside conscious awareness. The psychodynamic perspective has a deterministic and pessimistic image of human nature. This perspective is believed that motivation is something that happens to us rather than something we choose or create. psychodynamic refers to the study of dynamic unconscious mental processes. This can include learning about unconscious things like prejudice, depression, and defense mechanisms. The psychodynamic persepective was derived from psychoanalytic theories from Freud and underlying sexual needs.
Dual-instinct theory of motivation represents many of the biological drives as different body demands. Hunger and thirst are biological needs where sex and aggression are thought of as the psychological model of the drive. A person will start off in a homeostasis stage that then is presented a need which then created a drive. This drive then creates a goal-directed behavior, which then creates a consummatory behavior, which then returns back to the homeostasis stage. We learned about this in an older chapter in the book.
The unconscious is a complex system. It has been something that is more difficult for scientist to study. Freud believed that an individual must express strong unconscious urges and impulses in a disguised form. The unconscious is therefor a shadow phenomenon that can't be known directly but can be inferred only from its indirect manifestations. Freud also believed that dreams functioned to vent unconscious wishes. Dreams serve as neurophysiological activity, memory consolidating functions, stress-buffering or coping functions, and problem-solving functions. On the opposite side to Freudian theories the adaptive unconscious came about. It started with a patient with epilepsy. Because of his condition the patient had his hippocampus removed. As a result to this the patient developed amnesia. This patient would forget going to the lab every single day when psychologist then wanted to study him. This shows that the adaptive unconscious is good at what it does which is appraise the environment, set goals, make judgements, and initiate action. This all happens when we are consciously thinking about something else.
I found two websites that better talks about the adaptive unconscious. "If people recognize that their conscious narratives about themselves do not match their unconscious tendencies, they can take steps to mold their unconscious into something better". This is a quote from the first website presented showing that the conscious and unconscious can work together.
http://news.clas.virginia.edu/psych/x1115.xml
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/2473
Terms: Unconscious motivation, psychodynamic perspective, unconscious, Freud, dual-instinct theory, adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation.
Chapter 14 discusses unconscious motivation from different perspectives. First, the author introduces the topic from Freudian psychodynamic view. Motivation can arise from a source that lies outside of conscious awareness and volitional intent. According to psychoanalysis, people are more interested in getting sexual pleasure than they will admit and that is an aspect of human nature. Again, Freud’s dual instinct theory tells us that aggression and sex are conceptualized as psychological wishes rather than as physiological drives. Freudian unconcous is the mental storehouse in inaccessible instinctual impulses, repressed experiences, childhood, memories, wishes ,and desires.
Implicit motivation refers to all those motives, emotions, and judgments that are outside a person/s conscious awareness. Motivational constructs such as plans and goals represents an explicit type of motivation. Implicit in contrast is the motivational processes that are indirect, implied, or not well understood. Implicit motives orient direct and select attention such that people automatically attend to environmental events that have emotional associations.
The motivation of the id were unconscious impulse driven, hedonistic: to obtain pleasure and avoid pain. The motivation of the ego were partly conscious and unconscious .
Next, the author discusses repression and suppression. Repression is the tough-minded security guard who turns down most unconscious thoughts; is the process of forgetting information by ways that are automatic, unintentional. In turn, suppression is the process of removing a thought by ways that are conscious, and intentional. Yet, suppression always fails. When we try to suppress a thought, all we get is that we know that we have less control over our thoughts than we care to admit. Through suppression paradoxically opened the door to thought obsession.
The ego- the personality developed to fulfill the adaptive role of counterforce. Ego develops through psychological growth, maturity, adjustment, prosocial interdependce,. The ego is always in a state of vulnerability. There are 14 ego defense mechanisms. Ego effectance is when the individual deal with environmental challenges, demands, and opportunities. The greater the ego;s effectance motivation, the greater the person’s willingness to use ego properties proactively by intentionally changing the environment for better.
I chose to search further about Ego itself. Does it really exist and what is the purpose of ego?
The first article that I found talks about existing of ego. The author says that there is our actual true nature and s set of concepts that are the self image and that is the ego. Yet, the ego only appears to exist when it is being fueled by our own true nature. It cannot stand alone. Bob, the author of this article also says that we have been believing in the “me” hundreds of times a day for years and that is quite a habit, a habit to break and actually SEE “is that ME, really there?”
Another article talks about ego;s purpose which is to drive us to do things that are personally powerful. Ego is what makes people successful in work, school every day life. That is why we need our ego Selves, but also it does not mean that we should be controlled by out Ego selves, our higher selves must be in control of the ego self. As the title of the article says : Ego seld is a wonderful servant, but a lousy master.”
http://theendofseeking.net/EG%20-%20DoesTheEgoExist.html
http://www.lovingspirituality.com/ego-is-a-great-servant-but-a-lousy-master/
Terms:
unconscious motivation, psychodynamic, dual-instinct theory, freudian unconscious, implicit motivation, explicit motivation, repression, suppression, defense mechanisms,Id, Ego, Ego Effectance.
CHAPTER 14 BLOG
Chapter 14 is about unconscious motivation. Unconscious motivation is all about how motivation arises from a sources that is outside of conscious awareness. The chapter first starts out with explaining the psychodynamic perspective. This perspective presents a deterministic and pessimistic image of human nature. This is due the belief that the cause of motivation and behavior derives from biological sources along with the statement that personality changes little after puberty. These two statements draw the conclusion that many motivational impulses of an adult can be traced to situations that took place in their childhood years. The pessimistic part of psychoanalysis is that is focuses on conflict, anxiety, repression, defense mechanisms, vulnerabilities and other shortcomings of human nature.
The Dual Instinct Theory focuses on two general categories such as the instincts for life and the instincts for death. The life instincts, maintain survival. So it focuses on such things as food, water, air and sleep. These instincts focus on self preservation. The second class of instincts, the death instincts, push a person towards getting enough rest, inactivity and energy conservation. An absence of any bodily disturbance can be achieved only through total rest, which is death.
The Contemporary Psychodynamic Theory came about due to the fact that a lot of things changed from the time of Freud. Now, four postulates define psychodynamic theory. 1. The unconscious: much of mental life is unconscious 2. Psychodynamics: mental processes operate in parallel with one another 3. Ego Development: healthy development involves moving from an immature, socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and interdependent with others 4. Object Relations Theory: mental representations of self and others form in childhood that guide the person's later social motivations and relationships. The first posulate focuses on the unconscious, the second focuses on psychodynamics, the third focuses on ego development and the fourth, object relations theory.
The unconscious is a difficult topic to research due to it being hidden from both private and public observations. Over the years there has been much debate but in the end the conclusion that much of mental life is unconscious has been made. The idea that people have motives that they are not aware of is highly accepted by motivation researchers. The debate truly focuses on the three different portrayals of the unconscious. These three views are called the Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious and implicit motivation. Freud rejected the idea that consciousness is the essence of mental life which led him to dividing the mind into conscious, preconscious and unconscious. The conscious includes thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories and experiences that a person is aware of. The preconscious stores all the thoughts, feelings and memories that one is not aware of however can be retrieved into consciousness with a little thinking. The unconscious is the mental storehouse of inaccessible impulses, repressed experiences, childhood memories and strong but unfulfilled wishes and desires.
The second postulate of a contemporary psychodynamic understanding of motivation and emotions is that mental processes operate in a parallel with one another, meaning that people want and fear the same thing at the same time. This postulate is one of psychodynamics.
The third postulate is ego development. Healthy development moves from an immature, socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and socially responsible. According to neo Freudians, the go develops motives of its own by moving through the following phases, symbiotic, impulsive, self protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous.
The fourth postulate of a contemporary psychodynamic understanding is that mental representations of self and others form in childhood to guide adult social motivations. This is the postulate of object relations. It states that one’s personality traits form in childhood.
I decided to do more research on the topic of the unconscious mind. On both of the sources I found information that supported the same information found in Chapter 14. This information includes the fact that the unconscious part of the mind is more important than what past research has stated. Also that if a thought or feeling is unconscious, an individual is not aware of that thought or feeling.
http://www.psypress.com/social-psychology-and-the-unconscious-9781841694726
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/obsonline/the-unconscious-has-a-mind-of-its-own.html
Chapter 14 is about unconscious motivation. This chapter demonstrates that things that we are not aware of may be the source of our motivation. The three views on unconscious motivation are Freudian unconscious, adaptive unconscious, and implicit motivation.The first aspect of unconscious motivation comes from the Freudian psychodynamic perspective. This perspective believes that the cause of motivation and behavior derives from biological causes and social impulses that determine our desires, thoughts, feelings and behaviors. This perspective is often associated with Sigmund Freud who believed that human have two basic instincts: instincts for life and death. He also believed that sex and aggressions drive behavior. Currently it is believed that sex and aggressions are psychological wishes rather than physiological drives. Contemporary psychodynamics focus on the following concepts: the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory. The unconscious is a difficult area to study because it functions without our awareness.
The second aspect of contemporary psychodynamic theory is psychodynamics which means that mental processes operate in parallel with one another. This area desires to explain why people want and fear the same things. An example of this is wanting and fearing a job interview.
The third aspect of psychodynamic theory is ego development. Healthy ego development means maturing from a socially dependent personality to one that is interdependent with others. Two terms discussed in this section are ego defense and ego effectance. Ego defense means that the ego is always in a state of vulnerability and develops various defense mechanisms to reduce anxiety, distress, or depression. Ego effectance is an individual's competence in dealing with environmental challenges, demands, and opportunities.
The last aspect of psychodynamic theory is object relations theory. Object relations theory studies how people satisfy their need for relatedness through their mental representations of and actual attachments to social and sexual objects.
I decided to do more research on the Freudian psychodynamic perspective. I have always been interested in learning about Freud and his focus on the unconscious mind. Although Freud is always criticized, his ideas were fundamental in popularizing the importance of unconscious motivation. One of the areas that Freud studied was dream analysis. He believed that dreams had a symbolic representation of our internal wishes and desires. Dream-work is a concept that dreams are a way to transform forbidden wishes into a non-threatening form. Freud was also one of the first to introduce the concept of the id, ego, and superego. The ego is the conscious part of a human that rationalizes the unconscious id and superego.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/freud-dreams.html
http://www.healthguidance.org/entry/10736/1/Sigmund-Freuds-Psychodynamic-Theories.html
The psychodynamic perspective postulates that our motivation for behavior is biologically and socially derived. Our motivational impulses come from the social interactions we had during childhood and the biology we were born with. Many believe that this is a pessimistic view of human nature because we lack choice in our motivation and ultimately our behavior. Our motivational impulses are derived from simply what we were born with and the social experiences we had in the first few months of life.
Freud developed two distinct categories or instincts, Eros and Thanatos, for his dual-instinct theory. Eros are life instincts which help an individual as well as the species survive. Individual instincts are those for water, food, air and sleep while collective instincts are our needs for sex, nurturance, and affiliation. Individual instincts help one person survive while collective instincts help the entire species survive to the next generation. Thanatos are what Freud called death instincts; they motivate a person to take part in activities that promote rest, inactivity, and energy conservation. Individual Thanatos instincts are activities like self-criticism and depression.
I looked up more information on this topic of the dual-instinct theory. I found a website with an article that made the theory more clear and easy to understand. The article titled, “Instinct Theory” found at: http://motivationcentre.blogspot.com/2006/04/instinct-theory.html, pointed out that Freud’s Eros was considered the basis for sexual motivation, while Thanatos was the motivation for aggression.
Another important idea from the chapter was that of implicit motivation. Implicit motivation is all the motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments that are not within our conscious awareness. They are different the motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments that we would self-report. These implicit motives are linked to emotional experiences. Although one might say they like doing a difficult task, the emotional response that task illicit from them is likely to be either feeling energized or to feel bad and anxious. Although our conscious values state that we enjoy the difficult task, our emotional reactions (whether the challenge makes us feel bad or good) is what is more likely to predict our behavior.
An interesting topic discussed in this chapter is the suppression of thoughts. There is no way for a human being to stop a thought, they can only be suppressed once they have passed through our minds. Suppression is intentionally attempting to remove a thought from the mind. It is very difficult for people to not think about, do, want, or remember something. Often times when someone attempts to suppress a thought they experience a “rebound effect” where they seem to be curiously preoccupied with that they are trying to not think about. Therefore, conscious thought suppression starts an unconscious counter process.
I decided to look up more on suppression of thoughts. I found the website http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/10/8-ironic-effects-of-thought-suppression.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PsychologyBlog+%28PsyBlog%29 with an article titled “The 8 Ironic Effects of Thought Suppression.” This article outlines some ironic processes that have been studied. One of these is the “yips.” This is a loss of fine motor control that seems to happen to athletes, especially golfers, when they’re trying really hard to concentrate. The harder they concentrate, the worse their fine motor control becomes. Another talked about a study that showed our latent prejudices can be more easily exposed after conscious attempts are made to suppress them. At times, the more someone tries to be politically correct, the more they accidentally display their prejudice.
The ego is defined as: “...a developmental progression toward what is possible in terms of psychological growth, maturity, adjustment, prosocial independence, competence and autonomous functioning.” The ego develops along a developmental trajectory as follows: symbiotic (relies on caregiver), impulsive (external forces restrict desires), self-protective (defends self from consequences), conformist (conforms to group), conscientious (internalized set of rules), autonomous (thoughts and behaviors originate only form the ego). Ego development defends against anxiety and helps the person interact more effectively with their environment.
Terms: ego, prosocial independence, ego development, supression, rebound effect,implicit motivation, eros, thanatos, dual-instinct theory, psychodynamic thoery,
Chapter 14 discusses the topic of unconscious motivation and psychoanalysis, a school of psychology created by Sigmund Freud. Originally, Freud’s view of motivation was that sex and aggression motivated an individually both physically and mentally. However, psychoanalysts today no longer hold the idea that sex and aggression function as physiological drives and instead assume the existence of four different truths within psychodynamic theory. The first of these truths is that a majority of mental life is unconscious, meaning that people have the possibility to act irrationally and spontaneously due to their present thoughts, feelings and desires. From here, many contemporary psychoanalysts hold three different views on the unconscious.
