Chapter 14 explains the concept of unconscious motivation, which states motivation comes from biological and social impulses that tends to happen rather than us choosing it (largely by negative things such as aggression, anxiety, and defense mechanisms). It’s also important to explain that Freud’s psychoanalysis began the emphasis of the unconscious mind, but psychodynamics (which is not totally consistent with Freud’s principles) is the more popular approach of the two today.
The roots of all this can be traced back to Freud’s Dual-Instinct Theory, in which the body increased or decreased energies through biological drives (instincts). There were two types of instincts: life instincts (survival behaviors) and death instincts (inactivity, which was linked to aggression and depression). The idea was that people went through psychosocial development (personality development) by experiencing their surroundings, and learned to manage sexual and aggressive drives. However, contemporary psychoanalysts dropped sex and aggression from drive concepts, because they didn’t match physiological models, and were instead considered psychological wishes. An important difference between modern psychoanalysts and psychodynamic therapists is instead to trying to focus on intrapersonal and biological forces, psychodynamics focuses on interpersonal and cognitive forces.
Psychodynamics is constructed on four principles dealing with the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object-relations theory. First, the unconscious is assumed to contain most mental life via shadow phenomena (indirect perception). Freud believed the unconscious controlled the primary process and the conscious controlled the secondary process of this urges. The entire idea has had lasting debates and split into three views. The Freudian unconscious states there are a conscious for memories and feelings, a preconcious for unconscious but retrievable thoughts, and an unconscious for inaccessible impulses. Adaptive unconscious states one’s unconscious acts sort of as autopilot to deal with the environment while our conscious thought focuses on other things. Finally, implicit motivation is emotional imprints that affect our behavior based on the quality of the underlying emotion.
The second principle of psychodynamics is ironically termed psychodynamics, which describes one’s struggle between the id and the ego. This arises in us when approached with things we want but also fear, such as marriage. Furthermore, our thoughts can be affected by repression or suppression. Repression is when we unconsciously forget information and avoid situations that may help reemerge it. Suppression is when we consciously try to forget something, which does not work but actually ends up getting fixated on our minds. It does; however, serve a useful purpose to inhibit us from social outbursts in public.
The third principle is ego development, which brings us to maturity and independence. It begins with the symbiotic stage when we are infants and a caregiver tends our needs, because we are overwhelmed with impulses. The impulsive stage uses external force to regulate our behaviors (i.e. time out). The self-protective stage arises when we realize there are rules and consequences (i.e. grounded for missing curfew). The conformist stage regulates our behavior using disproval. The conscience stage relies on our internal selves. Finally, we develop autonomous ego to mediate anxiety using defense mechanisms. Defense mechanisms range by maturity, denial and fantasy being the most immature. Projection is at the next level, because it recognizes reality. Reaction formation and rationalization are the most common, and deal with short-term anxiety well, but not long-term. Finally, sublimation and humor are the most mature, because they accept reality. The ego also helps build confidence to deal with the environment effectively (called ego effectance).
The final principle is object-relations theory. This deals with how childhood mental representations of their caregivers are reflected in their future personalities. Furthermore, it explains how they use other people to satisfy their own sexual and social needs. The qualities of their representations of relationships are based on good vs. bad unconscious tone, level of emotional involvement, and mutual autonomy. Although it’s been around awhile, psychodynamics does not go without its criticisms. Mainly, it cannot be tested for the most part and many testable points were refuted. Another popular criticism is despite understanding the past well enough; it fails to give predictive power to situations, making real-life applications difficult.
Something that stood out to me, which I’ll likely remember from this chapter was the segment on subliminal messaging. This was an interesting aspect, because it took the concept of the unconscious and applied it to real-life scenarios. I’ll probably remember this particular section, because I find hypnotic-type information interesting. I also did a high school project for psychology on the effects of hypnotism (which included subliminal messaging). During my research, I found many examples of (supposedly) messages in movies and songs, which has sort of remained in the back of my head when interacting with music or movies (I try to analyze my feelings afterward and use that stimulus in case I want that specific emotion again). Basically, the subliminal messaging section was consistent with an already established interest of mine and will not likely be forgotten anytime soon.
Chapter 14 dealt with unconscious motivation and items that were related to unconscious motivation. Unlike the motivation that we have talked about thus far, this type of motivation occurs when you don't even know it is. The first thing that the chapter talks about is the psychodynamic persepective. This approach presents a largely deterministic and pessimistic image of human nature. It is deterministic because 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. This theory also says that much of the motivation impulses that we feel as adults comes from events that you had as a child. This means that motivation comes across as something that happens to us rather than something we choose. It is an innate impulse. There is a theory that arises from the psychodynamic perspective. Dual-instinct theory is what I am talking about. Sigmund Freud is the person who founded this theory as his own and he talks about two significant instincts in which we live our lives by. The first one is life instincts. These instincts refer to food, water, air, sleep, and others that contribute to survival of an individual. The second type of instincts that are talked about is death instincts. These instincts push the individuals toward rest, inactivity, and energy conservation. Freud focused this instinct on talking about aggression. Since Freud, the psychodynamic theory has changed significantly. The four big changes relate to the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory. I will talk about these in the rest of this discussion.
With the unconscious, it talks about it simply as saying that much of mental life is unconscious. Freud talked about the unconscious. He rejected the idea that conciousness, was the essence of mental life and therefore divided the mind into three components which include the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. He referred to the unconscious as the mental storehouse of inaccessible instinctual impulses, repressed experiences, childhood memories, and strong but unfulfilled wishes and desires. The chaapter goes into talking about the adaptive unconscious. This runs on automatic pilot as it carries out countless computations and innumerable adjustments during acts such as tying your shoes, driving a car, or playing the piano for example. Implicit motivation is talked about and it 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 judgements. Psychodynamics is talked about next. The main concept that is talked about here is the clashing of will and counterwill. Freud talked about psychodynamics as concerned with the conflict between the id and the ego. One concept that is talked about in this section is suppression. It refers to the process of removing a thought by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate. The next section talks about ego development which is the healthy development that involves moving from an immature, socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and interdependent with others. When referring to the development of ego, they talk about symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. There is also something called ego defense which helps us to reduce anxiety and depression. The last section refers to the object relations theory. This theory is all about mental representations of self and others form in childhood that guide the person's later social motivations and relationships.
I think the thing that I am going to take away from this chapter is the discussion on if the id and ego actually exist. I have always heard of the id and ego and also remember it specifically from my intro to psychology class that I took. I didn't really know that there was a discussion on whether it actually existed or not. They mainly talk about difference biological responses in the body when they are discussing this topic. I feel like the author believes that there is an id and an ego(also can't forget about the superego which they don't talk about in this book). More contemporary research says otherwise though.
Terms: Psychodynamic perspective, Unconscious mind, Life Instincts, Death Instincts, Dual Instinct Theory, Adaptive Unconscious, Suppression, Ego Development, Ego Defense, Object Relations Theory
Chapter 14 talks about unconscious motivation. Automatically my mind think to Freud and the Id, Ego, and the Superego. Psychoanalytic theory does in fact apply here and the chapter talks about Freud and his various ideas. First we start out with Psychodynamic principals. This approach is largely pessimistic image of the mid. They say you can trace many motivational aspects back to your childhood. This theory also places the spotlight on sexual urges and conflicts. One theory the chapter discusses is Dual-Instinct Theory. In this Sigmund Freud identified two major class of instincts. Eros of life and Thantos of death instinct. These two would provide motivation of behavior. On another hand contemporary Psychodynamic theory suggests that some of Freud's concepts were correct. Those include the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development and object relations theory.
The unconscious is believe to be a hidden part of the mind that is unknown to anyone and contains urges and impulses. Freud believed that one must vent this urges and impulses. We now agree with Freud when saying that many motivational aspects lie beyond our conscious awareness. Freud also believe that we vent our unconsciousness in our dreams which is why he went on to develop dream analysis. The adaptive unconscious is a system that is said to adapt to the environment, set goals, make judgement s and initiate action. During this the conscious mind is thinking about something else. Implicit motivation is all the motives, emotions, attitudes and judgement that operate outside of our awareness of it. Implicit is more about processes that are indirect and implied. Finally in the last section under the unconscious we have subliminal motivation. This includes subliminal advertising. To subliminally activate one's unconscious information, a stimuli is presented at a weak energy level for a brief time. After research on this topic is shows that subliminal advertising is ineffective.
Next we have psychodymics. Under this topic we have repression, suppression and id and ego existence. Repression is what keeps some thoughts unconscious and others conscious. This could be thought like those that don't fit into our self schema about ourselves. This is the process of forgetting information by ways that are unconscious and automatic. Suppression is the ability to stop a thought. This is impossible for human to achieve, you cannot stop a thought once is has occurred. Suppression can be an ally allowing people to suppress actions and thoughts when they are occurring in a not socially acceptable environment. Finally we talk about id and ego existence. The chapter states that the limbic structures make a good id and the neocortex qualifies as the ego. So in this instances yes they do exist.
Next we move onto Ego Psychology. The ego is the process of maturation that is independent for the id. The ego develops through out age and is the system that curbs instincts. When we are infants the ego is under matured and we consistently succumb to our instincts. Our developing ego helps us to defend against anxiety and to empower person's to interact better with their environment. Ego defenses refers to the deference mechanisms that Freud came up with. These protect the person from anxiety. Finally we have ego effectance. this is concerned with the individual's competence in dealing with challenges and demands in their world. This can develop in skills and coping responses.
Lastly we discuss object relations theory. This is focused on the nature and development of mental representations of the self and others on the effective processes. Really, it is the study of how childhood representations of one's caretakers are captured and those personality traits are ingrained and persist through out adulthood. This stresses the importance of proper parenting and the suffering from abuse. This can be very determinate of how a child may grow and the person they may become as an adult.
Chapter 14 focuses on unconscious motivation. The main topics that go along with this chapter are the psychodynamic perspective, the unconscious, and psychodynamics in general, ego psychology and the relations theory.
The psychodynamic perspective states that our motivation and drive come specifically from our biology; in that it is determined by our desires, thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Psychodynamic theory is something that is actually very popular in that people are very interested in the topic. Human nature is an interesting topic and it is something that related to psychoanalysis. It honestly relates to everything, and like the text said, it takes us to where nothing else has. It relates to our dreams, unconscious, fantasies, and every little force in the world that relates to our motivation and our emotions. Yet, even though back in the day psychodynamic and psychoanalytic could be used interchangeably, today many practitioners differ in many ways. Psychoanalytic relates to the Freudian process, and some people do not feel comfortable relating to that such thing. Psychodynamic deals with the study of unconscious mental processes. The dual instinct theory relates to Freud and this theory states that our emotions come from impulses that come from biological forces. Freud believed that there were too many needs, so instead he came up with instincts. There are two of these: instincts for life as well as instincts for deaths. Instincts for life are called Eros. This relates to our ability of survival. Death instincts are called Thanatos, which take us towards rest and inactivity. It is stated that it is these that motivate our behaviors, energizes our behavior and shows us which direction to go to. Although this is still looked and at practiced, we have come a long way since Freud. There is now contemporary psychodynamic theory. This is more modern and contemporary, and really does not really relate to Freud and his theory. This relates to four different areas: the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development and object relations theory.