The first of these views is that of the Freudian unconscious. Freud divided the mind into three different components - the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. The conscious includes all of the thoughts and feelings that a person is aware of in the present. The preconscious includes things that an individual is aware of but may take a second to recognize, such as the color of their shirt or their name. The unconscious, to Freud, was the most important of these three, and this was because Freud saw it as what motivated our behavior as humans. Freud did a lot of work with dream analysis because he believed it was the key to discovering the unconscious and what a person may not actually be aware of.
The second of these views is the adaptive unconscious. Timothy Wilson described the adaptive unconscious as a sort of autopilot for the human body. The adaptive unconscious performs varies tasks all while we are consciously doing something else. These tasks can be anywhere from making judgments, appraising our environment and performing special motor skills.
Implicit motivation is the third view held by contemporary psychoanalysts on the unconscious. Implicit motivation is how our emotions are unconsciously attached to events in our environments, and how we respond to these events with a variety of different emotions such as fear, sadness and happiness.
The second postulate held by contemporary psychoanalysts states that mental processes operate parallel to each other. This means, that people often times can fear and want the same thing at the same exact time. Leading to many people having opposing and conflicting feelings with the actions they decide to take, such as seen in love/hate relationships.
The third postulate deals with ego development. This postulate states that people must move from an immature and dependant personality to one that is mature and independent, with one having to come before the other in a series of steps. This developmental progression starts with the infantile symbiotic state, where the ego is immature and dependant upon its caretaker. The second state is the impulsive stage, where rules set by the caretaker direct the individual’s impulses and desires. When an individual hits the self-protective stage, the child is able to internalize and comprehend why rules exist and can protect themselves from the consequences that breaking them may impose. The fourth stage of conformity causes an individual to internalize a set of rules and fear group disapproval through anxiety. The fifth stage of the conscience is where an individual’s internalized sense of rules and responsibility curbs and counters their impulses. The autonomous stage, which is the final stage, states that an individual’s thoughts and behaviors originate from within themselves and not from society and other pressures.
The fourth postulate (object relations theory) states that mental representations of one’s self form within an individual’s childhood and carry over to their adult social motivations. This means that, as an individual begins to form ideas in childhood about themselves and others, these beliefs carry over to other motivational states such as anxiety, which carry over to an adults understanding of relationships.
For outside research I decided to research the topic of subliminal messages and unconscious motivation. The first link I came across discussed a study where individual’s were shown two coin values for a fraction of a second and asked to squeeze a pressure-sensing handgrip as hard as they could – the harder they squeezed, the higher the monetary amount they would receive. It turns out that those whom saw the larger monetary value actually squeezed harder than those whom saw the weaker monetary value. The second article I looked at discussed how a Dutch researcher found that subliminal messaging does actually work, but the behavior must be something that an individual actually wants to do. The researcher also found out that people would only be subliminally motivated to do a task if they have positive feelings towards the task beforehand as well.
http://www.physorg.com/news197039212.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090630163523.htm
Chapter 14 was all about the unconscious motivation and the different perspectives of it. The first perspective that discusses unconscious motivation is the psychodynamic one. This view is seen to be a pretty pessimistic image of human nature. One aspect of psychodynamics is that motivation in adult life and the impulses we have can be traced back to childhood events. This perspective of motivation says that we do not choose or create motivation; motivation is just something that happens to us. One other way of looking at motivation is through the dual-instinct theory. This means that motivation is regulated by two forces: biological drives and instinctual drives. This part of the chapter confused me a bit, so I am hoping that we go over this more in class. The dual-instinct theory was thought up by Freud, who was in love with the unconscious. Freud describes the unconscious as a mental storehouse, of our inaccessible impulses, repressed experiences, childhood memories and strong but unfulfilled wishes and desires.
The chapter continues to mention different experiments and studies of different types of people, those with seizures, young children, etc. Part of the unconscious includes the ability to stop a thought (which we cannot control…we just suppress it). The Id and the Ego are two parts of psychodynamics and the unconscious motivation thought up by Freud. The id is motivated by unconscious impulses, driven to obtain pleasure and get away from pain. The Ego is motivated by both the conscious and unconscious, and develops throughout our life at different stages. The rest of the chapter talks about more experiments relating to the Id and the Ego, and the eleven different ego defense mechanisms, which I thought to be very interesting.
I chose to look at subliminal motivation more in depth. The book says that to activate unconscious information subliminally, a stimulus has to be presented at a very weak energy level, to an unsuspecting person. The part in the book also states that although some people may recognize the subliminal message and understands it, doesn’t necessarily mean they will act on it. A lot of the articles I looked at online was for “self-help” books, hypnosis, motivation techniques and how to basically feel better about one’s self. All these articles had links to buy books, videos, tapes or music to achieve that motivation. Personally, I do not subliminal messages/motivation works for me. I usually know when someone or something is trying to get me to act in a certain way, or buy a certain product (like the popcorn ads at movies), but I overlook that. Some people I can see would be duped into buying that popcorn when they see an ad. I may be biased, because I have never tried it, but I think hypnosis and subliminal motivational messages in tapes or music is a bit ridiculous, and hypnosis…I don’t see how that would cause a lasting change in behavior or thinking for a person. The last link I looked at was a website with “motivational kits”, including “essential oils” that would help a person stay motivated on a goal……interesting.
http://www.secretsofmotivation.com/subliminal-motivation.html
http://www.subliminalhealth.com/motivational%20kits
Chapter 14 talks about unconscious motivation. Psychodynamic perspective says that “the ultimate cause of motivation and behavior derives from biologically endowed and socially acquired impulses that determine our desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, whether we like it or not.” Because the psychodynamic theory says that after puberty personality does not change very much, in adults a lot of the motivational impulses arise from experiences as a child. The unconscious is the subject matter when it comes to psychoanalysis. The dual-instinct theory says that motivation is regulated by impulse-driven biological forces. Through behavior the body was seen as a complex energy system organized for the purpose of increasing and decreasing its energies. Contemporary psychodynamic theory has four postulates: 1. The unconscious: Much of mental life is unconscious. “The unconscious is a ‘shadow phenomenon’ that cannot be known directly but can be inferred only from its indirect manifestations.” Most of our mental life is mostly unconscious. The adaptive unconscious appraises the environment, sets goals, makes judgments, and initiates action, doing all of this while we are consciously thinking about something else. “implicit motivation refers to all those motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments that operate outside a person’s conscious awareness and that are fundamentally distinct from self-report motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments.” Instead of being linked to learned values and cognitively elaborated aspects of the self-concept implicit motives are linked to emotional experiences. 2. Psychodynamics: Mental processes operate in parallel with one another. Freud believed that motivation is more than intentional volition because he found people did things they did not want to do sometimes. Freud defined repression as the process of forgetting information or an experience by ways that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic. He also defines suppression as the process of removing a thought by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate. I have found that when I try not to think about something I just think about it even more so when the book said “when we try to suppress a thought, all we get for our trouble is a lesson that we have less control over our thoughts than we care to admit” I found it to be very true from experience. 3. Ego Development: Healthy development involves moving from an immature, socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and interdependent with others. The first reason that ego development is important is because it defends against anxiety. It is also important because it empowers the person to interact more effectively and more proactively with its surroundings. 4. Object Relations Theory: Mental representations of self and others form in childhood that guides the person’s later social motivations and relationships. The infant’s need for attachment to the caregiver and the adult’s subsequent interpersonal connectedness to the important people in his or her life is the central key to the object relations theory. The nature and the development of mental representations of the self and others and on the wishes and fears associated with these representations is the focus of this theory.
http://www.eclecticenergies.com/ego/defensiveness.php is the first article I went to, it is called “The Defensive Ego”. The author talks about different ways we defend ourselves. In conflicts a lot of times we use blaming as a technique to defend ourselves. If someone blames us for something many times we will come back with something to blame that other person for. When we try to protect ourselves from hurt many times we tense our bodies up. When we are rejected by someone we may try to tell ourselves that we don’t really like them but in reality we really do.
http://www.2knowmyself.com/Subconscious_mind/ego_defense_mechanisms is another website I found. Here it discusses the different types of defenses such as: denial, displacement, repression, projection, rationalization, suppression, sublimation, regression, identification, undoing, fantasy, reaction formation, humor, compensation, affiliation, and dissociation. It also discusses whether the defense mechanisms are effective. It says that in certain times the defense mechanisms are healthy and in other times they are not good for us.
This chapter talks about the unconscious motivation within a person. The psychodynamics is the study of dynamic unconscious mental processes. Freud developed the dual instinct theory, this theory stated that motivation is regulated by impulse-driven biological forces. He decided that there were two basic biological forces that caused motivation. Those were life instincts and instincts of death. Life instincts are those instincts that helpt maintain life and ensure survival of a species. Death instincts are those instincts that push a person toward rest, inactivity, and energy conservation. The psychodynamic theory contains for main parts, these include the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory. The unconscious is really a "shadow phenomenon: that cannot be known directly but can be discovered through indirect manifestations. Freud believed the unconscious to be a "mental storehouse of inaccessible instinctual impulses, repressed experiences, childhood memories, and strong but unfulfilled wishes and desires. (Frued 1915, 1923)" The psychodynamics include the conflict that occurs between the personality and the id and ego. Certain motivations of the id or ego are unconscious and can make people do things that their personality would never have let them do before. Another part of the psychodynamics is the ego development, this is the progression in the psychological growth, maturity, adjustment, pro-social independence, competence, and autonomous functioning of a person. The ego develops out of instincts to control it. The last part is the object relations theory. This theory deals with the unconsious motivation on sexual drives. This theory "studies how people satisfy their need for relatedness through their mental representations of and actual attachments to social and sexual objects.
http://www.2knowmyself.com/Subconscious_mind/ego_defense_mechanisms
http://www.eclecticenergies.com/ego/defensiveness.php
These two articles discuss the topic of ego defense. The ego defense are mechanisms that help the ego defend itself from anxiety. The ego defends itself in times of conflicts, when they don't want to feel hurt and when there is a lack of feeling. There are many mechanisms that the ego has to help defend itself from anxiety and conflicts. Some of these mechanism are; denial, displacement, repression, projection, rationalization, suppression and many more.
Chapter 14 is about unconscious motivation. The fundamental assumptions of psychoanalytic theory are that individuals control their sexual desires and aggressive urges by placing them in the unconscious and these take on a life of their own and become the motivated conscious. Freud said that the human mind is like an ice burg. The tip of the ice burg is the conscious and that is what we are currently thinking of. This is the smallest part of our mind. The next part is the preconscious, which are things we are not currently thinking of but could tap into at any time. The biggest and deepest part of our mind is the unconscious, which we cannot tap into. Consciousness is our subjective experience and awareness. Our awareness can be altered, such as when we are sleeping or under the influence of drugs. Consciousness is the realization of environmental stimuli and the awareness of mental events. Different types of consciousness exist and they are nonconscious processes (bodily functions), preconscious memories that can be readily retrieved, consciousness, self awareness (personally experienced events that make up a person’s biography), and unconscious. There are also three contemporary views of the unconscious. The first is the Freudian unconscious, which automatically appraises the environment. The second is adaptive unconscious, which sets goals, makes judgments, and initiates action. The third is implicit motivation, which automatically attends to emotionally linked environmental events. Freud came up with a dual instinct theory and the two instincts are eros and thanatos. Eros is the instinct for life and includes instincts for sex, nuturance, and affiliation. Thanatos is the instinct for death and includes instincts for aggression towards the self and others. The contemporary psychodynamic perspective says that much of mental life is unconscious. It says that mental processes operate in parallel with one another and healthy development involves moving from an immature socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and interdependent with others (ego development). Contemporary psychodynamic perspective also highlights object relations theory, which is the mental representations of self and other forms in childhood that guide the person’s later social motivations and relationships. Psychodynamics can be illustrated in two ways: repression and suppression. Repression is the process of forgetting information and an experience by ways that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic. It is the ego’s counterforce to the id’s demanding desires. Suppression is the process of removing a thought from attention by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate. We use different defense mechanisms to cope with anxiety. These mechanisms include repression, denial, displacement, rationalization, reaction formation, projection, and sublimation. Sublimation is the most adaptive defense and can actually be considered positive. It is when a person converts unacceptable desires into acceptable behaviors.
I wanted to find out more about repression and learn about some real life examples of this occurring. I found a website that told the story of a man who went on trial for a murder he committed 20 years earlier. His 8 year old daughter witnessed the murder but repressed it for 20 years. When his daughter was playing with her own kids, it triggered the memory of witnessing the murder and she provided evidence against her father. The website described how repression occurs when something so shocking happens that our mind pushes it deep into our unconscious. It also talked about how repressed memories are controversial because they are not really based on scientific evidence. I also looked at another website that further explained that repression is controversial. This website discussed that repression occurs today for child abuse and is gaining some validity in child abuse cases that have been followed over many years.
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/lof93.htm
http://www.guidetopsychology.com/repressn.htm
In Chapter 14 the topic of focus was the unconscious and how it motivates individuals. The unconscious is a complex system and something that can’t be studied so directly as others, but rather indirectly measured. Freud was the man that was more or less the first person to look more in depth into the unconscious, though nowadays, his ideas are either miss proven, criticized, or un-testable. However, he did have some of the right ideas and encouraged further the study of the unconscious by developing his Psychoanalytic theory. His theory, involving that an individual has control over their sexual and aggressive urges by placing them in the unconscious, then these take on a life of their own and become the motivated unconscious. The conscious is just the tip of the purposed iceberg, the subjective experiences one has and awareness of the environment and self.
Freud also thought of his duelist theory that is discussed in this chapter discussed. The eros, was the instinct of life, concentrated on sex, affiliation and nurturance. The corresponding instinct thanatos, was the instinct of death, focusing on aggression toward the self and others. At the same time developing that concepts of id, ego and superego, though these are found not to be the names that are now associated with the responses that a human has. The limbic system is associated with the pleasure/non-pleasurable center of the brains making a fair id. While the neocortex makes a fair comparison to be the ego, which executes control that perceives the world. Nowadays the contemporary ideas of Freud go into Psychodynamics. Psychodynamic meaning the mental processes operate in parallel with another. The best things that illustrate this concept are defense mechanisms. 1.) Repression, the process of forgetting information and an experience by ways that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic. This would normally be accomplished by distraction or denial, but no clear evidence that repression scientifically exists. 2.) Denial, convincing yourself that a traumatic even did not occur, is not your fault, or not so bad. 3.) Displacement is where an emotion is redirected elsewhere rather than the original object that may have cause the intense emotion. 4.) Rationalization, is where generating acceptable, logical reasons for outcomes that otherwise would not be acceptable. 5. Reaction formation, is when one stifles an unacceptable le impulse, the exact opposite behavior/desires are displayed; marked by persistent behavior. 6.) Projection, is where a person’s own unacceptable qualities are placed onto other, regardless if those traits are even present. 7.) Sublimation, is converted unacceptable desire into acceptable behavior; arriving at an outlet for aggression through acceptable behavior.
With that said, I decided to look more into defense mechanisms, more specifically sublimation. Sublimation is considered to be the most constructive and adaptive coping and defense mechanisms if done right. I looked at a website that gave some more good examples as well as a good warning. That sublimation is constructive if done right, one has to watch out for sublimation behavior turning into anti-social activates accidently, or looked at less constructive.
http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/coping/sublimation.htm
Looking on youtube, thought I might find some interesting displays of sublimation, and in fact I did. Rather really interesting I must say, some young men making a video for one of their own psych classes, dressed up and talking liked cavemen to demonstrate sublimation. One failing to get dinner is diced by the other and frustrated and disappointed by being called an idiot leaves. When he comes back he come back with a picture that he had made fire. Using sublimation of his frustration channeled it into making fire. Interesting way to look at it, it was a rather humors video as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psaSPhfI3Y0
Chapter 14 discusses unconscious motivation. The chapter begins by discussing the psychodynamic perspective, which states that motivation stems from biologically endowed and socially acquired impulses. It is very focused on the fact that personality does not change after puberty. Also, motivation is something that happens to us rather than something that we choose. This perspective on motivation is deterministic and pessimistic. Today, the term psychoanalytic is applied to those who focus on the study of dynamic unconscious mental processes; instead of psychoanalytic which focuses on Freud’s main ideas. Freud saw motivation as an impulse-driven biological force. He focused on two instincts: instincts for life and instincts for death. He believed that these instinctual drives were what created our motives and drives. Today, psychologists look at these drives as wishes. It is our wishes that motivate us to move from our present state to our ideal state. In psychoanalytical therapy, the focus is to understand the confusing aspects of the unconscious through cognitive and interpersonal forces, instead of on biological forces. Freud believed that the unconscious was the primary process, while the conscious was the secondary process. He divided the mind into the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. He believed that the unconscious was the mental storage unit for inaccessible instinctual impulses. Freud’s dream analysis emerged because he believed that dreams were the unconscious’ way to vent. However, today we know that dreams have many functional purposes. Dreams create neurophysiological activity, they act as a memory consolidation function, they work as a stress and coping buffer, and they also work as a problem solving function. Because they have many other functions, they do not operate only to vent unconscious wishes. It is important to understand that our unconscious is adaptive. That is, our unconscious can influence our judgments and they are often times correct judgments. However, our unconscious does not influence behavior. The chapter provided the example of subliminal messages. With subliminal messages, the information is processed at the unconscious level, but studies have shown that people do not act on the information. Freud invented the concepts id and ego, which are widely known today. He said the id is our unconscious, involuntary, and impulsive ideas that are driven by the pleasure principle. Today, we related the concept of id to our limbic system. Freud defined the ego as party conscious and partly unconscious. It was organized around the reality principle. Today, we look at the ego as our neocortex which performs the tasks involved in learning, memory, and decision making. Freud’s central concept involved in psychodynamic theory was repression. Repression is our mind’s security guard and it works to forget information or experiences by ways that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic. Suppression, on the other hand, is the process of removing a thought by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate. We use suppression often in our lives, but it can have negative implications. When I was reading about this in the chapter it made me think about people who diet. They try their hardest to suppress their thoughts about unhealthy food, but it usually just leads to their obsessive preoccupation about unhealthy food. The chapter pointed out that suppression activates an unconscious counter process. Our conscious mind focuses on removing the thought of food from our mind, but our unconscious is busy searching for the thought of the food which is supposed to be being suppressed! I thought that was the most interesting thing in the chapter, it really helped me understand why dieting and probably quitting smoking can be so mind boggling and extremely hard to do. The chapter said that the ego is our personality and that it is always vulnerable. When we feel anxiety, it can be understood as our ego’s way of admitting its weakness. We use defense mechanisms to prevent being overwhelmed by our id impulses. The lowest levels of defense mechanisms fail to recognize external reality. The next levels recognize reality but cast the disturbing aspects away from themselves, like projection. The next level deal with short term anxiety but cannot cope with long term stressors. Rationalization and reaction formation fall into that category and they are the most common. The last levels are the most adaptive because they effectively channel our impulses into effective situations. Sublimation and humor are the most adaptive because they are socially acceptable and personally productive. Studies have found that the maturity level of one’s defense mechanisms can predict income level, job promotions, and joy in living. Ego effectance is a person’s individual competence in dealing with environmental demands and opportunities. It is the desire to interact effectively with the environment. The object relations theory relates to how people relate to objects/others in order to satisfy their emotional and psychological need for relatedness. This is largely related to childhood experiences with family members. While Freud’s ideas were a necessary start to the study of psychology, many of his ideas have been debunked. Many of his ideas and concepts are not scientifically testable and they fail to make predictions about people and behavior.
The thing I found most interesting was the concept of suppression. http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/05/why-thought-suppression-is-counter-productive.php This page discussed how suppression of impulses or ideas can actually make our situation worse. It discussed the same study that chapter 14 discussed, the one about not thinking about white bears. They called it the “post-suppression rebound effect”. They pointed out that emotions have a much stronger susceptibility to this effect because emotions are much harder to ignore. The article mentioned a study that wanted to know if suppression worked better with practice. They found that things that people are used to suppressing, become easier with more experience. They related this effect to substance cravings, intrusive thoughts, and depression. It is really interesting and also important that we understand that suppression can actually make our thoughts or impulses stronger and much worse. I also read part of a journal article from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005796703002961. It related thought suppression to the escalation and persistence of OCD. The findings of the study suggested that people who interpreted failure in controlling their thoughts had stronger OCD symptoms and more negative mood than those who did not interpret failure when trying to suppress thoughts. This suggests that suppression, especially when people feel failure when attempting suppression will have more negative mood and actually increase their negative thoughts and impulses.
Chapter 14 deals primarily with psychoanalysis and the study of the unconscious and consciousness. The textbook discusses Sigmund Freud and his views of motivation as biologically driven by the two instincts of sex and anger. These two energies also supplied the body with energy, both physical and mental. Contemporary psychoanalysis, or psychodynamic theory, refutes much of this. The four postulates of psychodynamic theory developed are the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory.
The first postulate states that much of mental life is unconscious. It illustrates the mind in all its forms as an iceberg. At the top of the iceberg is consciousness, or what we are aware of at any given moment. Directly below that, right under the water level, is the preconscious. This is what we can bring to consciousness very readily at any given moment, but is not currently in our thoughts. The majority of the iceberg is unconsciousness, or what we are not aware of throughout our lives.
The second postulate explains that mental processes operate in parallel with one another. This explains how we can have conflicting motivations and emotions and other thoughts. One example given is how one woman has a close relationship with her father, yet feels rejected at the same time. Another one is how you can want something really bad, but be afraid of it at the same time, like a job interview.
The third postulate, ego development, says that ‘healthy development involves moving from an immature socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and interdependent with others. There are six stages of development of the ego identified by neo-Freudians: symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. The ego progresses through these stages gradually becoming stronger, more independent, and more mature. This involves developing defensive mechanisms and a sense of competence. There is some disagreement about much of the theories of Freud in regards to the ego development, as many of them cannot be tested and some seem borderline ridiculous.
The fourth postulate is object relations, which states that ‘mental representations of self and others form in childhood that guide the person’s later social motivations and relationships.” This explains that in childhood, we develop a ‘mental representation,’ which sounds a little like a schema, or a view of ourselves and our relationships with other people. Positive views of the self can lead to confidence and competence, whereas negative views can lead to hesitancy and a low self-esteem. Also, a trusting view on others can translate into adulthood as trust and will create positive, impacting relationships with others. In other words, our relationships as children define how we view ourselves and others which, in turn, defines much of our adult interactions with other people.
This website, http://www.objectrelations.org/, covers a more in-depth view of the object relations theory and gives an overview, key concepts, the 8 stages of it and much more information. It discusses how trauma can sometimes interrupt the growth and development of a child, thereby not permitting them to reach complete development by adulthood. This ‘identity diffusion’ can make it difficult to maintain healthy relationships and to function as an adult should. The website also discussed the methods of psychotherapy that could help resolve this. The most important thing identified by Dr. Klee, the creator of this website, is that “all psychotherapists are concerned with resolving human conflict, whether the conflict exists within an individual, between individuals, or among members of a group.” So essentially, the basics of psychotherapy mean resolving conflict of some sort. However, Klee also pointed out that in relation to object relations theory, psychotherapy “offers a deeper level of resolution by identifying and resolving the underlying causes of human conflict.”
The website, http://changingminds.org/disciplines/psychoanalysis/concepts/object_relations.htm, discusses how male gender identity can be threatened when the first person the child identifies with is female. Through the object relations theory, this can cause problems in relationships down the road. The article also discusses how children have various different internal parts and influences, which is contradictory to Freud’s view that the parents had the most influence over the child, especially the introjection of same-sex parents.
Chapter 14 discusses unconscious motivation. Some of the main topics discussed in this chapter include psychodynamic perspective, Freud, psychodynamics and the ego. The psychodynamic perspective revolves around the idea that behaviors and motivation are caused by biological and social impulses. Many scholars today have adopted the term psychodynamic instead of psychoanalytic because of the lack of scientific basis behind Freud’s work. Because scientifically studying the unconscious is difficult, it limits the amount of reliable information given about it. Luckily however, it is not impossible. Freud is included in a lot of this chapter. Because he was one of the first people to talk about the unconscious, it is hard to leave him out of it. Although many of his theories have been disproven, he was definitely on the right track. For example, when it comes to the “ego” (which was suggested by Freud” we do know that there is no such thing as a person whispering in your ear telling you to be selfish. However, the limbic system in our body does seem to produce the same types of behaviors that Freud called the “ego”. In relating to the “ego”, the chapter goes into detail about the different defense mechanisms people use to promote wellbeing. One of these defense mechanisms is denial. This is when a person will either pretend that a tragic event did not occur or that it wasn’t as bad as most people think. Defense mechanisms such as denial help people to cope successfully with anxieties. Finally, the chapter ends with the theory of object relations. This is defined as mental illustrations from childhood that stay with children and impact motivation in the future. These can either be positive or negative.
I chose to look up more information on defense mechanisms. I chose this topic because I feel like it impacts everyone and it would be useful to know more detail about it. The first website I found was on the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute website. On this webpage, it gave examples of different defense mechanisms and possible advantages to them. For example, it talked about projection. This defense mechanism refers to when a person projects his or her own unpleasant thoughts on someone else. A few of the other defense mechanisms included on this website include regression, intellectualization and denial. http://homepages.rpi.edu/~verwyc/defmech.htm
Another link I found relating to the topic on defense mechanisms was on YouTube. It was a clip of a guy giving examples of the different types of defense mechanisms. I think this was very interesting and helpful. Sometimes when I read the book it is hard for me to think of real life examples that relate to the information covered in the textbook. The guy making the clip gives examples and definitions of 5 different defense mechanisms. I would encourage anyone to watch this clip that has a hard time of differentiating between the different defense mechanisms. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T81nJOqZSdA
Chapter fourteen was mainly about unconscious motivation. Psychoanalysis has made it possible to study topics like traumatic memories, inexplicable addictions, anxieties about the future, dreams, hypnosis, inaccessible and repressed memories, fantasies, masochism, repression, self-defeating behaviors, suicidal thoughts, overwhelming impulses for revenge, and all the hidden forces that shape our needs, feelings and ways of thinking and behaving. Humans can have thoughts, feelings, and emotions that they feel are their own but are actually interjected from another source. These thoughts, feelings, and emotions are there and are real but they may not originate from this person at all. This is a good demonstration of motivation arising from something other than conscious awareness. Psychodynamic perspective is that motivation is something that happens to us rather than something we choose or create. Psychodynamic perspective has a rather pessimistic and deterministic view of human nature. The father of psychodynamic perspective is Sigmund Freud. He was a huge influence to this. His view of motivation presented a biologically based model in which the two instinctual drives of sex and aggression supplied the body with its physical and mental energies. There is a contemporary psychoanalysis that emphasizes more of the motivational importance of psychological wishes, rather than the biological drives, and of cognitive information processing. The book also talks about a dual-instinct theory of motivation. This represents a lot of biological drives as different body demands. This theory tells us that aggression and sex are conceptualized as psychological wishes rather than physiological drives.
There are four postulates that define contemporary psychodynamic theory. The very first one is that mental life is unconscious. It argues that thoughts, feelings, and desires exist at the unconscious level. Therefore, people can behave in ways that are inexplicable to themselves even because their mental life is unconscious and it affects behavior. The second postulate is that mental processes operate in parallel with one another that people commonly want and fear the same thing at the same time. The third postulate is that of ego development. A healthy development involves moving from an immature, socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and socially responsible. The ego develops motives of its own. It movies through a developmental progression. Symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. The last postulate is that mental representations of self and others form in childhood to guide adult social motivations.
I chose to look up more information on the topic of the unconscious mind. I found two sources that basically were saying a lot of the same stuff as chapter fourteen. Both articles explain that thoughts or feelings are unconscious and an individual may not be aware of those feelings or thoughts.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/unconscious-mind.html
http://www.psypress.com/social-psychology-and-the-unconscious-9781841694726
Chapter fourteen focuses mainly on unconscious motivation. The first perspective is the psychodynamic perspective. This approach is very pessimistic and holds that the ultimate cause of motivation and behavior derives from biologically endowed and socially acquired impulses that determine our desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors without us being able to control it. Sigmund Freud viewed motivation as regulated my impulse-driven biological forces. He believed that the human body was an energy system organized for the purpose of increasing and decreasing energies through behaviors such as eating, breathing, working, and playing.
A lot of these behaviors are motivated unconsciously. The unconscious is very hard to explore or prove. Freud believed that an individual must express strong unconscious urges and impulses, though in a disguised form. The adaptive unconscious appraises the environment, sets goals, makes judgments, and initiates action, all while we consciously think about something else. Implicit motivation is rooted in emotional associations that lie outside out conscious awareness.