The unconscious is something that has been debated throughout the years when it comes to Freud and his theories. Freud divided things up into three categories: The conscious, preconscious and unconscious. It then goes on to talk about adaptive unconscious, which is related to an automatic pilot. It states that it is very good at what it does, such as set our goals, make judgments, and constantly think. Implicit motivation is the next branch discussed in the book. This relates to all of our inner motives, such as emotions, attitudes, judgments, etc. It was stated that we need to make sure that we recognize that this relates to our emotions and our emotional experiences.
Psychodynamics was the next topics explained in the chapter. Freud started to realize that people did many things that they did not often want to do, so he started thinking more deep into it. This then relates to something called the id and ego. Motivations that related to the id were things that were unconscious. Yet with the ego, these were partly conscious and partly unconscious. Although many people do not realize it (according to the text), repression was the central concept of Freud’s psychodynamics. This is the process of forgetting information. It is something that is very hard to test because it is obviously hard to ask people things that they do not remember. Suppression is the next topic that relates to psychodynamics. People rely on this throughout their lives to control their thoughts. Ego psychology was the next topic that was covered in the text, this was pretty much just explain the ego development, which explains how it grows with age, and how it starts out when we are very young, and then it is extremely immature, but as we grow, it grows. Ego defense was also talked about in the next section, which explains our defense mechanisms and how it relates to our ego. The last topic explained was the relations theory, which I already discussed a little. This refers to the nature and development of our mental representations of our self and others.
I think that there are many things from this chapter that I am going to remember; mostly because it is stuff that I have already somewhat learned in other classes that I have taken. Yet, one thing that I thought as interesting and that I will remember is the section about the id and ego, do they really exist. Ever since I took my first psychology class in high school we have discussed the id and ego, and there was never a question of do they actually exist. I thought it was just something that we already knew. Now I guess this is something that can be kept in mind while thinking about the id and ego.
This chapter focused on the unconscious motivations. As soon as I read the title of this chapter, automatically Freud popped into my head. And of course Freud's view of motivation and how it affects us was the main concept of this chapter. Psychoanalysis has a pessimistic feel to it because it focuses on bad experiences and memories in the unconscious and how we deal with those. There are four main postulates that describe the psychodynamic theory.
The first focus is the unconscious and that the majority of mental life is unconscious such as desires, thoughts and feelings. There were 3 views on the unconscious. The first is Freudian unconscious. Freud said that there is a conscious which is aware and available at any time, a preconscious which is absent from mind, but can be called forth to conscious when prompted to and the unconcsious which is full of repressed experiences and memories, most negative. The second view is the adaptive unconscious which is the unconscious automatically evaluates the environment, makes judgements and decides their goals. The third view is implicit motivation which is the emotions and attidues that are in the unconsicous, they are emotional experiences.
The second postulate is psychodynamics. Freud talks about how people do things they don't want to, like if you have OCD and have ritual you must perform. This is will vs. conterwill, the conflict between the id and the ego. Freud talks about the defenses that are used, such as repression which acts like a security guard. To repress something is to hide something so that you don't remember it and it doesn't affect your every day actions. Suppression is another act of defense, which is when someone stops a thought. To me this is impossible, because when someone tells me to stop thinking or want a certain thing, its all I can think about!
The third postulate is ego psychology. This talks about the development of the ego. There are six developmental stages to the ego. The process starts at symbiotic, which is overwhelmed by impulses than moves onto impulsive, which is when outside sources (rules) impact your thoughts and desires. Next is the self protective defensiveness followed by the conformist which is the anxiety of group rejection (bet this happens during middle school/high school!). Than is the conscientious stage which is following your own rules and accepting responsibility. And the final stage is autonomous. This person has their own thoughts and goals that they came up with, without any outside sources. The ego is always vulnerable so they must grow in strength and use defense mechanisms to learn how to cope with life.
The last postulate is object relations theory. This is how people relate to others to satisfy their emotional needs for relatedness, and that it starts in childhood (id). Mental models, positive or negative, affect adult levels of confidence, careers, relationships etc.
A lot of this stuff in this chapter is very interesting, and I have learned a little bit about it in other psych classes. The one thing that I really find interesting and stuck out to me was about the adaptive unconscious. People are able to make a pretty accurate judgment of others emotions in less than a second due to their facial expressions. This reminds me of the MIT activity that we did a couple weeks back where we saw the facial expression and had to see if we could figure it out. I find it interesting that it doesn't take much time at all to get the other persons feeling. First impressions really do matter!
Good old Freud. He is often the person people associate with psychology, which can be seen as both a good thing and a bad thing. Sigmund Freud established the psychoanalysis perspective, which focuses on unconscious mental processes such as repression or suppression. The psychodynamic perspective, which is related to psychoanalysis but not synonymous with it, has a mostly deterministic and pessimistic view of human nature. The emphasis is placed on sex, aggression, conflict, and other flaws in human nature. While psychoanalytic refers to traditional Freudian principles, psychodynamic refers to the study of dynamic unconscious mental processes (such as prejudice or depression). This is important because this means a psychologist can take a psychodynamic approach without adhering to the psychoanalytic framework.
According to Freud’s Dual-Instinct Theory, impulse-driven biological forces regulate motivation. He emphasized two categories of motivation: 1) instincts for life (Eros) and 2) instincts for death (Thanatos). Life instincts maintain life and ensure individual and collective (species) survival. This includes self-preservation (individual survival) needs such as food, water, air and sleep and species preservation needs such as sex, nurturance, and affiliation. Freud placed the most emphasis on sex. On the other hand, death instincts push the individual towards rest, inactivity, and energy conservation. The main emphasis for this type of motivation is on aggression. This aggression can be directed at the self, possibly resulting in depression, suicide, or alcoholism, or it can be directed at others, possibly resulting in anger, hate, prejudice, murder, or war. The underlying idea behind Dual-Instinct Theory is that these innate drives (life instincts and death instincts), which originate from impulse-driven biological forces, provide the energy for behaviors.
However, contemporary psychoanalysts do not adhere to Freud’s Dual-Instinct Theory because sex and aggression do not fit the cyclical pattern seen in drives (such as thirst and hunger). Instead, contemporary psychoanalysts adhere to the “wish model”, which says that motivation comes from psychological wishes. The idea behind psychological wishes is that individuals are aware (consciously or unconsciously) of their present state and ideal state, and this discrepancy generates motivation to act so as to attain their ideal state (sounds familiar, huh?). This is just one example of how contemporary psychoanalysts reinterpreted Freud’s theories.
There are four main postulates in contemporary psychodynamic theory: 1) much of mental life is unconscious, 2) mental processes operate in parallel with one another, 3) healthy development involves moving from an immature, socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and interdependent with others and 4) mental representations of the self and others form in childhood that guide the person’s later social motivations and relationships.
The chapter then focuses in depth on each postulate. The unconscious is a difficult thing to study because it cannot be known directly. Instead, researchers must use indirect approaches. Some of the early research on the unconscious included hypnosis, dream analyses, and Freudian slips. But even with its difficulties, it is now accepted that much of mental life is unconscious. There are three main views of the unconscious: 1) Freudian unconscious, 2) the adaptive unconscious, and 3) implicit motivation.
The Freudian unconscious divides the mind into three parts: the 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, on the other hand, stores all the thoughts, feelings, and memories that are absent from the immediate consciousness but can be readily retrieved into consciousness with little effort. Most importantly, the unconscious is the mental storehouse of inaccessible instinctual impulses, repressed experiences, and strong but unfulfilled wishes and desires. Because the unconscious is inaccessible, Freud used techniques such as dream analysis to study it indirectly. There are two types of dream content: latent and manifest content. Manifest content is the storyline of the dream, or the defensive façade whereas the latent content is the underlying meaning and wishful core. It is in the latent content that the unconscious becomes known. In other words, Freud felt that dreams were meant to be venting functions for unconscious desires. However, we now know that Freud’s concept of dreams is way too narrow. Dreams serve many purposes, including neurophysiological activity, memory consolidation, stress-buffering or coping, and problem solving functions.
The second model for the conscious is the adaptive unconscious, which acts almost like an automatic pilot. It appraises the environment, sets goals, makes judgments, and initiates action all while we are consciously thinking about something else. The last model for the unconscious is implicit motivation, which refers to all those motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments that operate outside a person’s conscious awareness and are fundamentally distinct from self-report motives, emotions, and judgments. Implicit motivation is linked to emotional experiences. However, in order for implicit motivation to affect behavior, a person must be mindful of their emotional reactions to certain situations. Mindfulness is defined as a receptive attention to and awareness of present events and experiences.
The next postulate is discussed in the chapter is psychodynamics. Freud saw the human mind as a conflict between the will (Id) and a counterwill (Ego). This clashing of forces is what he meant by the term psychodynamics. For Freud, psychodynamics concerns the conflict between the personality structures of the Id, Ego, and Superego. The Id is unconscious, involuntary, impulse-driven, and hedonistic (or pleasure driven), whereas the Ego is partly conscious and partly unconscious, steeped in defenses, and organized around a delay of gratification (or reality principle). Some concepts central to psychodynamics include repression (the process of forgetting info or an experience by ways that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic) and suppression (the process of removing a thought by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate). Interestingly, research has found support for the existence of the Id and the Ego.
The third postulate concerns the nature of the Ego and its development (“Ego Psychology”). While we are born with the impulse-driven Id, our Ego develops and matures through learning and experience. There are actually five stages of Ego development (symbiotic > impulsive > conformist > conscientious > autonomous ). The more mature the Ego becomes, the more self-motivating and self-regulating it becomes. However, the Ego is always in a state of vulnerability, and therefore we need defense mechanisms to protect the Ego. There are fourteen defense mechanisms that exist in a hierarchy from least mature/adaptive to most mature/adaptive. The maturity level of a person’s defense mechanisms is called their Ego strength, which can predict life adjustment and psychological well-being. Our Ego can also be strengthened when we effectively interact with our environments. This is called Ego effectance, which concerns the individual’s competence in dealing with environmental challenges, demands, and opportunities. When we have multiple positive experiences interacting with the environment, these perceptions and feelings accumulate into a general sense of competence. When there is a high level of Ego effectance, a person often reacts in approach-oriented behaviors towards their environment.
The last postulate in the psychodynamic theory relates to object relations theory. Initially, Freud thought drives came from biological forces, but now they are thought to come from psychological sources (remember those things called psychological wishes?) For instance, sexual behavior is not driven by a need for sexual gratification, but by the psychological need for relatedness. Object Relations Theory studies how people relate to objects (others) to satisfy that emotional and psychological need for relatedness. More specifically, object relations theory focuses on the nature and development of the mental representations we have created for ourselves and others. Our mental representations are formed in early childhood, with the parent-child relationship as a template for later relationships. If the relationship between the child and parent is positive, then the person will be able to develop and relate to others in ways that are healthy, growth-oriented, and resistant to psychopathology.
The one thing I will remember from this chapter is that even though many of Freud’s theories have been refuted in empirical studies, he has made significant contributions to the field of psychology. It has been hard for me to determine how I feel towards Freud because while some of my professors seem to view Freud as a dark mark on psychology’s history, others seem to be completely devoted to his teachings. Taking the middle road seems to be the most difficult, because it requires that you evaluate every theory that Freud had and what contemporary research has found. I think this chapter clearly illustrates that many of Freud’s ideas have developed into a prominent field of thought (psychodynamics) that does have empirical evidence to support it. However, there are criticisms mentioned in the book and it seems to me that this approach (psychodynamics) aims to improve its theories by addressing those concerns.