Repression is the process of forgetting information or an experience by ways that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic. Suppression is the process of removing a thought by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate. When we try to suppress a thought, all we get for our trouble is a lesson that we have less control over our thoughts than we care to admit.
Lastly, chapter fourteen discusses the concept of ego psychology. Healthy ego development involves moving from an immature, socially dependant personality to one that is more mature and socially responsible. I ego must learn to work with the superego and the id to come out with the best solutions to a person’s behavior.
I researched into the repression concept shown in chapter fourteen and really was interested in repressed false memory syndrome. I found a scholarly article online that explains that people actually can make themselves believe something did or did not happen to them only because they are repeatedly told over and over that the memory was a certain way or because a person unconsciously suppresses the memory. This even happens in people who are abused who suppress memories to actually make themselves believe it never happened until one day the memories come back. This is really interesting because it’s almost like a person has amnesia, but eventually the correct memories usually come back.
http://www.jimhopper.com/memory/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/apr/07/sexual-abuse-false-memory-syndrome
Chapter 14 is mostly about the unconscious. This chapter was very fascinating to read, learning the basis for Freudian theories and being able to decipher between what is real and what isn't real. Freud created psychoanalysis which is what most people think about what they hear the word "psychology" when it reality Freud's work has been largely disproved. However, his work did allow our society to take a closer look at things such as traumatic memories, anxiety, dreams, repressed memories, suicide, etc... Throughout his psychoanalysis, Freud coined these terms: the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is our childish, selfish feelings wheres our superego is like our parent voice that is always trying to keep us away from things. The ego works as the mediator between the two. The book then describes how there are four ideas that work together to define contemporary psychodynamic theory. The first idea states that most of our mental life is unconscioius. This accounts for many phenomenas such as how our body regulates its everyday processes. This idea, or postulate, as the book describes also entails three views on the unconcious. These three views are the Freudian Unconcious (which I discussed earlier), the adaptive unconsious, and lastly implicit motivation. The adaptative unconsious allows us to interact with environment while still concsiously thinking about something else. Implicit motivation makes us eager to be emotionally liked to the events in our environment.
The moving on, The second postulate of contemporary psychodynanalysis says tha mental processes can operate parralell of each other. Meaning someone can want but also fear something at the time. This is not an uncommon feeling but rather a feeling felt by many. The third idea of contempary psychoanalysis is centered on ego development. This is Freud's attempt of understanding why people move from immaturity to maturity. Finally, the last postulate of the contempory psychodynmaic understanding of the brain's work is that mental representations of self and others that are formed in childhood work to sway our adult motivations.
In class we learned that in reality, the limbic systerm works as our id and our neurocortex works as our "ego."
I choose to look up more on Freud's original work on:
http://psychology.about.com/od/sigmundfreud/p/sigmund_freud.htm Where I found about the "Freudiam slip" which in our world is known as a simple memory or verbal mixup. However, Freud said these mistakes were due to our unconscious feelings and aggrevations stemming from childhood.
On this website: http://www.dreammoods.com/dreamdictionary/ I "learned" about the meanings of varoious dreams, although I expect none have been backed up by scientific research.
Chapter 14 discussed unconscious motivation and how we control our sexual and aggressive urges by placing them in the unconscious. Consciousness includes awareness, altered awareness, realization of environmental stimuli and awareness of mental events. The types of consciousness include non-conscious (bodily functions), pre-conscious memories (easily retrieved), consciousness (aware of our internal and external events), self awareness (based on personal experiences) and unconscious (as Freud describes as repressed thoughts and ideas). Freud developed the Dual Instinct Theory which is eros is the instinct for life including sex, nurturance and affiliation. Thanatos is the instincts for death which include aggression toward the self such as depression, criticism and aggression towards others, such as prejudice. The contemporary psychodynamic perspective has four postulates. 1. The unconscious: much of mental life is unconscious. This would include our thoughts, feelings and desires and say they are on a unconscious level that can influence us to act differently. 2. Psychodynamics: mental processes operate in parallel with one another. This explains that we want and fear the same thing at the same time. An example of this would be holding our purse close to our body when we walk past an African American. We unconsciously do this even if we don’t consciously have the prejudice belief that all African Americans are thieves. 3. Ego development: healthy development involves moving from an immature, socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and interdependent with others. 4. Object relations theory: mental representations of self and others form in childhood that guide the person’s later social motivations and relationships. This states what we learn in childhood shapes us to become more mature as adults. Repression is the process of forgetting information and an experience by ways that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic. It is the ego’s counter force to the id’s demanding desires. For example, if one experienced a traumatic event, such as being abused as a child, they push these memories out of their awareness. Suppression is the process of removing a thought from attention by ways that are conscious, intentional and deliberate. Once one remembers a night they were abused, they try not to think about it and think or do something else to get their mind off of it. There were many defense mechanisms discussed that are used to cope with anxiety. They include repression, denial (think an event did not occur), displacement (threatening impulse redirected), rationalization (generate acceptable reasons for outcomes that would otherwise not be acceptable), reaction formation (stifle unacceptable impulse), projection (project own unacceptable qualities onto others) and sublimation (convert unacceptable desire into acceptable behavior).
I decided to research the defense mechanisms in more depth than discussed in class. http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/ss/defensemech_5.htm provides each of the defense mechanisms in detail with an example. For instance, denial is described as situations in which people seem unable to face reality or admit an obvious truth. It then gives the example of an alcoholic. When one is an alcoholic they don’t see their drinking as a problem and affecting other people. This is why the first step in the AA program is to admit you have a problem.
http://users.rider.edu/~suler/defenses.html shows some statements that would be used for each defense mechanism. I thought this was a great resource in addition to providing the definition so we could learn how to recognize as well as define these mechanisms.
unconscious motivation, consciousness, nonconscious, pre conscious, consciousness, self awareness, dual instinct theory, psychodynamics, ego development, object relations theory, repression, suppression, denial, displacement, rationalization, reaction formation, projection, sublimation
Chapter 14 discussed the unconscious aspect of motivation. This aspect is a part of the psychodynamic perspective. Psychodynamic perspective implies that much of human nature is biologically determined. It places special emphasis on the negative side/experiences of human behavior. Sigmund Freud began this approach to psychology long ago, but it is still appealing to people today. There are four different aspects of psychodynamic theory. The first is the unconscious. This is the belief that much of our mental life is unconscious. There are two types of unconscious. The first is Freudian unconscious. This is made of three components: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. The conscious state of being is like the small type of the ice berg. It is the current thought in our mind. The preconscious is just below the level of consciousness. It’s something that we could think of, but aren’t at the moment. The unconscious state is repressed thoughts that we are unable to readily conjure up. The adaptive unconscious is our ability to learn new tasks, follow routines, and use our procedural knowledge. We use it daily to make it through our lives, but don’t have to explicitly think about. Implicit motivation are things that we are innately interested in doing. We are unconsciously drawn to these things. Not everyone is implicitly motivated to do the same things. Subliminal motivation is something that is unconsciously affecting us in our environment. It plays on areas of our unconscious to make us want to do something. This could be like a quick flash of a picture of food during a movie that makes us hungry.
Psychodynamics describes the clashing of forces between our will and our counter will. This occurs when our id and our ego attempt to figure out what we should do. The id says do it and acts on impulse. The ego tells us to restrain our impulses and not act on them. They are balanced by the superego. Repression is the central concept to psychodynamics. It explains that our conscious is picky about what it allows in. It leaves much of our thoughts in the unconscious and doesn’t bring it to our attention. This way we forget things, either intentionally or unintentionally, to avoid damaging our consciousness. Suppression is the ability to put a thought aside. If we tell ourselves to simply not think of something, it does not put the thought out of our minds. Instead we try to think or do something else instead.
Ego psychology explores human development by using the id as a function of our growth. As we develop our ego throughout childhood and adolescence, we gain maturity and learn to control our emotions. Defense mechanisms work as an ego defense and help to protect the highly vulnerable ego. There are many criticisms of the this approach to motivation and it has little scientific value.
I decided to look more into thought suppression. A lot of what I found concerned thought suppression and OCD. Researchers were interested in seeing whether patients suffering from OCD had an inability to suppress thoughts. They found when someone with OCD attempted to suppress a thought, it actually made them think about it a lot more. This suggests that individuals with this disorder have an underlying cognitive problem that causes a failure in thought suppression.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12384322
http://www.ocdla.com/blog/ocd-thought-suppression-1249
TERMS: psychodynamic perspective, psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, dual instinct theory, unconscious, Freudian unconscious, adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, subliminal motivation, will, counterwill, repression, suppression, id, ego, superego, ego development, ego psychology, ego defense, defense mechanisms
Chapter 14 focused on unconscious motivation and the theories of Freud. One of the first terms mentioned was psychoanalysis which claims our impulses determine our thoughts, feelings, and desire whether we like it or not. Freud claimed that we are too guilty to admit our sexual pleasures that will secretly desire.
Freud defined the unconscious part of our mind as a "shadow of phenomenon" He then divided the mind into three separate parts: the conscious, unconscious, and preconscious. The conscious deals with short term memory. It includes our thoughts, feelings, sensations and experiences that we are aware of at any given moment. Our preconscious stores all our thoughts, feelings, and memories that are absent from our conscious mind. In other words, it stores information that we are already aware of, until we need it directly. For instance, I know my phone number or a friends, but I am not currently thinking about it, yet I can retrieve at any given time.
Freud believed there were clashing forces the cathexis which is sexual attraction and the anticathexis which is guilt. In addition, Freud had a personality structure that consisted of the id, ego, and superego. The id is the part of the brain that wants to do only pleasurable things, and seeks what IT wants. The superego is the moral reasoning which kicks in as whether we should or shouldn't do something. The ego however, is the negotiator of the two that tries to draw a happy medium.
Repression and suppression were two terms that were also discussed in this chapter. For instance, repression is unintentional, and not deliberate. However, suppression is intentional and deliberate. An example of repression would be an individual suffering from some sexual abuse as a child, and then when asked by a therapist they can't seem to recall that memory due to its traumatic effect. An example of suppression is when an individual may try to think of other things to get rid of a thought. This can be seen with individuals who are dieting, and try to fill their mind with other thoughts rather than perhaps indulging in a juicy cheeseburger. Individuals rely on suppression as a form of self-control, to help such things as a smoking or drug addiction.
This chapter also discussed the object relations theory which focuses on the development of mental representations of the self and of others and of the affective processes associated with these representations. This theory focuses mainly on childhood representations of their caretakers and how they affect their representations in the future.
I was interested in Freud's structure of the id, ego, and superego so I decided to look up a few articles on this area.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/psyche.html
This article discussed how the id consisted of inherited traits, and that it is responsible for our sex (Eros) and death (Thantos) instinct. Therefore, this area of our brain is rather impulsive, attacking upon instinct. The id needs instant gratification, and a term that was discussed in this article was the pleasure principle. This principle states that every wishful impulse should be satisfied immediately regardless of the consequences. In addition, it discussed how the ego was our "reality principle" because it works to satisfy the demands of the id. Lastly, it states that the superego consists of our conscience which deals with guilt, and our ideal self which deals with how we picture ourselves and how we want to be.
http://www.victorianweb.org/science/freud/division.html
This article discussed how Freud came to believe in the division of the mind based upon his patient Anna O. He claimed that there were three parts the id, ego, and superego. In addition, it states how Freud believed impulses or memories float from one level of consciousness to another. In other words, the ego, superego and id all functioned on their own in different levels of consciousness. The interaction of all three of these structures, signifies constant movement from one level to another.
Terms: suppression, repression, objects relation theory, unconscious motivation, preconscious, conscious, unconscious, id, ego, superego, conscience, cathexis, anticathexis, psychodynamic, psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis studies the unconscious pessimistic view of human nature. Psychoanalysis studies such things such as traumatic memories, inexplicable addictions, anxieties about the future, dreams, hypnosis, inaccessible and represses memories and other similar topics.
The founder of this perspective was Sigmund Freud. His view was biologically based and dealt with sex and aggression. Contemporary psychoanalyst focus on psychological wishes and cognitive processing rather than biological drives.
There are four postulates that define contemporary psychodynamic theory. The first claims that much of mental life is unconscious. This postulate states that thoughts, feelings, and desires exist on an unconscious level. Three contemporary views of the unconscious are Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious (goal setting), and implicit motivation (emotional associations).
The second postulate is psychodynamic understanding of motivation and emotion in mental processes that are equivalent to one another. An example would be wanting and fearing the same thing at the same time.
The third postulate is ego development. This is moving from immature socially dependent personality to a mature and socially responsible personality. The ego develops motives by moving through growth processes such as symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous.
The fourth postulate is understanding that mental representations of self and others form in childhood and guide adult social motives. It states that personality patterns begin at childhood and people make representations of the self, other, and relationships. After formed, motivational states such as relatedness and anxiety guide the adult’s interpersonal relationships.
I chose to look more into subliminal motivation. The first article discusses a study done on hand eye coordination. The study involved participants looking at different coin values with one eye and to squeeze something when they saw the highest coin value. They did a combination of hand, eye, patterns. What they found was that the half the brain could be motivated at a time.
The second article discussed how subliminal messages can help motivate you to stop bad habits through audio messages. These are in the form of self-assistance tapes that can help you lose with or build confidence. It also discussed visual forms of subliminal motivation such as pictures in your office or computer screen.
http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/subliminal-motivation.htm
http://subliminaldirect.com/subliminal-messages-for-motivation
Chapter fourteen discussed unconscious motivation from it’s origin to it’s criticisms. As discussed in the chapter, motivation can stem from sources outside of conscious awareness and volitional intentions. The psychodynamic perspective is one much more pessimistic than humanism, mainly because it is based on deterministic beliefs that our behavior and motivation is derived from purely biological and socially acquired impulses that are not in our control, while placing emphasis on sexual and aggressive urges. Freud is noted as the father of psychoanalytic/ psychodynamic theories, for his early work (although very extreme, and rather unscientific) asked many questions and got people thinking about where exactly our motivation is born. One of his theories, largely rejected now, was the dual-instinct theory which focused on eros (instincts for life, reproduction) and thenatos (instincts for death, aggression) where the ego was what was giving our behavior direction, and our instincts gave our behaviors energy.