Reeves starts off chapter 14 with psychodynamic perspective in the chapter that explains unconscious motivation. Psychodynamic perspective says that biological nature and social ques determine our motivation and the behaviors following. Freud came up with this theory very early on, but called it psychoanalytic theory instead. The terms were synonymous, but basically now it just means that one can study mental processes inside or outside freudian perspectives.
In Freud's dual-instinct theory he states that there are two main categories that drive us, the instincts for life and the instincts for death. The first class of instincts for life called Eros are very simple in nature. They are motivations that keep us alive like the drive for food, water, sleep, oxygen, sex, etc. The second category is a called Thanatos and they are the death instincts. These behaviors are basically anything that moves us towards self-destruction like alcohol, drugs, gambling, aggression, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Although these instincts play an important role in Freud's theory they are still regulated by what he calls personality that is fully developed just after puberty. There are many criticism of this theory and today we look more towards a 4 postulate construct of psychodynamic theory. The first is the unconscious made up of mental life constructs. The second is psychodynamics which takes all mental processes and makes them work in parallel unity. The third is the development of the ego. This basically means that you mature from being socially dependent child to a socially responsible adult. The final one is the objects relation theory which takes our early associations and helps shape our future perspectives.
Reeves discusses four types of unconscious. Freud asserts in his ideas about unconscious, subconscious, and conscious that we experience in the conscious, place in the subconscious during the day and then during our dreams those experiences are played about in a randomized dream sequence that can be later analyzed by a professional. Adaptive conscious was theorized by studying a patient who had his hippocampus removed in order stop seizures. Researchers found that when they brought him to the lab day in and day out he never remembered being there. So they believed that the unconscious was in fact adaptive in nature. Implicit motivation is the next topic Reeves discusses. Implicit motivation is hard to study because it is not found through self-report data because it happens without us thinking. Basically whenever we encounter an emotion activating event we already feel the emotion before we have time to really analyze what we are feeling. Many times people are scared when someone jumps out and they react accordingly and its only after many seconds that people will say, "Jeez you scared me!"
The basics of contemporary psychodynamics says that people are motivated in such different ways that we all want different things out of life and we also want the things that oppose those wants as well. A great example is the way we have racist beliefs socially, but morally we know that we shouldn't.
Reeves also talks about the development the ego. Going from an immature irresponsible child to a well rounded adult. The development includes many areas like symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientiousness, and autonomy. Through development as an adolescent we gain tools and resources that help us develop into beings that can function and defend in the contemporary world. When we reach this stage we have fully developed the ego, although technically we really never stop learning.
The postulate of objects relation theory is the last postulate that says personalities are created through relations. As we age we make associations with objects, people, places, and situations and as our personality develops we become accustomed to circumstances. We develop both positive self models and negative self models that guide our behavior based on the way we have adapted in the past during development. These four postulates guide what our motivation does in the conscious, subconscious, and the unconscious.
I've always been interested in what makes up our dreams and how they can be explained. Although many people have since thrown many of Freud's ideas out the window I found Unconscious theory of dream venting very interesting. The fact that our daily interactions don't dwell in our present state of thought, but rather they linger in "the back of the mind" or the subconscious. Only later do those events play out in a weird way during a random sequence of dreaming. Until science can come up with a definitive answer I can except this notion as well as any other.
This chapter looks at the unconscious motivation of human beings and the psychoanalytical perspective. This means topics such as traumatic memories, revenge, fantasies, and hypnosis - basically all the stuff a person thinks about but doesn't want to directly discuss with their neighbor. Overall it reflects what is popular in contemporary movies at a particular time. For example, sex, aggression, psychopathology, revenge and the like. The father of the psychoanalytical perspective is Sigmund Freud. He developed this biologically based model that displays 2 instinctual drives of sex and aggression supplied to the body with physical and mental energies. This is the dated ways of looking at it but today contemporary psychoanalysts have modified the motivation importance of the psychoanalytical perspective. They now emphasize motivational importance of psychological wishes rather than the biological drive. They also included the cognitive informational processing. This retains the idea that Freud's motivation but overcomes the contradictory evidence that sex and aggression don't function like the psychological drive does. They are completely different.
There are four different contemporary postulates that explain the psychodynamic theory. The first principle says that mental life is unconscious. Our thoughts, feelings, and desires exist at an unconscious level the majority of the time. Because the unconscious mental life affects our behavior, people will behave in ways that they can't explain. There are also different views on the unconscious, first the Freudian view, secondly, the adaptive unconscious, and lastly the implicit motivation. The adaptive unconscious automatically appraises the environment, sets different goals, makes judgements, and initiates action while consciously thinking about something else. For example, something as simple as tying your shoes or driving a car, one doesn't consciously think about these events once they are experienced. The implicit motivation is rooted in an emotional association that lies outside our conscious awareness when cued by encountering environment events. This orients, directs, and selects our attention toward people that automatically link to the emotional environment events. Lastly, Freud's rejected the conscious and divided the mind into three parts: the conscious, preconscious, and the unconscious. The unconscious served as the mental storehouse of instinctual impulses, childhood memories, and represses experiences.
The second postulate is the one of psychodynamics. This is the mental processes that operate in parallel with another where people commonly want and fear the same thing at the same time. Basically it follows the rule and not the exception that people have conflicting feelings that motivate them in opposite ways. For example, racial attitudes, gender biases, love/hate relationships with parents, or jobs. The third postulate is about ego development. It states that healthy development of the ego involves moving from an immature, socially dependent personality to one that is mature and socially responsible. The ego develops motives of its own by moving through the progression of symbiosis, impulsiveness, self protection, conformists, conscientiousness, and autonomy in order to cope with the anxieties of life. It also helps provide a sense of competence that gives a generative capacity for changing environments for the better. The last postulate deals with object relations. This is understanding the mental representations of the self and others formed in childhood to guide adult social motivation. Life long personality patterns begin to form in their childhood as people construct mental representations of themself, others, and relationships. Once these are formed the beliefs forms the basis of motivational states guiding an adult in their interpersonal relationships. These can be positive mental models that can help predict the levels of self reliance, social confidences, self esteem, and loving committed partnerships. The negative models, on the other hand, may predict dysfunctional interpersonal relationships.
I think the thing I will take away from this chapter is where we stand now with contemporary psychoanalysts and how it differs from Freud when this part of psychology was still developing. It has always been very difficult for me to understand how Freud thought about these concepts. The fact that everything is based around sex and aggression seemed so limiting for human beings because I see us as much more complex creatures. It was interesting to see how contemporary psychoanalysts say that their perspective is still spirited by Freud but they have made the changes necessary to move forward in this chapter. There is more of the psychological and cognitive importance when dealing with motivation rather than the strict biological basis of motivation. It is not so black and white anymore, rather there are more explanations that still remain within the psychoanalytical perspective.
Psychodynamic theory focuses on the unwanted fears that lurk around us every day. Anxiety has the biggest effect on the general population, springing up as soon as an aversive event occurs. I thought it was interesting to learn the difference between psychoanalytic and psychodynamic, because they were once referred to as synonyms. Psychodynamic practitioners have adopted some aspects of the psychodynamic theory but choose to deny others; whereas psychoanalytic practitioners remain the most traditional to Freudian principles.
Although the dual-instinct theory goes unutilized by psychodynamic practitioners, it is still a useful concept to consider. I think it is logical to think that motivation is an impulse-driven biological force. The term instinctual refers to something that is innate. Instinct are not acquired, we are born with them. When a child is in danger for the first time instincts will kick in, such as fight or flight, to protect them. With this in mind, our body needs energy to function and without instinctual behavior to motivate individuals, we wouldn’t get off the couch to eat, or hydrate our bodies when needed. Therefore, I agree that instinctual body drives are “a” source of motivation but not the only one. There are many other extraneous variables that motivate our behavior other than instincts, such as rewards. I am going to college to get a degree and to get a good job, but without my instincts telling me what to do; I might not get out of bed in the morning.
I thought the shadow phenomenon was rather interesting and something I won’t forget because the idea of studying the unconscious mind is incredible to me. There seems to be no right answer because there is no sure way of proving it. Yet decades ago, Freud and his colleagues were able to come up with various techniques to analyze unconscious behavior, such as slip-of-the-tongue, hypnosis and more. Knowing that much of our mental life is unconscious makes me wonder what motives and intentions I have thought about today that I am unaware of. Freud divided the mental process of thought into three components. Conscious memory is all the short term experiences we have at any given time. Preconscious stores memories that are in the past but can still be retrieved. Lastly, the unconscious mind stores all inaccessible memories that are associated with repression and implicit memories, information is not stored in an unconscious state of mind.
I commonly confuse explicit and implicit memory. To help myself remember the difference, explicit memories relates to experiences. Such as learned values and aspects of self-concept. Implicit refers to indirect or implied motivational processes. Also, I learned that repression is unconsciously used to forget memories that conflict with our self-view. I wish suppression were easier, because unfortunately for those who have repressed memories about traumatic life events, there are others in the same situation that haven’t repressed the memory and fail to intentionally suppress it.
Ego development is a process that occurs over a lifespan. First, infants experience the symbiotic stage, where they are extremely immature because they don’t know any better. The impulsive stage occurs while children are learning from their parents and mentors. Self-protective stage occurs when rules and consequences are understood, which leads to the conformist stage. Naturally, individuals will conform to the norms in which they were taught. The conscientious stage set personal boundaries based on what knowledge they have acquired. Lastly, autonomous stage stems from independence. The stage in life that we realize what is right and wrong but no longer have to abide by households rules, the choice is our own.
This chapter was about psychoanalysis and how it opens up new study topics such as 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 that we would probably not want our neighbors to know about us. This is all done by studying and embracing a rather pessimistic view of human nature. Psychoanalysis reflects what is popular in contemporary society: sex, aggression, psychopathology, and revenge. Sigmund Fred was the father of this theory and 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. However, contemporary psychoanalysts emphasized the motivational importance of psychological wishes rather than biological drives and cognitive information processing. The concept of the psychological wish retains the full spirit of Freudian motivation, but it overcomes the contradictory evidence that sex and aggression do not function like physiological drives. The contemporary psychodynamic theory is defined by four postulates. First is that much of the mental life in unconscious and argues empathetically that thoughts, feelings, and desires exist at the unconscious level. People can behave in inexplicable behaviors because unconscious mental life affects behavior. Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious, and implicit motivation are three contemporary views on the unconscious. The adaptive unconscious automatically appraises the environment, sets goals, makes judgments, and indicates action all while we are consciously thinking about something else. Implicit motivation is rooted in emotional associations that lie outside of our conscious awareness. Emotional associations are cued by encountering cue-activating environmental events, orients, directs, ad selects attention such that people automatically attend to emotionally linked environmental events. Secondly, mental processes operate parallel from one another such that people commonly want and fear the same thing at the same time. It is the rule, not the exception, that people have conflicting feelings that motivate them in opposing ways. This explains why people commonly hold divergent conscious and unconscious racial attitudes, gender biases, or loves/hate relationships with their parents, job, and everything else in their life. Third, is ego development which involves moving from an immature, socially dependent personality to one is more mature and socially responsible. According to neo-Freudians, the ego develops motives of its own by moving through the following developmental progression: symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. In order for us to develop and overcome immaturity and vulnerability, the ego must gain resources and strengths including resilient defense mechanisms for coping successfully with the inevitable anxieties, or ego defense, of life and a sense of competence that provides a generative capacity for changing the environment for the better, or ego effectance. Finally 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 and argues that lifelong personality patterns begin to form in childhood as peoples construct mental representations of the self, others and relationships. Once formed, these beliefs make up the basis of motivational states such as relatedness or anxiety that guide the course of adult’s interpersonal relationships. A positive mental model of oneself would predict the adult levels of self-reliance, social confidence, self-esteem, and loving/committees partnerships where as a negative mental model of oneself would forecast dysfunctional interpersonal relationships.
What I will remember most about this chapter is how are thoughts, feeling, and desires including 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 are all unconscious. As curious as humans are, we want answers to everything. I always figured majority of the things listed above came from a certain reaction or at least was a conscious decision of our own, so it is crazy to think that we truly have no control over such things. Even when we think we are or are not having such detailed mental processes; we really don’t know what our mind is telling us.
Chapter 14 covers unconscious motivation. It is an interesting and difficulty topic to discuss and research because by definition you cannot be consciously aware of what is going on in your unconscious, making it rather difficult to study and measure. The origins of unconscious study begin with Freud. Freud was a genius and gave us many interesting ideas, a whole new perspective on motivation along with a new set of vocabulary to describe his ideas. Ultimately though, Freud ideas where more philosophical than scientific, meaning there are no real good ways to measure or test most of his ideas. For that reason I am not going to spend too much time focusing on his views, they are better placed in a history of psychology class rather than in a motivation and emotion class with a modern perspective.
Modern psychodynamic theory proposes four basic themes. The first of which is the unconscious. There are two ways in which modern thought has changed in its thoughts on the unconscious. They first being that it is rather dumb as compared to the smart and complex version Freud postulated. The second being it is cold rather than hot. It is mechanical and automatic unlike Freud’s view that it is filled with lust and anger. Subliminal messages are those that are picked perceived by us but we are not always consciously aware of that fact. Research shows that people do not act on these types of messages.
Psychodynamics hold the idea that mental processes operate parallel to one another. This can explain why people sometimes do things they do not really want to be doing. There are two concepts that one needs to be able to differentiate: repression and suppression. Repression is the process of forgetting things unconsciously. It is likely a defense mechanism. Suppression is the process of trying to remove a thought consciously and deliberately. Research shows that suppression generally fails and ever has the opposite effect, meaning you think about something more when you intentionally try not to think about it.
Ego development entails moving from a immature socially dependent personality type to one that is mature and interdependent with other people. Freud concentrated on sexual and aggressive drives while modern thought expands to include a variety of motives. It is under this topic that defense mechanisms like denial, projection, and regression are discussed. Defense mechanisms are ways people protect themselves from anxiety provoking changes in their concept of reality. Ego effectance is a coping mechanism people develop in response to the demands of life. It is similar to the idea intrinsic motivation.
Objects relation theory focuses on the development of our mental representations of the self and others with particular interest given to its development during childhood. We construct these mental representations of our self and others and these mental models construct and guide our future patterns of motivation. The quality of these ideas of relationships can be chiefly described through unconscious tone, capacity of emotional involvement, and mutuality of autonomy with others. Positive mental models predict things self-esteem and social confident while negative mental models predict future dysfunctional relationships with others.
The thing I will likely remember years from now is the information on suppression. It is interesting that trying to suppress thoughts has the opposite effect as evidenced by the study telling people not to think of a white bear and then that is all they can think about. It is fun to mess with friends and tell them not to think about something in order to make them think about it incessantly. For example, when golfing you can tell a friend don’t think about something in their swing so they then over think about it causing them to hit a bad shot.
Chapter 14 was highly interesting to me for I am constantly engaging interest in Freud and his theories on motivation through the unconscious mind. It first starts by describing psychodynamic perspectives and the dual-instinct theory which states that instinctual bodily drives explain the source of all motivation. Freud's input on this involved creating two different categories: instincts for life and instincts for death. He claimed that the first class of instincts (Eros) are life instincts and they maintain life and ensure individual and collective survival. Examples of this would be needing water, food, shelter, etc. to survive life. The second class, the instincts for death, are called Thanatos. Freud claimed that they push the individual towards rest, inactivity, and energy conservation. He also believed that total rest was death but it did resolve any bodily disturbance. He really focuses on sex and aggression within this category to push our motivation, but it is argued later that sex and aggression are simply just psychological wishes, not drives. This leads into understanding the psychodynamic theory and it's four core postulates that require overviews: the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and the Object Relations Theory. The unconscious is seen as an unreachable, yet powerhouse of the body and brain and Freud believed it is the primary processor of information. Freud tried many different ways to understand the unconscious mind through hypnosis, free association, dream analysis, etc., but today the debate over mental life being mostly unconscious; it focuses around three different views.
These views are of course the Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious, and the implicit motivation. To begin with Freud's view, he separated the unconscious into three different parts: the conscious, preconscious, and the unconscious. He described the conscious as having all thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, and experiences that a person is aware of at any given time. The preconscious compliments this by storing all these thoughts, feelings, and memories absent from the immediate conscious but can still be retrieved by it when trying (such as knowing colors and shapes of things while also thinking about where to hand in an assignment that is due). The unconscious is seen by Freud as the mental storehouse of all inaccessible instinctual impulses, repressed experiences, childhood memories, and as well as strong, unfulfilled wishes and desires (hence his orientation around sexual motivators). He claims that all of these are not expressed openly through the conscious, but rather through symbols and other nonverbal behaviors. Dreams are a big symbol to Freud of unconscious wants and desires. He claims four supportive facts that dreams serve as: neurophysiological activity, memory consolidating function, stress-buffering or coping function, and lastly, a problem solving function. To Freud, dreams were the answer to understanding the unconscious.
The adaptive unconscious view explains how we unconscious adapt to our surroundings without even knowing it, such as making actions occur while thinking about something completely different. An example of our adaptive conscious would be walking and talking on the phone. While one is thinking and interacting through a conversation with someone over the phone, they are also watching out for cars and moving out of the way for other people. We also use our adaptive unconscious to be able to emotionally read what other people are feeling or thinking. Within a split second judgment, we are usually correct.
Implicit motivation is the most difficult to understand because it is so indirect, implied, and not well understood. It orients, direct, and selects attention towards environments that support the person's wants and abilities that need to be expressed appropriately. We react to these processes through thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Mindfulness helps explain when our implicit motivation affects our behavior and mindfulness helps explain when it fails to affect our behavior. This shows that when we consciously are aware that we do not like the situation we are in, that our unconscious will lead us to behave in a certain way that copes with our feelings, emotions to direct our behavior from that situation. Our conscious and unconscious are actually connected in some way. Subliminal motivation ties in with this part of the unconscious, but does not exactly direct behavior, only thoughts.
Psychodynamics is a very complex aspect of understanding the unconscious. Freud's depiction involved people having ideas and wills, but also having counterparts to each. One's Will and Counterwill must balance in order to maintain peace within the unconscious mind. Repression was claimed as the central concept of psychodynamics and is said to be the check point of each thought's identification before entering into the public world. When an unwanted desire arises, repression occurs through anxiety to push that information into an unforgotten field unconsciously, unintentionally, and automatically. Suppression is kind of the same, except unwanted thoughts are conscious, intentional, and deliberately. But when we try to tell ourselves to NOT think about something, or do something, etc., we tend to have a rebound effect that keeps us preoccupied with that thought, resulting in exactly what we did want to happen with those thoughts.
Chapter 14 also discusses terms of Ego Psychology. The ego development processes towards psychological growth, maturity, adjustment, prosocial interdependence, competence, and autonomous functioning. It unfolds as symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. It's defense is highly vulnerable and comes into conflict with the id (causing neurotic anxiety), the superego (moral anxiety), and environmental dangers (realistic anxiety). To stop ourselves from becoming overly anxious about a situation, we use defense mechanisms. These range from the most mature to the most immature reactions. It has been found that people who react more immaturely open themselves up to be more depressed and have more life long difficulties than people who react maturely. By our ego effectance, we can understand our desires to interact effectively within our environments. By using a positive coping response to environmental situations, our ego develops a great sense of competence and strong defense mechanisms over challenges.
The Object Relations Theory is probably one of my favorite theories ever. It focuses on people's need of relatedness that is expressed by their mental representations of attachments to different social and sexual objects. There are three dimensions in which one's mental representations can be categorized: unconscious tone, capacity for emotional involvement, and mutuality of autonomy with others.
Overall, Freud is a weird, interesting psychologist who had a unique way of gathering information about the human brain and it's unconscious domains. Many of his psychodynamic views have been accepted why others have been proven to be ignored, or just set aside for now until proven worthy through research. Years from now I will remember the dream part of this chapter and how Freud's dream analysis brought out certain roots of an underlying problem within individuals' unconscious parts. Every time I dream or have a nightmare, I will try and analyze what is going on in my current life that is causing me anxiety or worry and try to relate it to my dreams. I will also remember to always try and respond as maturely as possible to situations because in the long run it will free me of depression and anxiety. As a psychology student, I will keep in mind the slowly processing work of current contemporary psychodynamic theorists and how much more input is needed to understand the psychodynamics of our beautiful minds.
Chapter 14 discussed the topics psychodynamic, unconscious, and ego psychology and how it relates and influences motivation. It starts off with defining psychoanalysis, which is a deterministic, pessimistic approach to understand the unconscious motivational impulses. Freud was a pioneer of this approach. He believed that motivation was regulated by impulse-driven biological forces, that some behaviors increase energy, and other deplete energy. According to Freud, there are two types of instincts, the life instinct or Eros, and the death instinct or Thanatos. Eros produces sexual desires and Thanatos produces aggressive behavior - which are wishes not drives. Freud then defines the unconscious as the shadow phenomenon because it cannot be observed or thought of consciously. The Freudian Unconscious view asserts that there are three components: the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. He was also an advocate of dream analysis and free association to draw out the unconscious motives. However, we now know that dreams serve as neurophysiological, memory consolidating, stress-buffering, and a problem solving function. A non-Freudian view is the adaptive unconscious, which are behaviors such as tying your shoes and riding a bike. Another non-Freudian is the implicit motivation view, which describes the indirect, implied, and not understood aspect of motivation. These motives are linked to emotional experience. Subliminal motivation is when phrases are blended into a video clip or the like to change the behavior in the viewer, however this view is shown to not actually work.
Psychodynamics is defined as that clashing of forces such as idea vs. counteridea, will vs. counterwill, and desire vs. repression. Freud believed it was because of the conflict between the id and ego. The id is unconscious, involuntary, impulse-driven, and plays on the pleasure principle. On the other hand the ego is partly unconscious and conscious, defensive, and plays on the reality principle. Freud also believed repression was the central concept of psychodynamics. Repression is the process of forgetting information/experiences through unconscious and automatic ways. When these thoughts try to emerge, then anxiety also emerges. On the other hand, suppression is the process of removing a thought through conscious and voluntary ways, however, no one can stop a thought because it'll end up opening doors to thought obsession. The id is located in the limbic system while the ego is located in the neocortex where they can be interrelated. Ego psychologists assert that ego develops from learning and experiences through a series of developmental phases. Since the ego is always in a vulnerable state, it builds ego defense mechanisms to calm anxiety. These mechanism are rated from immature to mature on a hierarchical ordering. Mature defenses promote well-being, and immature defenses promote depression. Ego effectance deals with a persons ability to deal with challenges, demands, and opportunities. It can also lead to feelings of a sense of competence, effective, and satisfaction. The object relations theory study how people satisfy their need for relatedness through mental representations of social objects. However this model may underscore the psychological need for relatedness.