Now sex and aggression are not perceived a physiological drives, but more as psychological wishes, and modern psychoanalysts see psychological wishes rather than physical drives as our behavior’s source of direction and regulation. Today there are four postulates defining current psychodynamic theory. First, the unconscious, which suggests much of mental life is not conscious. Second, is psychodynamics, emphasizing mental processes often operate in parallel with one another. Third is ego development, emphasizing the development of beings. Fourth is the object relations theory, which argues the way beliefs formed in childhood shape beliefs and guide behavior.
The idea that much of mental life is unconscious is largely accepted now, and there are three different portrayals of the unconscious. First, the Freudian unconscious, which is divided into the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. Second is the adaptive unconscious, which appraises the environment, sets goals, makes judgments, and initiates action. Third is implicit motivation, which includes all motives , emotion, judgments, and attitudes outside of our awareness.
One of Freud’s most central concepts of psychodynamics is repression. Repression is the process of forgetting information or experiences by ways that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic. It would be the ego’s counterforce to the id’s demanding desires. Suppression is the process of removing a thought from attention by ways by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate. Many cases of repression have been found to be implemented memories from psychologists rather than real memories of the clients. Repression is hard to verify, but suppression is very apparent and can be very helpful.
One interesting thing about the id and the ego are their functions are very similar to that of the limbic system and the neo cortex. The limbic system is primarily responsible with pleasure and pain centers, and the neocortex is responsible for learning, memory, decision-making, problem-solving, perceptions of the world, and adaptation.
One of the interesting things discussed in chapter fourteen was the use of subliminal messages and how they influence, or are supposed to influence our unconscious motives. I particularly wanted to see some examples of subliminal messages in advertising.. Or at least what images are considered to be subliminal messages in current-day society. Some of the websites I found weren’t real scientific, but overall pretty interesting and even kind of funny. For instance, the most interesting/ strangest ones I found were about subliminal messages/ hidden messages in advertisements. They were very strange and interesting as well, but seemed pretty overboard at the same time.
http://www.11points.com/Food-Drink/11_Hidden_Messages_In_Food_Ads_and_Logos
http://sub-lim.blogspot.com/
The psychodynamic theory is deterministic and pessimistic. According to the psychodynamic theory, motivation is caused by biological impulses and is not something that you choose. Personality is also believed to change little after puberty, so there is a lot of emphasis placed on childhood events. Much of the focus in psychodynamic theory is placed on aversive concepts such as aggressive and sexual urges, anxiety, and repression. However, today psychoanalytic describes practitioners who practice in traditional Freudian ways and psychodynamic refers to the study of the unconscious mental processes. Under the psychodynamic perspective is the dual instinct theory. The dual instinct theory view the body as a complex energy system with a purpose of increasing or decreasing energies through behavior. Under the dual instinct theory, the primary source of all physical energy was biological instinct. According to Freud, there are two categories of instinct: Eros-instincts to maintain life by ensuring survival and thanatos- instincts that push an individual toward rest. Eros ensure the survival of the individual through instincts for things such as food and water. Eros can also serve to ensure the survival of a species through instincts such as sex, nurturance, and affiliation. Thanatos are known as the death instincts because absence from all bodily disturbances can only be achieved through death. A primary focus is placed on aggression on the self or toward others. Contemporary psychoanalysts now believe that psychological wishes rather than instincts regulate and direct behavior.
The contemporary psychodynamic theory emphasizes four concepts: the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory. The unconscious is centered around the idea that many of our thoughts, feelings, and desires exist at an unconscious level. There are three portrayals of the unconscious, known as the Freudian unconscious, adaptive unconscious, and implicit motivation. The Freudian unconscious is known as the iceberg theory which contained the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. The conscious includes all thoughts, feelings, and experiences that a person is aware of at the time. The preconscious deals with thoughts and feelings that a person is unaware of at the time, but can easily be brought into consciousness. The largest component is the unconscious, which includes all inaccessible impulses, repressed experiences, and strong unfulfilled wishes. The second portrayal of the unconscious is the adaptive unconscious. The adaptive unconscious is involved with environment appraisal, setting goals, and making judgments while thinking about something else. The adaptive unconscious is involved in routine activities and recognition of familiar events. The third portrayal of the unconscious is implicit motivation. Implicit motivation deals with all thoughts, emotions, and motives outside of the conscious awareness. Implicit motivational processes can predict behavior only when attention and awareness are present.
Psychodynamics is a concept that recognizes that mental process are parallel to each other. When people have ideas, they also have counter ideas. When an idea/will is of equal strength to the counter idea/will, then neither is fully satisfied. Freud used the concepts of the id and ego to described the conflict. The id deals with unconscious, involuntary, impulse driven desires. The ego on the other hand, involved the reality principle which holds off pleasure seeking behavior until a socially acceptable object can be found. According to Freud, the central concept of psychodynamics was repression. Repression is described as forgetting information or experiences automatically. When impulses attempt to surface, anxiety emerges and encourages the mind to repress.
Ego Development involves the progression toward possible outcomes involving psychological growth, maturity, adjustment, competence, and autonomy. When an individual is born, the ego is reliant on the caretaker and is overwhelmed by constant impulses. Eventually, the ego becomes autonomous, involving self motivation and regulation. Ego development is important to motivation because it defends against anxiety and allows individuals to interact more effectively with their environment. The defense mechanisms help buffer the consciousness against potentially overwhelming anxiety levels. There are four levels of defense mechanisms. The first level defense mechanisms do not recognize external reality and simply deny reality or invent a fantasy reality. The second level of defense mechanisms recognize reality but send disturbing aspects away from the self. The third level of defense mechanisms deal effectively with short term anxiety but don’t allow for long tern adjustment. The fourth level of defense mechanisms are the most mature. The two most mature defense mechanisms are sublimination and humor. Sublimination involves channeling an impulse into something socially acceptable. For example, an individual could translate aggression into exercise. Humor involves accepting one’s shortcomings and talking about them is socially acceptable ways.
Object relations theory studies how people satisfy their need for relatedness through their mental representations of and actual attachments to social and sexual objects. A major component to the theory involves an infant’s attachment to their caregiver. When a caregiver acts in a warm and nurturing way, the child is more likely to have secure and affectionate relationships in the future. If a child perceives their caregiver as being cold, they will grow up to develop insecure and anxiety filled relationships. The reading also suggests that a child’s attachment to their caregiver can also predict if the child will ever marry and how long they will stay married.
The topic that I decided to further research was defense mechanisms and anxiety. After researching, I learned that if the ego cannot deal with the demands of our desire, anxiety develops. However, there are three different types of anxiety. The first is neurotic anxiety which involves the fear of losing control of the id’s, resulting in punishment for inappropriate behavior. The next type of anxiety is reality anxiety. Reality anxiety is fear of real world events or threatening objects. For example, being afraid of a poisonous snake. The third type of anxiety is moral anxiety which involves fear or violating our own moral principles. I then found a really helpful website that provided descriptions of Freud’s defense mechanisms and then had a quiz at the end. The quiz provided examples and you had to match the correct defense mechanism to the examples. The quiz really helped me relate the definitions for the defense mechanisms to real examples and situations.
http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/ss/defensemech.htm
http://www.cord.edu/faculty/covey/defense.html
Chapter 14 is about the evolution of psychodynamic theory from psychoanalytic and about unconscious motivation. The distinction between the original psychoanalytic theory of Freud is when other researchers decided they didn’t buy into all of his ideas about the sexual repression of peoples’ childhoods and the division Freud made between eros and thanatos in his instinct-drive theory. The psychoanalytic approach is a more modernized version of some of Freud’s more logical ideas about unconscious motivation. Those base ideas, of which there are four, have had time to be empirically tested and shown to be accurate in some sense. Those four postulates are the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory. In that previous order they describe that many of our mental functions occur unconsciously, that the processes can occur simultaneously, we develop in our control of unconscious urges as we grow, and childhood self and social perception guides later life in terms of social functions.
The unconscious itself is a topic that is constantly discussed and debated. It encompasses many different areas and has many different means depending on how it’s being used or referred to. There are a few main areas associated with the consciousness. Non-conscious processes are bodily functions over which we have little or no cognitive control. Preconscious memories being things we can access, readily available, but are not immediately part of the conscious. Consciousness is a state of awareness of internal and external events. Self-awareness is what we refer to our personal experiences as. And finally, the unconscious is the area of our minds that we are unaware of, Freud would say they were repressed while modern psychodynamics would consider them cognitive processes without awareness.
Freud was on the right track with his model of will versus counterwill illustrated by the id and ego. Each can be more accurately described as an observable human function more than just a loose concept or idea. The id for Freud was mainly motivated by unconsciousness, driven by impulse. Whereas the ego was the balance for the id, it kept the self from being entirely consumed by base desires with no conscious thought. In modern psychodynamics, the id could be similar to the limbic system, containing the center for pleasure and many immediate biological reactions. The ego would be comparable to the neocortex, higher level thinking and decision making. Freud had a list of defense mechanisms the ego used to reduce and manage anxiety levels when it was vulnerable and containing the id impulses.
I was particularly interested in those defense mechanisms. I found a really great article describing 15 common defense mechanisms. It had repression listed but not suppression as we discussed in class probably being the more logical idea. There were many similarities between the article I found and the table on page 408 in our book. The article included a division between the defense mechanisms as being on certain levels of maturity. Sublimation is specifically discussed as being an almost positive defense mechanism where a person can turn a socially unacceptable anxiety into something that is socially acceptable. Examples of that might be channeling anger or aggression into football or putting hurt feelings and depression into music. I wanted to look further into sublimation and I ended up on changingminds.org on their page describing sublimation. One particular example grabbed me; “A surgeon turns aggressive energies and deep desires to cut people into life-saving acts.” To me, that sounds like a very dangerous coping/defense mechanism. If you have some sort of deep desire to injure or cut people, I don’t think that doing that in a positive way would ward off the negative feelings that might linger. A defense mechanism, I find them to be similar to coping mechanisms, isn’t going to fix the problem, simply re-channel negative energies into more positive ones. At the point where the positive stops and negative might return, I don’t think I would want to be on the slab with that surgeon.
http://psychcentral.com/lib/2007/15-common-defense-mechanisms/all/1/
http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/coping/sublimation.htm
Chapter 14 is about unconscious motivation. The chapter begins with the psychodynamic perspective which was fathered by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis is deterministic in that it holds that the ultimate cause of motivation and behavior derives from biologically endowed and socially acquired impulses that determine our desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, whether we like it or not. Psychoanalysis is further deterministic in that personality changes little after puberty. According to psychoanalysis, people “are more interested in getting sexual pleasure than they will admit” and people have “blind rages, wild lusts, and parasitic infantile longings.” These aspects of human nature present us with a psychological riddle that pulls in our curiosity.
According to the book, Freud believed that the individual must express strong unconscious urges and impulses, though in a disguised form. The unconscious is therefore a “shadow phenomenon” that is cannot be known directly but can be inferred only from its indirect manifestations. The idea that people have motives and intentions that lie outside of their everyday awareness is readily accepted by motivation researchers. In our lecture today, I like how this subject was talked about. The lecture reminded us that everything that goes on with our body is not necessarily something we think about each second. For example, we do not think about digesting our food every time we eat. This is something that our body does for us without us being conscious about what is going on as it occurs.
Freud rejected the idea that consciousness was the essence of mental life and therefore divided the mind in to three components: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. The conscious includes all the thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, and experiences that a person is aware of at any given time. The preconscious stores all the thoughts, feelings, and memories that are absent form immediate consciousness but can be retrieved into consciousness with a little prompting. The unconscious is the mental storehouse of inaccessible instinctual impulses, repressed experiences, childhood memories, and strong but unfulfilled wishes and desires.
Next the chapter talked about repression and suppression. Repression is the process of forgetting information or an experience by ways that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic. It is the ego’s psychodynamic counterforce to the id’s demanding and distressing wishes, desires, ideas, or memories. Suppression is the process of removing a thought by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate. People rely on suppression to control their thoughts and actions in practically all areas of life.
The first link I found basically summarizes what I talked about from chapter 14. The second article I found depicts the differences between repression and suppression. It also tells the positive and negative aspects of repression.
http://allpsych.com/psychology101/ego.html
http://www.trans4mind.com/jamesharveystout/repress.htm
Chapter 14 was all about the unconscious motivation deep in our psyche. This has been theorized and debated between theorists throughout the ages from Freud’s unusual perspective to actually viable ideas that are used today.
The unconscious is the unobservable and unusable part of the psyche that stores information that may affect us in ways that we don’t usually notice. Freud broke down the conscious into three different levels, conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. The conscious, short-term memory, including all the thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, and experiences that a person is aware of at any given time. The preconscious stores all the thoughts, feelings, and memories that are absent from immediate consciousness, but can be retrieved into consciousness with a little prompting. For instance, if someone just threw the word whale out and people would be thinking giant fish, ocean animal, huge mouths, and etc., but before that you were probably thinking nowhere near whale, but as soon as you heard it, you begin to think all the things that represent a whale because you took it out of your preconscious or long term memory. The unconscious is the mental storehouse of inaccessible instinctual impulses, repressed experiences, childhood (before language) memories, and strong but unfulfilled wishes and desires. Then empirical study of non-Freudian unconsciousness was started and the first one I’m going to explain adaptive unconscious which is appraising the environment, set goals, and make judgments, and initiate action, all while we are consciously thinking about something else. Implicit motivation refers to all those motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments that operate outside a person’s conscious awareness and that are fundamentally distinct from self-report motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments. Subliminal motivation is to activate unconscious information; a stimulus is presented at a very weak energy level to an unsuspecting research participant.
Then, Freud came up with another concept of psychodynamics concerned the conflict between the personality structures of the id, ego, and superego. Id is the part of our conscious that is impulsive and anything that may seem interesting you want it. Superego is the part of the mind that says hey stop think about that before you do it and says “hey do you really need to do that or do you really need to buy that”. And then there is Ego which is the middle man between the two and sorts out the ideas from both sides and makes the final decision. Next, was repression which is the process of forgetting information or an experience by ways that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic. Suppression is the ability to stop a thought is beyond the human mind.
The first article was about a Buddhist cultures who are trying to eliminate the part of the personality that is nonspiritual. In the article the write tries to explain that when we are eliminating these parts of personality we are eliminating the Ego part of it, which is a very important part of personality. He says that we don’t need to live by the Ego in our head perfectly, but that we need it for those times when making decisions when were faced with different situations in life. The second article is how the College of London had found the first physiological evidence of subliminal messaging with the brain. With using an fMRI, they studied whether an image you aren't aware of, but reaches the retina has an impact on brain activity in the primary visual cortex, part of the occipital lobe. Subjects' brains did respond to the object even when they were not conscious of having seen it. I found this very interesting because it just seems so weird that our minds would react to something that isn’t obviously shown.