Something that I learned from this chapter that stuck with me is on the topic of suppression. It is known that thought suppression only induced thought-obsession. Only unconscious thoughts that we welcome into consciousness are we actually able to forget. This is kind of funny to me. Something that we want to forget will only get replayed in our minds over and over, yet a memory we let in our consciousness that we don't necessarily want to suppress gets forgotten. Yet, this is good advice. If there is something embarrassing i'd like to forget then I'd have to accept it and allow it into my consciousness in order to be forgotten. Although I'm not sure how to go about not-forgetting something that i'd like to remember besides writing it down on paper and re-reading it later on. Learning this fact though put me at ease, because I thought I was the only one who couldn't get a nasty thought out of my head and over-analysed things.
Chapter 14 talks about unconscious motivation and mainly deal with the Psychodynamic Perspective.
That chapter starts off with Freud’s Dual-Instinct Theory. The first instincts in the Dural-Instinct Theory are life instincts. Life instincts are instincts that maintain life and ensure individual and collective survival. The second instincts are death instincts, which push the individual toward res, inactivity, and energy conservation. These two sets of instincts work together to provide the energy to motivate someone to something.
There are four postulates that define the contemporary psychodynamic theory. The first is unconscious. Unconscious is a “shadow phenomenon” that cannot be known directly but can be inferred only from its indirect manifestations. In the Unconscious postulate there is the Freudian unconscious. Freud talked about the unconscious. He rejected the idea that consciousness was the essence of mental life and therefore divided the mind into three components: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Conscious includes all the thoughts, feelings, memories, experiences, and etc. that a person is aware of at any given time. Preconscious stores all the thoughts, feelings, and memories that are absent from the immediate consciousness. The largest and most important component is the unconscious, which, is the mental storehouse of inaccessible instinctual impulses, repressed experiences, childhood memories and unfilled wishes and desires. There is also the adaptive unconscious. The adaptive unconscious runs on auto pilot as it carries out countless computations and innumerable adjustments during acts. The book gives a few examples like tying your shoes, driving a car, or playing a piano. Implicit motivation is another aspect of the unconscious postulate. 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.
The second postulate is postulate of psychodynamics. For Freud, psychodynamics concerned the conflict between the personality structure of the id and the ego. Psychodynamics deals with repression and suppression. 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.
The third postulate is Ego Psychology and ego development. The essence of ego development is a developmental progression towards what is possible in psychological growth, maturity, adjustments, prosocial interdependence, competence, and autonomous functioning. Ego defense is another part of this postulate, along with ego effectance. Ego defense is to develop and to overcome immaturity and vulnerability, the ego must gain resources and strengths, including resilient defense mechanisms for coping successfully with inevitable anxieties of life. Ego effectance is what concerns the individual’s competence in dealing with environmental challenges, demands, and opportunities.
The fourth and final postulate is the postulate of object relations. It argues that lifelong personality patterns begin to form in childhood as people construct mental representations of their self, others and relationships.
Well besides pry leaning about Freud in other classes and pry in future classes, I think I will take a lot from the ego development section because as I continue to change over time and look at myself from the past to now, and now to later in life, it will be interesting to see how I continue to change and the major events that assist in my ego changing.
Chapter 14 starts the chapter by describing the psychodynamic theory. This theory describes motivation that comes biologically. It happens to us rather than something we choose to do. This theory also focuses on psychoanalysis, which refers to one’s repressed memories, urges anxiety, and many emotional shortcomings. Freud was the main psychologist that presented the idea of psychoanalysis, which is not practiced by many psychologists today; rather they have switched to focusing on psychodynamic theory.
Freud viewed motivation as a biological source that needed to replenish physical and mental energy. His theory included the belief of life and death instincts and these instincts (sex and aggression) give individuals the energy for motivation. This is referred to as the dual-instinct theory. Modern psychoanalysts believe human wishes to be the motivation behind certain behaviors, not instinctive drive. The idea coincides with the concept of the current self vs. the ideal self. The current beliefs and research done by psychologists using the psychodynamic theory are quite different than the focus during Freud’s time. There are four main postulates that current researchers and psychologists focus on. These postulates are the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory.
The first postulate, the unconscious, is one of the most notable concepts from Freud and is one of the most controversial in psychology. The controversy has created three forms of the unconscious, which are Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious, and implicit motivation. Freudian unconscious stored all of the repressed memories, unfulfilled desires, and childhood trauma one may have. This was measured through dream story telling from by subjects. This is unsteady ground for research because of recent research showing that there is much more to dreams that unconscious desires. The adaptive unconscious is continuously on. It is an automatic part of our every day lives. It can take into account things that may be unfamiliar by making judgments and scanning the environment. The final unconscious is implicit motivation. This is described as the motivation that occurs outside of our own consciousness. They are indirect and implied with a connection to emotional roots.
Psychodynamics is the second postulate that the text describes. This is described as the battle between the id (unconscious) and the ego (conscious). The id focuses on gaining pleasure and avoiding pain and distress. The ego is similar, yet states that one will gravitate to pleasure until it is socially acceptable. The concept of repression is also important in psychodynamics. Repression is described as an individual forgetting something unconsciously and automatically. Freud viewed it as the id bringing up bad memories and this is the ego’s response to keep the brain from danger. Suppression is similar to repression and also important. Suppression is totally eliminating thoughts unconsciously. Suppression often does not result in the way it is expected and instead the thought becomes obsessive.
Ego development is the third principle described. The ego counteracts for the id’s desires and wants. It also is developed through learning and experiences. It progresses through the life through stages (symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, autonomous). The development of the ego helps avoid anxiety and allows the individual to interact with their environment more effectively. The ego also creates boundaries as a defense from outside anxiety created by the id, the environment, and the superego. The defenses perform as a hierarchy from immature (denial and fantasy) to mature (humor and sublimation). The final category of ego development is ego effectance. It relates to the person’s competence to interact with problems and complications in their environment. The ego develops through the person’s life to adapt and be able to deal with the challenges faced with in the environment.
The final principle described in the text is objects relations theory. This theory adapts to the idea of a person’s need for relatedness. The object is what the person may desire. It is how a person relates to objects for emotional or psychological needs of relatedness. The mother-child relationship is the main focus of research. The way a mother interacts with her child can reflect on their need for relatedness later in life. The objects relations theory characterizes relationships by the unconscious tone, the level of emotional involvement, and mutuality of autonomy with other people.
What I will remember down the road about this chapter is the crazy ideas that Freud came up with has lead to a study of psychology. The information provided about the battle between the id and ego is intriguing and questionable. Freud was an interesting man that came up with a lot of ideas that were outside of the box at the time and still are. The id and ego are at the heart of that.
The first part of this chapter on the unconscious mind talks about psychodynamic perspective and psychoanalysis, which looks at topics such as traumatic memories, addictions, anxieties about the future, dreams, hypnosis, repressed memories, fantasies, repression, self-defeating behaviors, and a few others that we may not want other people to know about if they didn’t have to.
Freud was the father of the psychoanalytic view and his idea of motivation was biologically based where sex and aggression is where people go their motivation and energy. This is the thing I will remember from this chapter in years to come. It always amazes me. The more contemporary view is importance in motivation of our psychological wishes, and cognitive information processing. This idea still has the same idea as Freud’s but it doesn’t say that sex and aggression are physiological drives.
There are four ideas that go into the psychodynamic theory. The first is that a lot of our mental life is unconscious, meaning that our thoughts, feelings and emotions and desires are happening unconsciously. Because the unconscious life affects our behaviors, people can act in a way that are not easily understood, even to themselves. (So, this is my excuse) there are three different view on this unconsciousness; Freudian, adapative and implicit. The adaptive unconscious sts goals and make judgements while we are consciously thinking about something else. Implicit motivation is the emotional part that is outside of our awareness.
The second idea in the understanding of motivation and emotion is that mental processes operate in parallel with each other. For example, people want and fear the same thing at the same time. people have conflicting feelings that motivate them in different ways. People lots of times have unconscoious racial attitudes, gender biases, feelings about their parents or jobs, etc. I think a good example of this is I hear a lot of people when telling a story about a person of a different race than them, they emphasize the idea that they are black or Asian, etc. but if they are telling the exact same story about their own race, they would never even mention the race of the person. We have these biases all over in our lives and lots of times not aware of it that all.
The third idea is that of ego development. We develop healthy by moving from our immature personality to a more mature and socially responsible personality. the book talks about how neo-Freudians, the ego develops motives of its own by moving thru a developmental progression. To overcome these things the ego must then gain resources and strengths for coping with anxieties.
The final idea is that mental representation of self and others form in childhood to guide adult social motivations. This is called object relations. It is the argument that personality begins to form in childhood as we gain mental representations of the self, others and relationships. Later in life these beliefs form the basis of the motivational states that guide our adult interpersonal relationships. Positive models predict positive outcomes like self esteem and loving relationships, and negative predict the opposite like dysfunctional relationships.
Terms used: psychodynamic perspective, drive, Freudian unconscious, adaptive, implicit motivation, repression, ego, object relations.
Chapter 14 is titled Unconscious Motivation. The main concepts from this chapter include; psychodynamic perspective, the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego psychology, objects relations theory and criticisms. Psychoanalysis holds the ultimate cause of motivation and behavior derives from biologically endowed and socially experienced impulses that determine our desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This occurs whether we like it or not. Psychoanalysis is further deterministic in that individual’s personality changes very little after puberty. Many motivational impulses that occur as an adult can be linked back to impulses that were had in childhood. Motivation is thought of as something that happens to us, rather than something someone chooses or creates. Part of the appeal of psychoanalysis is that the subject matter is the unconscious. Many people have trouble accepting Freud’s theory that goes along with psychoanalysis. His theory goes where no other theory has gone. It looks into dreams, hypnosis, inaccessible memories and fantasy. Freud categorized drives into two general categories. The first class of instincts is life instincts – Eros, the life instincts are easier to define. Eros instincts maintain life and ensure individual and collective survival. The second class of instincts – Thanatos, the death instincts push the individual towards rest, inactivity, and energy conservation The book gives the example of telling a hostile joke about an ethnic group is an expression of the Thantos. There are four core postulates; 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 guides that person’s later motivations and relationships.
The unconscious is thought of as a “shadow phenomenon” that cannot be known directly but can be inferred only from its indirect manifestations. Feud believed that unconscious constituted the “primary process” while consciousness was but a “secondary process”. Freud and his colleagues explored the contents and processes of the unconscious through hypnosis, free association, dream analysis, humor, and slips of the tongue. He rejected the idea that consciousness was the essence of mental life and therefore divided the mind into three components: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious.
Psychodynamics, according to Freud, concerned the conflict between personality structures of the id and ego. The motivations of the id were unconscious, involuntary, impulse-driven, and hedonistic, as the id obeyed the pleasure principle. The pleasure principle is to obtain pleasure and avoid pain and to do so at all costs and without delay.
Defining ego is difficult to do because it is not so much a thing as it is a developmental process. From its infantile origins through its progression toward what is possible, the ego unfolds along the following developmental trajectory: symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. Object Relations Theory focuses more on the nature and the development of mental representations of the self and others and on the affective processes associated with these representations. In particular, this theory focuses on how childhood mental representations of one’s caretakers are captured within the personality and persist into adulthood.
I believe the main thing that I will remember from this chapter down the road is the theory of object relations. Today I was offered a job at Lutheran Services of Iowa working as a Youth Specialist. This job involves working with youth that have neglected and abused. Object relations often stress the impact that parental abuse or neglect has on the infant’s emerging representations of self and others. The bond between caregiver and child becomes the child’s template for self and other mental representations. When a caregiver is warn and nurturing, the infants need of approval is met and vise versa. This concept is what my future job will be all about. I will be in the position to act as a positive role model to help encourage children social confidence, self-esteem and self-reliance.
Chapter 14 discusses unconscious motivation. First off, psychoanalysis is deterministic and pessimistic. It is deterministic in that the ultimate cause of motivation and behavior comes from biology and socially acquired impulses that determine desires, thoughts, feelings and behaviors. It is pessimistic in that it focuses on sexual and aggressive urges that relate to conflict, anxiety, and defense mechanisms and so on. Psychoanalytic refers to those who practice traditional, Freudian principles and views. Psychodynamic is the study of dynamic unconscious mental processes. The Dual-Instinct Theory, introduced by Freud, views motivation as regulated by impulse-driven biological forces. The body is therefore a system that through certain behaviors increases energy and through other behaviors it decreases energy. There are two instincts that Freud chose to focus on; life and death. Eros, the instinct for life, is an instinct to maintain life and ensure individual and collective survival. Freud centers this instinct on sex; species preservation. The second instinct, death or Thanatos, pushes the individual toward rest, inactivity, and energy conservation. Freud centers this instinct on aggression. Therefore sex and aggression provide the energy to motivate behavior. However, through further studies this theory no longer holds true. Sex and aggression do not conform to a physiological model of drive. Therefore contemporary psychoanalysts waive the idea of the instinctual drive as a central motivational construct. Sex and aggression are now viewed as psychological wishes, rather than drives. The wish model is yet another discrepancy theory. When individuals are aware, unconsciously or consciously, of their present state and perceive a more potentially desirable state motivation arises and directs and regulates behavior. The unconsciousness is something that is not only hard to describe, but hard to study. However, we do know that much of mental life is unconscious; people have motives and intentions that lie outside of their everyday awareness. There are three views of the unconsciousness; Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious and implicit motivation. The Freudian unconscious is divided into three parts: conscious, preconscious and unconscious. The conscious includes the thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, and experiences that a person is currently aware of. The preconscious are stored thoughts, feelings and memories that while not in immediate consciousness can be retrieved at any time with little prompting. The unconscious contains the inaccessible impulses, repressed experiences, early childhood memories, and strong unfulfilled wishes and desires. The adaptive conscious appraises the environment, sets goals, makes judgments, and initiates actions while and individual is consciously thinking about something else. Implicit motivation is described as 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. Implicit motives are linked to emotional experiences. They orient, direct, and select attention so that people automatically attend to environmental events that have emotional associations. Clashing forces such as idea versus conteridea is known as psychodynamics. People sometimes do what they do not want to do, therefore the clash occurs. Freud studied psychodynamics in terms of the id and the ego. The id is unconscious, involuntary, and impulse-driven. The ego is conscious, defensive, and non-impulsive. People go out of their way to avoid certain motivations because they do not want to know things about themselves that contradict self-schemas. Repression is defined as forgetting information or an experience by ways that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic. Suppression is the process of removing a thought once it has already occurred, because thoughts cannot be stopped. However, suppression can backfire into an obsession. A person focuses energy on forgetting the thought ultimately giving the thought more attention through the unconscious conterprocess. Ego psychology is a developmental study. The ego grows, matures, adjusts, and becomes autonomous over time. During the infantile, symbolic stage, the ego is immature and overwhelmed by impulses. It goes through a series of phases before reaching autonomy. The autonomous ego has thoughts, plans, goals and behaviors that come from the self-motivating, self-regulating ego rather than the impulsive id. Ego development defends against anxiety and allows a person to interact more effectively with their surroundings. The ego is in a constant state of vulnerability. Mature defense mechanisms for this vulnerability allow a person to live a well-adjusted life, keep a fulfilling job, develop friendships, avoid divorce, and have a higher income level and so on. Ego effectance is the individual’s competence in dealing with environmental challenges, demands, and opportunities. The greater ego effectance motivation, the greater the person’s willingness to use ego properties proactively change the environment. The object relations theory involves how people relate to objects to satisfy their need of relatedness. Childhood mental representations of an individual’s caretaker continue into adulthood. This involves the theory of attachment. The connection made or not made between the caregiver and child is a base for the self and other mental representations. Feud faced many criticisms in his studies. First, that his studies are not scientifically testable. Second is that his theories are not predictive. A scientific theory must be able to predict future events to be credible.
The concept that stuck with me throughout reading Chapter 14 was suppression. As soon as I read the section on it I couldn’t stop thinking of thought that I would like to never think of. It’s interesting to learn that suppression backfires into obsession. I know this occurs for me almost daily. Instead of attempting to avoid the thoughts it might be best to simply confront them and obtain closure.
Chapter 14 is about unconscious motivation which includes the psychodynamic perspective, the unconscious, psychodynamics, and ego psychology. The psychodynamic perspective looks to an adults childhood to see how that effects their motivations for behaviors as an adult. Psychodynamic and psychoanalysis were formerly used interchangeably, but now psychoanalysis is considered to be following traditional Freudian views whereas psychodynamic is a more modern view on Freud’s original theories. Freud had the dual-instinct theory which said that biological impulses drive motivation. Freud argued that there are two primary motivations which are life and death, and said that these are what motivates behavior. Today, the psychodynamic theory has a more modern approach with empirical evidence to support it.
The unconscious is included in the psychodynamic theory and it is things that are hidden from our conscious mind. Freud believed that one key to the unconscious mind was through dreams that show our impulses that are suppressed in our conscious mind. Modern psychology views this as the adaptive unconscious and argues that this is what appraises our environment while consciously we are doing other behaviors and having other thoughts. The last aspect is subliminal motivation which is a message that is sent to the unconscious that we are consciously unaware of, but effects individuals because it was seen by the unconscious.
Psychodynamics is where our (conscious) will and our (unconscious) counterwill meet. Freud had the theory of the id (unconscious), ego (half conscious half unconscious), and superego. Freud’s theory was that these three things were intertwined and was actually the cause of our motivation. Two aspects of this are repression and suppression. Repression refers to an individual’s filter for what remains internal and what becomes public. Often individuals unconsciously repress information or experiences because it is something they don’t like, or is painful. Suppression is a conscious way of trying to stop a thought or behavior such as an individual trying to not think about their upcoming presentation because it will cause anxiety throughout their day.
The last aspect is ego psychology which is a developmental process. The stages of this process are symbiotic, impulse, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. The ego is constantly at a state of vulnerability, so it created defense mechanisms to try to protect themselves. An example of one of these defense mechanisms is humor. An individual can use humor to mask their insecurities and just turn it into a joke. Another example is reaction formation which is when an individual is unhappy about something in their life so they portray a strong opposition to their true feelings or behaviors. The last aspect of ego psychology is ego effectance which essentially is how competent an individual is in their environment.
The final topic discussed in this chapter is the object relation theory which is how well and individual achieves their desire for relatedness. This starts in childhood and then continues to adulthood and is a result of how a child related with their primary caretaker (typically parents) if the caretaker was warm and loving and satisfied their need for relatedness or not. This is thought to effect how an adult’s behavior is motivated.
I have learned a lot of this information in previous psychology courses, and a lot of it has stuck with me. I find Freud very interesting, and I definitely think he had some good theories but most people just think of his strange views when it came to certain theories. The psychodynamic field is based off Freud’s ideas and has empirical evidence supporting them, so Freud was not always far off. I think that looking to ones past to see their motivation for behaviors is very important and can tell a lot for some individuals. I also think the defense mechanisms are important, because it can explain why someone would act a certain way and can help to understand them better. This can also help an individual to realize why they are behaving in a certain way and help them to cope with things in a more healthy and proactive way.
Chapter 14 discusses the subject of unconscious motivation. The first topic in this chapter is psychodynamic perspective. This perspective states that we are unable to control our motivations and behaviors, and that they are biologically and socially determined. Motivation happens to us, our text explains, it isn’t something we can choose. Psychoanalysis includes such behaviors as aggression, anxiety, conflict, sexual urges, as well as other “emotional burdens”. Psychoanalysis focuses on the unconscious human behaviors. Today, psychoanalytic is the term used to refer to Freud’s methods and principles, while the term psychodynamic has coined the unconscious mental processes without the Freudian association.
Sigmund Freud began his study of motivation with the view that impulse-driven biological forces were at work in the human body, where certain behaviors controlled bodily energy. He claimed there were two classes of instincts: Eros, the life instincts, and Thanatos, the death instincts. The first motivated the body to survive-namely to eat, drink, breathe, sleep, have sex, etc. The second instinct motivated the person towards inactivity, energy conservation, and overall- pushed towards death or eternal sleep. This second instinct category also involved aggression, which focused on hostility, self-criticism, addictions, revenge, anger, hate, unnecessary risk-taking, and others. These two categories of instinct provide the energy, Freud claimed, to motivate peoples’ behavior, thus managing life and death impulses and sex and aggression. According to Freud’s Psychoanalytic theory, individuals act impulsively as well as through learning experiences (psychosexual development)-giving us humans our “ego”.
Contemporary psychoanalysts do not follow this theory anymore. Today, the focus is on cognitive and interpersonal forces rather than biological and intrapersonal ones, chapter 14 states. Also, four postulates replace the former theory; contemporary theorists follow the core postulates of 1) the Unconscious, 2) Psychodynamics, 3) Ego development, and 4) Object relations theory. These four postulates tell us that our feelings and drives are at the unconscious level, that motivational and emotional processes operate parallel to one another, that we grow and develop, leaving our immature, fragile, and egocentric selves behind to make room for the more mature and socially responsible beings we will become, and that our personality patterns form at childhood as we construct mental representations of ourselves and others.
Freud believed that our unconscious was a “shadow phenomenon” which could be interpreted through the indirect manifestations of its expressions. The unconscious was the “primary process” and the conscious was the “secondary process”. It was at this time that we gain the knowledge of the unconscious mind through hypnosis, free-association, projection tests, and the analysis of dreams, among other ways. People today have accepted that the unconscious is a great part of mental life. But instead of the above methods used by Freud to discover the unconscious mental processes, psychologists now focus on subliminal activation, priming, selective attention, and implicit memory.