Terms: Unconscious motivation, conscious, preconscious, unconscious, adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, subliminal motivation, id, superego, ego, repression, suppression.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070308121938.htm
http://www.lovingspirituality.com/ego-is-a-great-servant-but-a-lousy-master/
Chapter 14 discusses the fact that a lot of what we do, we do unconsciously, such as breathing, growing hair/nails, or digesting food. The unconscious cognitions and behaviors root from both biological causes and the social environment. We now have a better understanding of the unconscious mind and all that it entails after all the research that has been conducted; however, Sigmund Freud was the one who brought up the discussion of the levels of consciousness (iceberg of consciousness) and all the facets surrounding it—though he had no real evidence to support his theories.
Freud theorized in the Dual Instinct Theory that one’s motivational drive for behavior was directed toward either a life instinct (Eros) or a death instinct (Thanatos) that were biologically based. Freud also thought that the unconscious consisted of repressed thoughts/ideas. Overall, his ideas were mostly based on sexual and aggressive drives.
The chapter describes the consistency of consciousness and its types. Conscious is made of subjective experiences, awareness, altered awareness, realization of environmental stimuli, and awareness of mental events. The different types of consciousness recognized in the chapter are nonconscious processes, preconscious memories, consciousness, self-awareness, and the unconscious.
Many ways of coping with ego anxiety were discussed. These choices of defense mechanisms include repression, denial, displacement, rationalization, reaction formation, projection, and sublimating. I realize that I do a lot of rationalization when I feel anxious. This also relates to my desire for control that I talked about last chapter blog. When I feel overwhelmed or like I don’t have control of something and it doesn’t go my way, I rationalize to others and myself in terms of me not having control of it.
Also discussed are the four proposed concepts of contemporary psychodynamic perspective of motivation. 1)The unconscious—most of mental life is unconscious; 2)Psychodynamic—mental processes operate parallel with one another; 3)Ego development—healthy development consists of moving from an immature socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and interdependent with others; and 4)Object Relations Theory—mental representations of the self and others start forming in childhood and guide one’s social motivations and relationships later in life.
I found the topic of ego anxiety coping defense mechanisms very interesting. I wanted to research more on reaction formation mechanisms.
I cam across this blog that discussed presidential candidate Michele Bachmann and her strange extreme, persistent rejection of homosexual issues and her actions trying to ban gay marriage. The blog pulled articles from several sources and discussed each relating to the authors conclusion that Bachmann is using a reaction formation defense perhaps because someone close to her, or she, herself, is gay. I also looked through comments people left on the discussion and found them very intriguing. There was even at least one person who claimed to have a masters degree in psychology. http://skydancingblog.com/2011/06/19/michele-bachmanns-homophobia-is-it-reaction-formation/
An article I found discussed a study in which females with high sexual guilt reported low arousal but contrastingly, showed more arousal physiologically when shown an erotic video than females low in sexual guilt. The researcher surmised that this could be from forbidden erotica. Thus, the females had conflicting feelings on the erotica and used reaction formation to stifle the anxiety from the conflict. http://psycnet.apa.org.proxy.lib.uni.edu/?&fa=main.doiLanding&doi=10.1037/0022-3514.49.1.177
In chapter 14 about the unconscious mind, the book talked a lot of how the unconscious can affect our motivation without us knowing it. One of the categories that really stuck out to me was Freudian Unconscious, since Freud was the first person to be known for looking at the unconscious mind. And I remember him quite well from my intro to psychology classes and my history and systems of psychology class. Freud’s look into psychoanalysis opened a lot of doors for his era and for research even if many of his theories were proven false after his death.
The chapter also looked at different kinds of motivation that can happen in the unconscious mind; adaptive, implicit, and subliminal. Adaptive motivation being that our mind remembers something that we consciously do not. Implicit motivation is the motivation and feelings or even ‘instincts’ we obtain over time. And Subliminal motivations being something quick that we don’t remember seeing but our brain does process what was too quick for the conscious mind to catch.
The last part of the chapter looked at the Id and Ego, both the existence and roles that are played out in our behavior. But the chapter mainly focused on the Ego and its ability to motivate a person into accomplishing their basic and simple needs. But it also talks about how these needs and motivations are suppressed and pushed aside so that people are not seen as acting childish.
When I googled ‘unconscious motivation cases’ I came across an article that uses Freud’s explanation of the unconscious mind to explain why people who are very devoted to their careers like playing music will find themselves hearing music in their dreams. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1599826/pdf/brmedj00105-0035.pdf
Intrigued by the first article I found I then searched ‘unconscious problem solving’ and found an article that explains that the unconscious mind may be better at thinking outside of the box and is better at solving problems then the conscious mind. http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/06/does-unconscious-thought-result-in-creative-problemsolving.html
Chapter 14 discusses Unconscious motivation and how it relates to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. According to psychoanalytic theory, an individual control’s their sexual and aggressive urges by placing them in the unconscious. These then take on a life of their own and become the motivated unconscious. There is a difference between motivated unconscious and consciousness. Consciousness is a subjective experience. In other words, it is the awareness one has of the world around them. This awareness can be altered by many things such as sleep or drug use. Psychologists have long considered the “hard problem,” which is concept of how the mind emerges from brain activity. There are many types of consciousness. These include nonconscious processes; preconscious processes; consciousness; self-awareness; and unconsciousness.
There are three main contemporary views on the unconscious. The most well know is the Freudian unconscious. This automatically appraises the environment. A second contemporary view is the adaptive unconscious, such as setting goals, making judgments, and initiating action. And the third is implicit motivation. This is automatically attending to emotionally linked environmental events – for example when you hear your own name being said in a crowd, but you don’t pay attention when other names are spoken.
Freud is known for his dual-instinct theory. There are two sides to this theory. Eros is the instinct for life, and includes sex, nurturance, and affiliation. Thanatos is the instinct for death, and includes aggression towards the self, such as self-criticism and depression; and aggression towards others. In the contemporary psychodynamic perspective there are five parts. These include the unconscious; psychodynamics; ego development; and the object relations theory.
With psychodynamics there is a clashing of psychological forces. There is the conscious volition, ego; versus the unconscious counter-will, id. Ego is an idea, desire, excitation, or cathexis, such as sexual desire. Id is a counter-idea, a repression, an inhibition, or an anticathexis. Repression is the process of forgetting information and an experience by ways that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic. In other words, repression is the ego’s counterforce to the id’s demanding desires. Suppression is the process of removing a thought from attention by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate.
There are many defense mechanisms to cope with anxiety. These include Repression or suppression, denial, displacement, rationalization, reaction formation, projection, and sublimation. If the id and ego exist, the id is most likely in the limbic system, while the ego would be in the neocortex. There are many intricately interrelated neural pathways and structures that link the limbic system and neocortex together.
I researched more information on Eros and Thanatos. Eros is the sexual drive or creative force, while Thanatos is the death force or destructiveness. They are actually mythical creatures created by Freud that represent the two biological outlets. On the one hand, Eros creates tension, while Thanatos dissolves tension and moves towards homeostasis. Eros is associated with the positive feelings of love, while Thanatos is associated with the negative feelings of anger, fear, and hate. Eros and Thanatos are in a balance.
http://www.trans4mind.com/mind-development/freud.html
http://changingminds.org/disciplines/psychoanalysis/concepts/life_death_drives.htm
Chapter 14 focused on unconscious motivation. Psychodynamic perspective was talked about first, which is human nature being viewed through an unconscious pessimistic view. Freud seemed to be the major one that is thought of when this topic is brought up even though his work is falsifiable and doesn’t really get to the true meaning, but it is appealing to others. Then contemporary psychodynamic theory was talked about. It consisted of four major postulates—the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relation theory. The unconscious is the most of our mental life is unconscious and the rest consists of the conscious and preconscious. Conscious is things we are thinking about right now and know of them (tip of the iceberg), the preconscious is things we could be thinking about (part of iceberg just under the surface), and the unconscious is everything else that can’t seem to be brought to memory( largest portion of the iceberg underwater). Psychodynamics are the want or even need to and yet fear of something at the same time. The ego development is the movement from being dependent and almost infant like state to a more mature and independent state. Ego brought up a lot of different types of defense mechanisms, which were very interesting to read about. Object relation theory is how a person’s mental representations carry over from the childhood years to the adult years and how it affects the person’s personality.
I chose to look up more on the topic of humor as a defense mechanism. One article found had case where the kid used the mechanism very early it seemed. I wonder if someone told him what he was doing if it would change anything.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2005/oct/29/class_clown_uses_humor_defense_mechanism/
This article seemed to show how bad a mechanism was as compared to all the rest.
http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2004/08/psychiatry-101-defense-mechanisms.html
Terms: Psychodynamic perspective, contemporary psychodynamic theory, unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relation theory, preconscious, conscious, defense mechanisms.
Chapter 14 discusses unconscious motivation. Unconscious motivation is described as an individual’s control of their sexual and aggressive urges by placing them in the unconscious mind. Unconscious motivation can be described in three different perspectives; the conscious mind, the preconscious mind, and the unconscious mind. The conscious mind is the state of awareness. The person is fully aware of what they are doing at that very moment. I know that I am typing a blog right now, so this blog is what I am consciously thinking about. The preconscious mind is not something that you are thinking about, but it is something that you are capable of thinking about. It’s a thought or idea that you don’t think about until someone brings it up. A good example of this is when you are getting helping solving a math problem. Once someone else explains how you do it, you understand and remember that you were taught how to do that in class but couldn’t think how to solve it. Then the unconscious mind is a state of mind where you operate without having any awareness of doing so. Hypnosis is thought to happen in the unconscious mind; the person is doing things while not being aware that they are doing them. Sigmund Freud believed that the unconscious mind is full of repressed thoughts and ideas.
Freud also developed a theory that viewed motivation as an impulse-driven biological force. He called this the Dual-Instinct Theory. The Dual-Instinct Theory consisted of two opposing instincts; eros and thanatos. Eros is an instinct for life. It’s the driving force behind peoples need for sex, nurturance, and affiliation. Thanatos is just the opposite; it’s people’s instinct for death. Thanatos is the force behind people’s aggression towards themselves and others. While contemporary psychologists do believe that people have all of these instincts, there is no evidence that there is actual eros and thanatos force in our bodies. The contemporary psychodynamic perspective consists of the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory. The unconscious just states that most a person’s mental life happens when they are unaware of it. Psychodynamics is are two opposing metal processes. It is feeling two different emotions at the same time (ex: you can be excited and nervous all at once). Ego development is your mental process moving from immature to mature and independent. Object Relations Theory is the mental representation you have of yourself and others. These mental representations begin in childhood and then guide a person’s social and relationship motivations later in life.
Repression and suppression were also discussed in this chapter. Repression is the process of forgetting information or experiences that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic. Repression is extremely hard to examine because you can’t make someone remember something that they unconsciously forgot. Then suppression is ability to remove a though from the state of mind. It is like when you are trying to diet and all you can think about is a piece of chocolate cake; you just tell yourself to stop thinking about it and consciously move your mind to somewhere else. Suppressing memories or thoughts is a way many people deal with anxiety. There are 10 defense mechanisms that we use to suppress memories or thoughts; denial, fantasy, projection, displacement, identification, regression, reaction formation, rationalization, anticipation, humor, sublimation.
I thought that the different kinds of defense mechanisms was really interesting so I looked up more information on that. I found information that supported the text in chapter 14. Freud came up with these defense mechanisms because they are what we use to protect our id, ego, and superego. If we are do cannot keep the id, ego, and superego all in balance—we develop anxiety. Defense mechanisms help people to cope with their anxieties. We develop our defense mechanisms early in childhood and use them throughout our adult life. Freud believed that these mechanisms could help determine a person’s success (such as a person’s employment).
http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/ss/defensemech.htm
http://www.psychologyfitness.com/category/freuds-defense-mechanisms/
This chapter is about unconscious motivation and the school of psychoanalysis/psychodynamic studies. It goes on to state how important it is to study the unconscious because, through psychoanalysis, was can study topics such as traumatic memories, addictions, anxieties, dreams, fantasies, repression, etc. Sigmund Freud is noted to be the “father” of the psychoanalytic perspective with his views of motivation were based on two biological drives: sex and aggression. This supplied the body with both mental and physical energies. This is contradicted by contemporary psychoanalysts who believe there should be an importance in “wishes” and well as the “drives”.
The chapter than goes on to describe the four postulates that define contemporary psychodynamic theory. The first is the most of mental life is unconscious which states that most of our thoughts and feelings happen on a unconscious level and because of this people can act in ways that even surprise themselves. There are three views on the unconscious: the Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious (automatically appraises environment in order to make decisions and judgments) and the implicit motivation (rooted in all emotional associations that we link between our emotions and people, events, etc). The second postulate states that mental processes operate in parallel with one another. This is emphasized as “the rule” of psychodynamics. It states that people have conflicting feelings that motivate them in opposite ways. The third postulate is ego development. According to Freudian studies the ego develops motives of its own by moving though a progression of development. The ego essentially tries to move from a status of immaturity to one of self reliance. The fourth and last postulate states that mental representations of self/others form in childhood to guide adult motivations (object relations theory). It believes that lifelong personality patterns begin in childhood as people learn to construct mental representations. Once formed, these things will guide one through their adult life.
The first thing I looked up was psychotherapy. Turns out I have been through this sort of thing with my therapist (however, they don't really come old and tell you how they are picking your brain; at least not directly). However it didn't really work because I have bipolar disorder and a lot of approaches seemed to have crashed and burned in the process and reading this I think I realize it is because this is for people with more situational problems and not so much people who create the situational problems in their head like myself.
http://psychcentral.com/psychotherapy/
Second thing to grab my attention was suppression. Its something I have been trying to master for years. I have both racing and intrusive thoughts and I think and think about things I dont want to think about and its exhausting and just plain terrifying. This article really allowed some insight on why and how my brain is doing this and how it can be BAD for me to strive constantly to suppress some of these things. I actually read this one more than once.
http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/05/why-thought-suppression-is-counter-productive.php
Chapter fourteen focuses its attention on unconscious motivation. The chapter first discusses psychodynamic perspective which is the study of dynamic unconscious mental process. Psychoanalytic believe determines that motivation and behaviors are caused by biology and social interactions in childhood. This concept is associated with Sigmund Freud. Freud believed impulses from biological forces created motivation in ones actions; however, he emphasizes two categories: insisting for life (eros) and instinct for death (thantoes). Eros are the initiative needs in order to maintain life such as food, water, and sleep. Thatoes are bodily disturbances such as aggression.