According to Freud, our minds should be divided into three parts: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. The preconscious was where our thoughts and feelings were stored that were not readily accessible to our conscious, but could easily be attained, and the unconscious was the place the thoughts and feelings we do not want known were kept. The unconscious stored painful memories, early childhood experiences, and unfulfilled wishes and desires, and was the largest storage unit in the human mind. During adaptive unconscious, we can do things as if we are on auto pilot, so to speak. The mind can learn new things, but we may not remember learning these things. Implicit motivations are those we have indirectly gained, possibly through emotional experiences in childhood or the like. Chapter 7 discussed implicit motivations as being those needs related to achievement power, intimacy, and so on. Also, to subliminally activate motivation, a stimulus is presented at a weak level, thus sparking a memory or behavior in a subject. An example of this is the flashing of a message during the 1960s that read “Drink Coke”- this subliminal message thought up by marketing execs was meant to plant the thought into peoples’ heads in order to motivate them to buy and drink their product. Another example is the self-help motivational tapes that were popular some years ago. These were meant to boost self-esteem and even help patients to quit smoking or other unhealthy habits, resulting in a better lifestyle.
Psychodynamics is the term coined to describe the mind’s constant clashing within itself. Freud claimed that the human mind was always in conflict; mentally, we are struggling ideas versus counter ideas, desire versus repression, and sexual attraction versus guilt. Freud stated that the id and ego were always in combat, causing the human mind to do things it did not want to do at times. While repression is the process of forgetting experiences and possibly important information, suppression is the human mind’s ability to stop a certain thought. One is consciously achieved and the other is unconscious. However, suppression is not a very successful process. When someone tells you not to remember something, more than likely you WILL remember it, even if you try not to. Studies have shown that different parts of the brain correspond with Freud’s Id and Ego, and that the Id and Ego are separate entities. The Ego forms through a developmental process including symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous stages, and is always very vulnerable. The Ego buffers against anxiety-laden situations in order to protect the mind. Without these defense mechanisms, our lives would be filled with anxieties stemming from internal and external reality changes. Some examples of the Ego’s defense mechanisms are: fantasy, regression, humor, sublimation, displacement, and denial. The presence or non-existence of these defense mechanisms may determine the depression level in subjects, as well as the stress levels. How effective the Ego is determines the person’s competence in dealing with challenges in the environment, everyday demands, and afforded opportunities.
Object Relations Theory studies how peoples’ need for relatedness is satisfied through their attachments to sexual and social objects and through their mental representations of such needs. One’s quality of mental representations is characterized through three dimensions: 1) unconscious tone, 2) capacity for emotional involvement, and 3) mutuality of autonomy with others.
Criticisms against Freud are twofold. One states that many of his concepts are not testable scientifically speaking. The other states that although psychodynamic theory works to interpret past events, it does not correctly predict.
Years down the road, I can see the parts concerning the Id and Ego being separate entities sticking out in my memory. It fascinates me that within each of our minds there are constant battles and workings, some of which we know about and others we do not, aiding in our decisions and behaviors. Also, I remember hearing about the subliminal studies regarding the Coke commercials. I still remember those studies to this day. Anything relating to marketing strategies involving the human mind amazes me. It kind of scares me to a point as well. How do we know what we have been “secretly” motivated to do during our lives? That is something to think about.
Chapter 14 discusses the aspect of unconscious motivation, which basically the social and biological impulses that comes from motives that we don’t necessarily chose to happen. People’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions can come from other sources, yet subjectively be their own. This chapter explains the difference between psychoanalytic and psychodynamic. Psychodynamic is the study of dynamic unconscious mental processes, whereas psychoanalytic refers to focus of Freudian principles. With psychodynamic therapy, the focus is more cognitive and interpersonal forces; however, the psychoanalytic therapy, the focus is to understand the confusing activities of the unconscious and force the person to deal with reality.
Psychodynamic theory consists of four parts. The unconscious, this focuses on thoughts, feelings, and desires that exist at the unconscious level and how life affects people to behave in unexplainable ways. Dreams are discussed that they are neurophysical, cognitive, coping, and problem-solving events, but have little to do with unconscious wishes. The neurophysiological activity makes sense of the memory consolidating function; which move memories from short-term to long-term memory. Dreams are also a stress-buffering/ coping function by providing to pair defense mechanisms against threatening events. Lastly, problem-solving function helps people process information during dreams. The adaptive unconscious appraises the environment, sets goals, makes judgments, and initiates action, while consciously thinking about something else. This is when the body recognizes a routine action and proceeds to do without a second thought. Implicit motivation is all the motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments that occur outside a person’s conscious awareness. These are indirect, implied and not well understood. Subliminal motivation is motives through stimuli appearing when at a weak energy level. However, it is shown in research that subliminal messages don’t really affect people.
Psychodynamics discusses that motivational and emotional processes work hand in hand, where people will feel two different emotions at the same time. It’s a clashing of forces. If a person has a job interview they experience this. They are fearful and nervous to see if the interview will go well, but they also experience want because they desire the job. The id is unconscious, involuntary, impulse-driven, meaning that a person must achieve what they want no matter what. The ego is partly conscious and not, steeped in defenses, and organized around the delay of gratification. This is meaning that a person will get what they want only when they find the opportunity when it is socially acceptable. Repression is the process of forgetting information or experiences through unconscious, unintentional, and automatic ways. It is the tough minded security guard who turns down most unconscious thoughts’ request to exit. It is hard to study because you can’t ask about something one doesn’t remember. Suppression is a process to remove thought consciously, intentionally, and deliberately. However, it only works for a little while before it creeps back to prove that people don’t have much control over what they think. Studies show that not wanting to think about something, will cause it to come back more frequently.
Ego development focuses on how people grow, develop, and move past immature parts to become mature. This is a progression of development to grow, mature, adjust, become independent, competent, and autonomous functioning. The symbiotic stage is extremely immature and overwhelmed by impulses because it depends on the caretaker. The impulsive stage parents or rule guide the child to stop impulses and desires. When the child realizes there are rules, they go into the self-control stage. During the conformist stage the child learns social norms basically, whereas the conscientious ego sets the rules and responsibility. Autonomous ego learns to self-motivate and self-regulate.
Finally, Object Relations Theory states that stable personality pattern form in childhood as people form mental representations of the self and others. It studies how people satisfy their need for relatedness; how they relate to objects that satisfy the need for emotional and psychological relatedness. It stresses the impact created on infants from parental abuse or neglect. The bond between parents and children is very important.
Freud has two categories for bodily needs; instincts for life and instincts for death. The life category refers to maintaining life with food, water, air, sleep, and survival. The death category refers to rest, inactivity, and energy conservation. “Wish Model” proposes that at any time people are aware consciously or not, of their current state, encountering many situations, see a more desirable state. This is meaning that a person may go about their day without any negative urges, but once they are negatively affected, they desire a more ideal state which directs the motive behavior.
I will take with me from this chapter, the repression and suppression topics. I find it very interesting how people, including myself, are afraid to face the real problems in their lives. I can really relate to this topic because I feel there are many repressed memories from my life that have caused me to act the way I do. Also, I suppress a lot of thoughts to get through my life, however they do tend to keep popping back up. I enjoyed reading this chapter very much. It was very informative and helpful for me to understand my thoughts a little better.
Terms Used: unconscious motivation, psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, instincts for life, instincts for death, wish model, The Unconscious, Psychodynamics, Ego Development, Object Relations Theory, neurophysiological activity, memory consolidation, coping function, problem-solving function, adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, subliminal motivation, id, ego, repression, suppression, stages: symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, autonomous,
Chapter fourteen talked about unconscious motivation and also spent a great deal discussing Freudian theory. The chapter started off with Freud’s dual-instinct theory. This theory basically broke down all biological drives into two groups: Eros and Thanatos. Eros stood for life instincts, which included things such as instincts for food, water, air, sleep, and sex. Thanatos stood for death instincts, which included topics such as aggression. The underlying idea behind Dual-Instinct Theory is that these innate drives (life instincts and death instincts), which originate from impulse-driven biological forces, provide the energy for behaviors.
The book then went on to talk about the unconscious, which is pretty much known throughout the field of psychology. The unconscious can be defined as the idea that people have motives and intentions that lie outside of their everyday awareness. There are three views on the unconscious and those are Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious, and implicit motivation.
Freudian unconscious is part of his theory of psychoanalysis, which states that there are three components of the mind: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Conscious included thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, and experiences that a person is aware of at any point in time. The preconscious consists of all thoughts, feelings, and memories that are absent from immediate consciousness. The unconscious according to Freud is the mental storehouse of instinctual impulses, repressed memories, and unfulfilled wishes and desires.
The adaptive unconscious is the concept that learning occurs without it being present in our conscious. The example of the patient with amnesia really made me think about this concept and how it applies to my life. I don’t remember learning how to tie my shoes, yet I do it everyday without even thinking about it or where I learned it.
Implicit motivation refers to the motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments that operate outside a person’s conscious awareness. These motivational processes are indirect and include such things as: needs for achievement, affiliation, intimacy, and power.
Ego psychology talks about the development of the ego throughout life. There are six stages of ego development and they are: symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. Symbiotic stage is where the welfare of the being depends on its caretaker. Impulsive stage is when external forces curb the child’s desires. Self-protective stage occurs when the child firsts understands that rules exist. In the conformist stage, the ego internalizes group-accepted rules. Conscientious stage is when the person develops his or her own internalized set of rules. Finally, the autonomous stage is when thoughts, plans, and goals originate from within. Each one of these stages is important in the field of motivation by allowing the person to interact more effectively with their surroundings.
Defense mechanisms are tools to deal with potentially overwhelming levels of anxiety. These defense mechanisms are hierarchical from least to most mature. Each one of these defense mechanisms has its own effectiveness with the higher categories being more effective. There are many different defense mechanisms but some examples are: fantasy, regression, rationalization, and humor.
Object relations theory is the last concept that the chapter talked about and it mainly focuses on the development of mental representations of the self. The basis behind object relations theory is to study how people relate to objects to satisfy their emotional and psychological need for relatedness.
I believe that I will remember bits and pieces from this chapter because I have learned them in several different classes. Freudian theory seems to be a very debated topic in the field of psychology but his theories have led to great research in the field of the unconsciousness.
If there was one particular topic from this chapter that I believe I will remember the best, it would be the section on subliminal motivation. I always found this topic to be interesting and this section helped me to understand it a little better and the results on its effectiveness really made me consider all of the instances that occur throughout the day.
Chapter 14 talks about unconscious motivation. Psychodynamic perspective, the unconscious, psychodynamics, and ego psychology all deal with the unconscious mind. The psychodynamic approach is largely based on the image of human nature. It determines our biological and social desires, thoughts and feelings and there is no way to change it. Often times psychoanalysis come off with a pessimistic tone and places an emphasis on conflict, anxiety, repression, defense mechanisms and many other emotional issues. Subject matter becomes the psychoanalysis appeal. For many people psychoanalysis is very popular because it talks about different aspects of human nature and people enjoy reading about it. The book states that people often are more interested in getting sexual pleasure than they will admit and I definitely agree. People don't like to share about their sexual pleasures. Psychoanalysis refers to the study of unconscious mental processes. A lot has changed throughout the years and psychodynamic has definitely changed. There are now four principles that define the psychodynamic theory. The unconscious is the first one. Unconscious mental processes, electrons, and velocity are expanding the universe to measure the study scientifically. These are all parts of Freud's theory and he thought we had to express our unconscious impulses through a disguised form that we didn't know we had. Freud studied this theory is multiple ways. The debate on the unconscious mental life has ceased and now it's focused on the three views of the Fruedian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious and the implicit motivation. Psychodynamics focused on the things people normally did not want to do. Freud thought that there had to be some sort of motivation behind doing some things that you didn't wish to do. Psychodynamics can also be known as fearing and wanting the same things, such as a wedding proposal. As much as you fear doing the proposal you go through with it because you want to. Repression was Freud's first concept of psychodynamics. Repression is a way to forget information that is unconscious, unintention and/or automatic. Anxiety helps move the unconscious mind into the repression stage. Suppression also deals with psychodynamics and unconscious motivation. Suppression is the ability to remove a thought by ways that are conscious, intentional and deliberate. There is no way to completely stop a thought but suppression is the closest way to push it away. Ego psychology is developmental process. The process of ego psychology happens through a development of psychological growth, maturity, adjustment, prosocial interdependence, and infantile origins. The ego development is important to the unconscious world because it helps the body defend anxiety. Also, the ego helps the individual interaction more effectively in it's surroundings. The unconscious mind has a lot more to do with the body than I ever though it did.