Contemporary psychodynamic theory was created to accommodate the changes in life. There are four postulates used to define psychodynamic: unconscious, psychodynamic, ego development, and object relations theory.
First, the unconscious thought is their underlying motivation that lie outside everyday things that we are aware of. Freud separated the unconscious into three sections. First, the conscious thought, or short term memory. Second, the precocious which stores memories, feelings and through that are not present in the conscious. Thirdly, the unconscious that is most importantly associated with dreams.
Secondly, psychodynamics comes into play. Freud was focused on a person’s id and ego. Or the thought that people wanted and feared the same thing. Freud used two phenomenons to define itself repression and suppression. Regression is when one forgets experiences and pushes the thought out unintentional. Suppression is when one tries to remove a thought that already took place.
Thirdly, Ego is used. This is the development of ones ego going from an immature, dependent human to a more mature individual. Ego development is used to avoid anxiety and help a person act more proactively and effectively within society.
Fourth, object relations theory is a theory that one’s representation of self and others is created in childhood encounters that flow into adult motivations. Mental representations of one self can predict how they will act as an adult level.
I was interested in learning more about dreams, so I looked up the meaning of dreams. I found a dream dictionary where you can look up any type of dream and find out what they mean. For example, if you have a dream about earlobes, it is suggested that you are spiritually or ancestral connection. The second website I found taught me the difference of months in my dreams. For instance, spring is a sign for fortunate undertakings and cheerful companions. I think it is really interesting to learn about dreams. I didn’t know that each part of a dream, even on the small scale, plays a role in determining what your dream could mean.
http://www.dreammoods.com/
http://petrix.com/dreams/seasons.html
Chapter 14 covered unconscious motivation, and a lot of it included the work of Sigmund Freud.
The main idea is that our minds are made up of our super ego, ego, and id. The super ego is the critical, moral self. The id is the instinctual, aggressive self. The ego is the meeting ground and moderator between these two roles. According to Freud, our minds are full of mostly the unconscious thoughts, that we are not aware of. Psycho-dynamics explains that our conscious and unconscious minds run parallel to each other. A large concept behind the unconscious mind is the idea of repression, which is the forgetting of information through unconscious processes. The most popular example of this is the story of someone repressing something traumatic such as childhood sexual abuse, and later 'recalling' what happened. This is an unproven phenomenon, and is generally scoffed at by psychologists. However, repression is only one coping mechanism. The rest include denial (convincing oneself a traumatic event did no happen), displacement (redirecting an inappropriate impulse elsewhere), rationalization (generating acceptable reasons for an undesirable outcome), reaction formation (doing the opposite of the desired behavior), projection (projecting ones unacceptable behaviors onto others), and sublimation (convert unacceptable desires into acceptable ones).
We discussed how Freud is not really used in most area of psychology, but the general public sees him as a prominent psychological leader. I found articles detailing how China was showing a growing interest in Freud and psychoanalysis because of the release of the movie Inception. They want to better understand the meaning of their dreams because of the role of dreams in that movie, and Freud is still the major authority for that particular 'science'.
http://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/2011/01/30/freud%E2%80%99s-surging-popularity-in-china/
http://bx.businessweek.com/china-innovation/freuds-surging-popularity-in-china/9867656633369928861-b91d39d015ab469253a6b5aa87c9ea9a/
Chapter 14 discusses the unconscious as a source of motivation. The study of the unconscious is known as psychoanalysis and takes a rather pessimistic and deterministic view of human nature. This allows it to delve into sexual and more aggressive urges that can be found below the surface of human consciousness. The theory, pioneered by Sigmund Freud, has gained a great deal of criticism over the years for such things its classification of sex and aggression as biological drives as opposed to the more contemporary “psychological wish”. The theory has also been faulted for its deterministic nature, by which unconscious motivation occurs independently of human choice or thought. His dual-instinct theory centers upon two instinctual categories: eros (instincts for life) and thanatos (instincts for death). Examples of life-driven instincts are sex, nurturance, and affliation, while the death instincts include such aggressions as depression, self-criticism, anger, and prejudice. The contemporary psychodynamic theory that has developed out of Freud’s theories includes four different postulates. The first is that much of cognition occurs unconsciously. This means that people can often behave in ways that seem unusual, even to themselves. The second says that our mental processes work in parallel to one other, meaning that a person can desire and be afraid of the same thing simultaneously. The third postulate says that the ego develops from a socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and interdependent with others. And finally, the fourth postulate states that we form mental representations of self and others that serve to guide our later social motivations and relationships.
My sources deal with goal striving in relation to unconscious motivation. For both long and short-term goal setting the process is fairly similar – the unconscious identifies and responds to positively to objects and triggers in the environment that support the goal. When it comes to short-term goals, the unconscious will evaluate objects and form preferences based on whether the object will help an individual achieve the goal. But once a short-term goal is reached, those same objects will be evaluated differently. On the other hand, the unconscious deals differently with these objects during progress towards long-term goals. Moore says that, unlike with short-term finite goals, the unconscious will continue to positively value objects related to the long-term goals even after a level of success has been achieved. This phenomenon is though to be derived from the indeterminate nature of the goal.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02699931.2010.538598
http://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog/the-id-the-ego-the-super-ego-and-your-goals/
Chapter 14 deals with unconscious motivation. Unconscious motivation comes from places in our mind that we are not consciously aware of. There are three different viewpoints Freudian unconscious, adaptive unconscious, and implicit motivation. This perspective believes that the cause of motivation and behavior derives from biological causes and social impulses that determine our desires, thoughts, feelings and behaviors. These two statements draw the conclusion that many motivational impulses of an adult can be traced to situations that took place in their childhood years. Freud believed that the unconscious is mainly motivated by sex and anger.
Current studies in unconscious motivation claim that there are four postulates to current psychodynamic theory; unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory
Unconscious believes that much of our brain activity is unconscious and claims that our consciousness is similar to the tip of an iceberg with the rest of our brain working below the water and out of consciousness. We also have preconscious thoughts that can be readily accessed when the brain is commanded to do so. This field also believes the majority of our brain activity is unconscious and we have no control over it.
The second postulate has to do with how mental processes work together with each other. This helps to explain how we can have opposing thoughts or feelings at the same time.
The third postulate is ego development. This is the transition that we make as we grow older. We mature and become more dependent as time passes. People must change their personalities moving from the infantile symbiotic state to the impulsive state, to the self-protective state, to the conformity state, to the fifth state where an person internalizes rules and responsibility beings to have an effect on the actions of the individual, to the sixth and final stage the autonomous stage.
The last postulate claims that the way a person thinks about him or herself stays with that person from the time they are a child to adulthood and doesn’t change very much. If somebody believed they were highly sociable they would feel that way for most of their lives.
I decided to look at websites that discuss adaptive unconscious. I find it very interesting all of the different functions the adaptive unconscious serves for us and how resilient it is. Its amazing that our brains can work so well even with so many different and competing thoughts running through it.
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/2473
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/02/the_adaptive_unconscious.php
Chapter fourteen covers material though our unconscious motivation. The chapter begins with an evaluation of the psychodynamic perspective of psychology. Events from childhood memory can be traced from motivations across adulthood. Sigmund Freud was the founder of such unconscious psychoanalytic theory. There is a dual compartment of instinct theory. The first instinct involves a term called Eros, the life instinct. This places a strong emphasis on the need to survive and attributes to self-preservation. The second instinct is Thanatos, the death instinct. This exemplifies a way to conserve energy through rest, the maintenance to stay alive. Unconscious behaviors are inexplicably absent from the thoughts individuals realize. Freud composed three components to memory: the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Conscious involvement includes everyday thoughts that are apparent to the observer. Preconscious thoughts are those that are unobserved at a point in time, but were at some point conscious thoughts. The unconscious is repressed memory, though not accurately validated according to today’s term. Implicit motivation refers to our motivation and emotion outside of the conscious awareness. They are linked to emotional past experiences one has observed. Freud was able to observe factors in psychodynamics such as behaviors that were unconsciously clear to the individual. Freud was, and has, been continuously criticized for his works, and this includes the idea of his three personality ideals of the id, ego, and super ego. Infancy, according to Freud, was controlled by the id. Id involves the force of the person. The ego characterizes the personality component that counterbalances the id. The ego is important for developmental processes and the growth and development of the individual. It is an immature and conflicting part of the memory. The ego also deals with environmental challenges and imbalances of the demands from the id. Processes such as wishes are mental interpretations of the self and related to the object relations theory. The theory often stresses parental abuse or neglect and the negative impact that result from it.
I have always been fascinated with subliminal messages and the information that they portray to the unconscious mind. One article I have researched depicted Pixar and Walt Disney , very classical childhood movies, that indicate hidden messages. There is surrounding evidence as an attempt to elicit such material into the mind of children. The article describes scenes and instances where, mostly erotic material, is presented. This indicates that there may be some awareness by the company that these extremely quick visuals will elicit our unconscious mind into unexplainable behaviors.
Based on the importance of the unconscious throughout the chapter, my next website goes into more detail relating to what the unconscious is, as well as the concepts of the id, ego, and super ego. It further depicts the problems with Freudian theory, and the contradictory of concepts within the unconscious thought according to Freud. The article goes into detail about the id in terms of it’s uncontrollability and the chaos involved. The article says, “one cannot serve two masters at once”, which goes into detail of the conflict and controversy between the components of the id and ego.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1802/do-disney-movies-contain-subliminal-erotica
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/freudselection.html
chapter 14 was about Unconscious Motivation. this chapter started talking about the psychodynamic perspective. psychoanalysis is deterministic in that it holds that the ultimate cause of motivation and behavior derives from biologically endowed and socially acquired impulses that determine our desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. According to psychoanalysis people are more interested in getting sexual pleasure than they will admit. and people have blind rages, wild lusts, and parasitic infantile longings.
Psychoanalytic refers to practitioners who remain committed to most traditional freudian principals, whereas psychodynamic refers to the study of dynamic unconscious mental processes. so one can study unconscious mental processes inside or outside the freudian tradition.
Sigmund Freued viewed motivation as regulated by impulse driven biological forces. the human body was see as a complex energy system in which case some behaviors increased bodily energy (eating, breathing) and some behaviors depleted energy (working, playing). the source of all physical energy was biological drive ( or instinct) which was biologically rooted force emanating within the organism and penetrating to the mind. the first class of instincts; Eros, the life instincts , are the more easily defined of the two. Maintain life and ensure individual and collective survival. the second class of instincts; Thanatos- the death instincts; which push the individual toward rest, inactivity, and energy conservation.
Four Postulates define contemporary psychodynamic theory. the fist is much of mental life is unconscious. it argues that thoughts, feelings, and desires exsist at the unconscious level and because the unconscious mental life affects behavior people can behave in inexplicable ways. second psychodynamics: mental processes operate in parallel with one another. people often engage in behavior that they clearly did not wish to do (Will --->
http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=8742
talked about Repression and why it is important: To repress something means to put down something that wants to express itself;Repression is necessary, it is a social idea by nature (meaning it cannot occur in isolation). It describes a conflict between two or more things. It occurs when one thing puts another down; it is not present when two things cooperate or find a harmonious way to co-exist. Further, repression is necessary a sort of aggressive thing. Repression conveys the idea of the use of force or pressure. It involves a successful struggle between agendas that are not compatible, with one agenda winning out over another and enforcing itself in place of the other on a more or less permanent basis. For repression to successfully occur, one agenda must have struggled against the other, only to succumb to the dominant agenda, lose its public voice, and become submerged and forgotten.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab3PFwsdMfo
further discussed ego psychology.
Terms: will, drive, psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, counterwill, autonomous, ego, repression freudian unconscious, ego psychology
Chapter 14 focuses on an interesting area of the human brain, conscious, and the overall human experience: unconscious motivation. There are many different kinds of consciousness. There is nonconscious processes (like bodily functions), preconscious memories, consciousness (your state of awareness), self-awareness (who you perceive yourself to be and the events that make you that way), and of course, the unconscious (the thoughts and behaviors you have without awareness).
The concept of the unconscious has largely been a result of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. Freud’s theory was based on the principle that people had two basic instincts. One, we have EGOS (instinct for life), such as sex, nutrition, affiliation, etc. Two, we have THANATOS (instinct for death), such as aggression towards self (self-criticism) and aggression towards others (anger).
Nowadays, there are two other modern views on the unconscious mind besides Freud. There is the adaptive view, that says the unconscious makes goals, judgments, initiates actions, etc. The Implicit motivation view says that we have emotional associations with conscious experiences that are triggered events and then directs our behavior, thoughts, etc.
It is important to remember that mental processes operate with one another at the same time. People always have conflicting feelings that can pull there thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in multiple directions.
A third postulate of modern psychodynamics is ego development. This is based from Freud’s theories that we all have an ego, superego, and id. The id is the part of us that controls our unconscious drives, like aggression, according to Freud. The superego, on the other hand, is our “Jiminy Cricket” that helps restrict the id. The ego meets us in the middle, and is our conscious self that helps us figure out the balance between the two and drives out decisions and thoughts. Ego development is the process of the ego being able to gain the resources to control these impulses, so that we grow from immature and socially dependent to mature and independent.
Finally, a fourth postulate is Object Relations Theory. It argues that starting in childhood we begin to use our experiences to form our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us. These perceptions then direct our conscious motivations.
Although they are completely cliché due to the pop culture stereotype of psychology, I am particularly interested in the Id, Ego, and Superego. I’m interested because I remember it was one of the first psychological theories I was interested in when I was a senior in high school and took Intro to Psychology! Unfortunately, when browsing articles on the internet, it took me SEVERAL long minutes (hence the late post) to find even just two articles that didn’t simply explain the difference between the three, didn’t require a subscription, or wasn’t a quiz that determined which one you are.
I found an article that has relates the Id, Ego, and Superego to reaching your goals (perfect for this class!) It gives three primary ways to help reach your goals, knowing what the Id, Ego, and Superego are and what they try to do. He says to 1) Play to your strengths, since your superego will look to past successes and failures. 2) Start with smaller goals for bigger rewards. If you start smaller, then achieve your goal, your superego will use that success to move forward, while “the id is excited and the ego is happy.” 3) Communicate your success to your mind at different levels, which really helps paint the picture of success and will help you achieve more in the future.
I looked for over an hour for a good second article that interested me and was appropriate for the class, and I eventually caved and read one on how the novel Lord of the Flies relates to Freud’s Psychoanalytic theories. The book is about a group of boys whose plane crashes on an island. As the boys fight throughout and experience the island, we begin to see id, ego, and superego, develop and personify in different characters. For example, Jack is consistently driven by id the entire book, doing dangerous things without thinking them through. Another example is Ralph, who is chosen as the leader, is the personification of ego. He is reasonable, tries to get the group saved, gets them to get along, etc.
http://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog/the-id-the-ego-the-super-ego-and-your-goals/
http://www.digitaltermpapers.com/b3781.htm
Oh, and I never took the quiz, but I am guessing I would be id :-)
Chapter 14 focuses on the topic of unconscious motivation. Unconscious motivation is the motives for our automatic behaviors, or the things that happen to us rather than someone we choose or create. Sigmund Freud helped develop the basis for the idea of unconscious motivation with his theories of psychoanalysis. He believed that motivation was a result of biological forces that implicitly drove one to act or behavior in a certain way. These biological forces could be categorized as Eros, or the instincts that help us survive and remain living, or as Thanatos, or the instincts that help one relax, rest, and conserve energy. These ideas helped provide the basis for the psychodynamic theory that better explains unconscious motivation.
The psychodynamic theory, which is used more today, is made up of four postulates that better explain psychodynamics. The first postulate discusses the unconscious or mental processes stored in our inaccessible memory. The unconscious is classified as adaptive unconscious, Freudian unconscious or implicit motivation. Respectively, the unconscious is better described as the source for adaptive thoughts, the repressed memories or source of material for dreams, and place of motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments that operate outside a person’s conscious awareness.
The second postulate is the notion that mental processes function in a parallel manner. However, we still have the conflict between will or idea and counterwills or counterideas. This conflict is typically attributed to the difference between an id and ego. The id motivates one to obtain pleasure and avoid pain, whereas the ego motivates to hold pleasure until a need-satisfying object is available.
The third postulate is ego development, where one hopes to move from an immature, dependent person to become a more mature individual. There is a process involved with ego development that one moves through that helps them acquire different traits and “checkpoints” for maturing. This maturity process is the result of the ego being influenced more by the superego rather than the id. The fourth postulate is Object Relations Theory, which is the notion that we use our experiences to create perceptions of different situations. These perceptions are what then direct our motivation.
The idea of defense mechanisms seemed really interesting because as I read them in the book, I would think of a time that I utilized a defense mechanism to justify or distance myself from something. One article (http://psychcentral.com/lib/2007/15-common-defense-mechanisms/all/1/) listed more defense mechanisms, but some of these defense mechanisms could be condensed or incorporated into another broader defense mechanism. I also found another article (http://blog.self-improvement-saga.com/2011/01/ego-defense-mechanisms-examples) that listed 20 different defense mechanisms, but focused on how defense mechanisms are detrimental to success. They don’t look at any positive attributes of defense mechanism and see that justifying, distancing, or other actions of defense mechanisms just widens the gap in your opportunity to obtain success.
Terms: Unconscious motivation, Eros, Thanatos, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic theory, adaptive unconscious, Freudian unconscious, implicit motivation, will, counterwill, id, ego, ego development, superego, object relatiosn theory
Chapter 14 discusses how motivation can occur on the unconscious level. In the psychodynamic perspective, motivation stems from biologically endowed and socially acuired impulses that determine our desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, regardless if we want it to or not. In other words, motivation is something that happens to us, not something we choose to do. Because this perspective believes that the personality doesn't really change after puberty, most of our motivational impulses can be connected to events that took place in childhood. The psychodynamic perspective stems from Freud's psychoanaltyical approach (people are unconsciously driven by sexual and aggressive urges). However, researchers today do not fully agree with all of Freud's traditional principles about unconscious mental processes so they split off into the new area of the psychodynamic perspective.
One of the major controversial areas in which researchers disagree with Freud is the dual-instinct theory. Freud focused on two instincts: instincts for life and instincts for death. He believed that these instinctual drives were what created our motives and drives. Today, psychologists look at these drives as wishes. It is our wishes that motivate us to move from our present state to our ideal state.
There are four postulates that define contemporary psychodynamic theory. The first postulate is the unconscious. People's thoughts feelings, and desires exist at the unconscious level which affects their behaviors in ways that even they themselves cannot explain. There are 3 different views of the unconscious: the Freudian unconscious, adaptive unconscious, and implicit motivation. The Freudian unconscious is the basic idea of the unconscious in Freud's psychoanalytic theory. Freud divided the mind into the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. The conscious was the thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, and experiences that a person is aware of at any given time. The preconscious stores all the thoughts, feelings, and memories that are absent from immediate consciousness but can be retrieved into consciousness at anytime. The unconscious was the mental storage unit for inaccessible instinctual impulses, repressed experiences, childhood memories, and unfulfilled wishes and desires. Freud believed that it was the largest component of mental life. The adaptive unconscious is our "autopilot" function. As we go about our daily life, there are many unconscious processes going on around us that are happening automatically. The adaptive unconscious is constantly appraising the environment, setting goals, making judgments, and initiating action while our consciousness is preoccupied with other matters. The final view of the unconscious is implicit motivation. Implicit motivation are the motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgements that operate outside a person's conscious awareness. They tend to be linked to emotional experiences which direction our attention to certain environmental events.
The second postulate is psychodynamics. This is when mental processes operate in parallel with one another. The unconscious may feel one way but the conscious behaves, acts, or feels another. In psychodynamics, we again see Freud's idea that the mind is in constant battle with one another. The id is hedonistic, impulsive, involuntary and on an unconscious level. It motivates us to obtain pleasure and avoid pain immediately and without regard. The ego acts on both a conscious and unconscious level to keep our id in check by using defenses like repression (the process of forgetting information or an experience unconsciously, unintentionally, and automatically) and suppression (consciously, intentionally, and deliberately trying to remove a thought).
The third postulate is ego development. The ego is our personality which develops and matures over time. The ego develops through several states. The first is the symbiotic (infantile) stage where the ego is extremely immature and constantly overwhelmed by impulses. At this stage, the ego depends on the caretaker to provide for its welfare. As language develops, the ego moves into the impulsive stage where external forces limits the child's impulses and desires. As the ego starts to anticipate consequences and internalize rules, it moves into the self-protective stage where it uses this newly acquired knowledge to protect itself from foreseen consequences. The conformist stage follows which allows the societal rules to be fully internalized and the anxiety caused by group disapproval forces the ego to keep the id in check. The conscientious stage utilizes the internalized set of rules, the prosocial sense of responsibility to others, and a conscious level of awareness to continue to keep the id in check. Finally the ego will enter the autonomous stage where it is self-motivating and self-regulating. The ego develops to defend against anxiety. When we feel anxiety, it can be understood as our ego’s way of admitting its weakness. We use defense mechanisms (ego defense) to prevent being overwhelmed by our id impulses. There are several levels of defense mechanism. The lowest levels of defense mechanisms fail to recognize external reality. The next levels recognize reality but cast the disturbing aspects away from themselves, like projection. The next level deal with short term anxiety but cannot cope with long term stressors. The last levels are the most adaptive because they effectively channel our impulses into effective situations. Sublimation and humor are the most adaptive because they are socially acceptable and personally productive. Along with defending against anxiety, the ego develops to help the person to interact more effectively and more proactively with its surroundings (ego effectance). Ego effectance is a person’s individual competence in dealing with environmental demands and opportunities. It is the desire to interact effectively with the environment in a proactive rather than reactive way.
The last postulate is the object relations theory. The object relations theory is how people relate to objects/others in order to satisfy their emotional and psychological need for relatedness. It believes that lifelong personality patterns begin to form in childhood as the child begins to construct mental representations of their self, others, and relationships. Once these are formed, they provide the motivational states that direct the adult's interpersonal relationships.
While reading this chapter, I was interested in learning more about defense mechanisms. From previous classes, I know that people with substance abuse problems tend to employ the use of defense mechanisms to avoid the anxiety they feel about their addictions. Because this is a population of people that I will be interacting with a lot in my career, I decided to look more into how addicts use defense mechanisms. On http://www.egetgoing.com/drug_addiction/common_defenses.asp, I was somewhat surprised by the defense mechanisms they listed as be common among those with substance abuse issues. There were several that were listed in our text book but there were also some that weren't like blaming and minimizing. Upon a closer look at the definitions that they gave for blaming and minimizing, I realized that both could easily fall within the categories of rationalization and projection (which they listed as separate defense mechanisms).
Another interesting site that I found was http://policelink.monster.com/training/articles/1950-the-role-of-defense-mechanisms-in-detecting-deception. On this site, the article writes about how to spot defense mechanisms during a police interrogation or interview and how the use of the defense mechanism may imply guilt in the crime. I found it incredibly intriguing because the author gave examples of questions and possible answers that showed several different types of defense mechanisms that may help an officer detect deception. While I would be wary of it being a fool-proof method of determining guilt, I could see it as being an effective tool to help signal to the detective to pay a little more attention to the suspect.
Terms: unconscious motivation, psychodynamic perspective, psychoanalysis, dual-instinct theory, unconscious, Freudian unconscious, adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, psychodynamics, repression, supression, ego development, ego defense, sublimation, humor, ego effectance, object relations theory,
Chapter 14 is an overview of Unconscious Motivation. Freud’s “Fundamental Assumptions of Psychoanalytic Theory” says that individuals control their sexual and aggressive urges by placing them in the unconscious, where they take on a life of their own and become the motivated unconscious. “While we can be sure of what we want, think, and feel, we can have little idea as to the source of what we want, think and feel. Motivation can arise from a source outside our conscious awareness and volitional intent” (p. 392).
Consciousness includes such aspects as subjective experience, awareness of internal and external events, and altered awareness (sleep, drugs, etc.). There are three contemporary views on the unconscious. Freudian unconscious is an automatic appraisal of the environment. Adaptive unconscious involves goal-setting, making judgements, and initiating action. Implicit motivation stems from emotional associations that are cued by environmental events and which direct our attention and subsequent action.
Freud’s dual-instinct theory pits our instincts for life (Eros) against our instincts for death (Thantos), or sex vs. aggression. Aggression can be directed inwardly (depression or self-criticism) or outwardly (anger or prejudice). Similarly, phycho-dynamics oppose conscious volition/will(Ego) with unconscious counter-will (Id). Ideas and desires compete unconsciously with counter ideas, repression, inhibition, and guilt for our attention, with our conscious supression acting as the gatekeeper -- removing thoughts from attention by ways that are conscious, intentional and deliberate. The contemporary psycho-dynamic theory is defined by four postulates: (1) the unconscious (most of mental life is unconscious) (2) psycho-dynamics (mental processes operate in parallel with one another, wanting and fearing the same thing at the same time) (3) ego development (a socially dependent personality develops into a more mature and socially inter-dependent one) and (4) object relations theory (mental representations of self and others form in childhood and guide adult social motivations).
The ego’s defense against anxiety, distress, and depression is to employ a variety of coping mechanisms. Among them are repression, denial, displacement, rationalization, reaction formation, projection, and sublimation.
I had wondered why the topic of “love” hadn’t been covered yet, even in the chapters on emotion or personality, so I was curious to see what Box 14 on page 412 had to say about “Love as an Attachment Process” (especially under the umbrella of Unconscious Motivation). When I have taken questionnaires in the past, I never fit neatly into a specific category -- I am typically a contradictory blend of multiple labels. With the Hazan/Shaver Attachment Theory questionnaire, however, I was able to very quickly and very confidently identify myself with the third statement: “I find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I worry that others don't really love me or that others don’t really want to stay with me. I want to merge completely with others, especially love partners, and this desire sometimes scares people away.” This “anxious attachment style” seems to explain my, well, issues with anxiety, and how they have effectively sabotaged my past relationships. As the book describes, “Anxiously attached lovers experienced love as an obsession, a desire for constant reunion and reciprocation, and as an extreme attraction and extreme jealousy that produced emotional highs and lows.” So why am I like this? What happened in my childhood that contributed to me becoming an anxiously-attached adult? Mary Ainsworth’s “Strange Situation” research studied children age 12-18 months and how they responded to being left in a room (strange situation) without their primary caregiver. Theoretically, if I were to trace my style back to myself at that age, I would fit this description, “Unable to use caregiver as a secure base, seeking proximity before separation occurs. Distressed on separation with ambivalence, anger, reluctance to warm to caregiver and return to play on return. Preoccupied with caregiver's availability, seeking contact but resisting angrily when it is achieved. Not easily calmed by stranger. In this relationship, the child always feels anxious because the caregiver's availability is never consistent.” The matching caregiver’s behavior is described as, “Inconsistent between appropriate and neglectful responses. Generally will only respond after increased attachment behavior from the infant.” Was my mom really neglectful? I do remember being clingy as a child...did that drive my mom away, or was it because she was not available consistently? I am the youngest of four kids, and my mom suffered from severe depression -- exacerbated by marital separation when I was 4. All throughout school, however, I was successful, sociable, likable, and confident -- rarely anxious. In my adolescence, however, my obsessive tendencies came to light. When I got into something, I got into it passionately! I didn’t have my first boyfriend until college, so I was never given a chance to demonstrate obsessiveness (except through my heart-wrenching unrequited crushes). But once I did start dating, my relationships fit the description above. A couple of years ago I had a psychic reading done on Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts. One of the things she “knew” was that as a child, I had to play the role of a caregiver -- instead of just being a kid. Because my mom was sick (mentally and physically), I learned to be very independent very early. While I didn’t have to take care of her (or anyone else really), I did have to take care of myself. This may explain the inconsistency in her availability, and why I developed into such an anxious, “clingy” adult. Since research has shown that parents tend to pass on their on attachment styles, I’d like to learn how to “overcome” my own insecurities so that if I ever have the opportunity to have a child, I can raise her to be secure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory#Clinical_practice_in_adults_and_families
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_in_adults#Extending_attachment_theory