One of the things that I will take from this chapter and remember it years from now is ego psychology is developed throughout our life and that it is just developed in general. I didn't know that their was a process that we went through to get the ego psychology that we had. I often struggle with anxiety and to know that my ego psychology helps defending my body from even worse anxiety that makes me feel better. I know that my anxiety could be a lot worse if I didn't go through ego development.
Chapter 14 discusses unconscious motivations. The main concepts of this chapter are psychoanalytic perspective, the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego psychology, and object relations theory.
The psychoanalytic theory 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. So it’s known as the pessimistic image of human nature. But oddly it is very popular with people because there is so much to learn about it. This theory is all about the mind and its secrets. The Freudian process relates to the psychoanalytic theory. Freud says that our emotions come from impulses from biological forces. Freud, the smart man that he is, came up with instincts because he thought there were too many needs. The instincts for life are known as eros. Which is our ability of survival. Death instincts are known as thanatos, which take us towards rest and inactivity. Freud helped psychology a lot but things have changed and now we use the contemporary psychodynamic theory, which is more modern and doesn’t connect with Freud and his theories as much.
The unconscious makes empirical exploration difficult because it’s hidden from private consciousness and public observation. Freud divided the unconscious into three parts to make understanding it easier. The three categories are: the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Adaptive unconscious helps people to set goals, make judgments, and think. This of course will help us in motivating ourselves in life.
Psychodynamics is the idea that people engage in behaviors that they do not want to, but they can’t help it. Freud looked into these strange behaviors and explained ego and id. The ego is the conscious and the id is the unconscious. Repression is the process of forgetting information. The ego or id may use repression to help you forget certain things. Suppression is the process of removing a though by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate. Suppression can be used when certain thoughts come into consciousness that people don’t want to remember.
Ego psychology is the idea that the ego grows as people grow older. So as we get wiser, our ego gets wiser. Ego defense uses its defense mechanisms to help fight of the constant vulnerability. There are many different defense mechanisms that can be used, some of them are: Denial, regression, rationalization, humor, anticipation, and fantasy. The last concept I read about was object relations theory which is the nature and development of our mental representations of our self and others. This starts when we are young and helps us develop our thoughts of our self compared to others and what we think is correct or normal.
What I will remember from this chapter and from other psychology classes that I’ve learned a little about it is the ego and id. There are certain things about myself I can’t explain or why I think a certain way. I make conscious and unconscious decisions daily and I don’t know how to control them. The human brain is an amazing and complicated organ. Although I did find it interesting that the book wonders if they really do exist. To me the id and ego have always seemed a skeptical but I went along with it because it seemed to be proven. I still believe they id and ego exist with some stipulations and contradictions.
Chapter 14 talks about the concept of unconscious motivation, and psychoanalysis determines that motivation comes from biological and social impulses along with sexual urges, conflict, anxiety, and other shortcomings. It is something that happens to us rather than something someone chooses, an idea all on its own by Sigmund Freud. Today’s focus falls on psychodynamic, the study of dynamic unconscious mental processes like (prejudice, depression), allowing one can study the unconscious within the traditional Freudian perspective or outside.
In Freud’s Dual-Instinct theory he viewed motivation to be regulated by impulse-driven biological forces. He emphasized two general categories of motivation: instincts for life and instincts for death. Life instincts also known as (Eros) maintain life and ensure individual collective (species) survival. These are food, water, air, and sleep along with self-preservation (individual survival) such as sex, nurturance, and affiliation. Freud placed the most emphasis in this area more in particularly sex. The other hand death instinct (Thanatos) pushed the individual toward rest, inactivity, and over all energy conservation, with the ultimate rest being death. The primary emphasis toward this motivation is aggression. When focused on the self leads to self-criticism, sadism, depression, and so on, but when focused on other leads to anger, hate, cruelty, and even war. Although sex and aggression are instinctual drives they can be managed through psychosocial development (personality) by experiencing their surroundings. However, contemporary psychoanalysts dropped sex and aggression from the drive concepts because they didn’t match physiological models, like hunger and thirst, and were instead considered psychological wishes.
Psychodynamic theory is based on four postulates (principles): the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory. First is the unconscious, assumed to constitute the primary process through a shadow phenomenon (indirect manifestation) while the conscious controlled the secondary process of this urges. After much debate the idea was split into three views. The Freudian Unconscious split he mind into three components; a conscious for short-term memory and feelings, a preconscious for the unconscious to store thoughts and feeling that are retrievable, and an unconscious a mental storehouse of inaccessible impulses. An Adaptive unconscious that states that our unconscious acts as an autopilot, dealing with the environment while our conscious thoughts focus on other things. Finally, implicit motivation which are mindful emotions that affect our behavior based on the underlying emotional association.
The second postulate is psychodynamics in it-self. It describes the conflict between the conscious (ego’s) and unconscious (id’s). When the ego wants something but at the same time the id fears it, such as a job interview. It is the clashing of these forces that gives the psychodynamic its meaning. The mental combatants of our thoughts can be effected due to repression and suppression. Repression is an unconscious way of forgetting information and avoiding situations that may reemerge them. Suppression is the conscious process of removing a thought, but generally fails and ends up being a thought obsession. One way that thought suppression is an ally is preventing social out bursts of our thoughts.
The third postulate brings us to ego psychology or more so ego development. It starts during infantile (symbiotic stage) when a caretaker tends to our needs due to a overwhelming amount of impulses. The impulsive stage is when external forces (time outs, punishments) regulate our behavior. Self-protective stage arises when we anticipate consequences and understand that there are rules. The conformist stage acts against impulses using disapproval. The conscientious is a set of internalized rules that allows us to rely on our selves. Lastly is autonomous ego is developed, self-motivating and self-regulating, to mediate against anxiety using defense mechanisms. Defense mechanisms are used to buffer conflict with id impulses (neurotic anxiety), superego demands (moral anxiety), and environmental dangers (realistic anxiety). They exit in a hierarchical order ranging in maturity.
The final postulate is object relations theory. The nature and development of mental representations of the self and other and the affective processes. How the childhood mental representation of one’s caretaker are present in adulthood. Positive or negative mental models of one’s self predict the level of the adults confidence and relationships.
I found a lot of things interesting in this chapter, and I always like reading about Freud. If I had to pick one thing that I would remember from this chapter more than the others….it would have to be the ego defense mechanisms. I say this because dealing with vulnerability everyday and having to adapt to new situations makes the maturity process between individuals difficult. Having a way to measure someone’s maturity level in a day-to-day atmosphere makes it easy to see where someone is coming from’ a cranialagical age.
Chapter 14 related to unconscious motivation. By studying the unconscious and by embracing a rather pessimistic view of human nature, psychoanalysis opens the door to study topics such as traumatic memories, inexplicable addictions, anxieties about the future, dreams, hypnosis, inaccessible and repressed memories and a slew of other hidden forces that shape our needs and ways of thinking and behaving. The subject matter of psychoanalysis reflects what seems to be so popular contemporary movies such as: sex, aggression, psychopathology, revenge, and sorts.
Sigmund Freud is the father of the psychoanalytic perspective. 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. The concept of the psychological with retains the full spirit of Freudian motivation.
Four postulates define contemporary psycho dynamic theory. The first is that much of mental life is unconscious. The second postulate of a contemporary psycho-dynamic understanding of motivation and emotion is that mental processes operate in parallel with one another, such that people commonly want and fear the same thing at the same time. The third postulate is that of ego development. Healthy development involves moving from an immature, socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and socially responsible. The fourth postulate of a contemporary psycho-dynamic understanding is that mental representations of self and others form in childhood to guide adult social motivations.
One thing that I found interesting and will remember down the road is the Dual-Instinct Theory. It states that the mind received psychic energy from the body's physical energy. The source of all physical energy was biological drive, which was a biologically rooted force “emanating within the organism and penetrating to the mind”. It basically states that instinctual bodily drives explained the source of all motivation. I'll remember this because it is important to remember this to keep a healthy body and mind.
This chapter focused on unconscious motivation. According to the psychodynamic approach, motivation is derived from biology and society. This determines our desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Psychoanalysis is very popular because it focuses on the unconscious and therefore explores “the unknown.” Freud is very important in psychoanalysis. His dual-instinct theory separated all instincts into two categories- Eros (life instincts) and Thanatos (death instincts); In other words, sex and aggression. Individuals learned socially acceptable ways to manage their energies. What one does repeatedly is Freud’s concept of the ego. Contemporary psychoanalysts do not see instinctual drive as the center of motivation like Freud did. The focus is now on cognitive and interpersonal forces. Sex and aggression are seen as psychological wishes in the “wish model.” This chapter also explained that dreams are not just unconscious desires making themselves known. They are neurophysiological, cognitive, coping, and problem-solving events. Implicit motivations are inside of us and have to do with emotional experiences. They include needs for achievement, affiliation, power, and intimacy. According to the chapter, subliminal messages do not affect your actions. They might affect your unconscious, but they do not make you act in a certain way. People have conflicting feelings that motivate in opposite ways. For Freud, this was a conflict between the id and ego. According to the book, conflicting motivations occur in many aspects of our lives. Unconscious motivation is a complicated matter that everyone seems to want to know more about.
I will remember that the patterns learned in childhood often shapes interpersonal relationships in adulthood. I will remember this because I plan on having kids someday, and I will keep it in mind when raising them. I will do my best to help them be successful in loving and committed partnerships. I will also remember the concepts of ego defense and ego effectance because I found them very interesting. The difference between men who were depressed and men who were not depressed is what caught my eye. Those with effective coping strategies and mature defenses did not experience depression, as would be expected. Those with ineffective and immature coping strategies did. I think this clearly states that there is a correlation between the types of ego defenses and depression. I would be interested to see what the spread of ego defenses used in depressed individuals was.
Chapter 14 of the textbook deals with unconscious motivation. I immediately thought of Freud when I read the title of the chapter. Sure enough, the first heading in the chapter was called psychodynamic perspective. Freud had a dual-instinct theory that said motivation was made up of biological impulses for life, Eros, and death, Thanatos. Life instincts included eating and sex. Death instincts included sleeping and aggression. As we have learned through out the textbook and class, drives are not quite right when it comes to motivation. The core postulates of contemporary psychodynamic theory are the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory.
The unconscious regards the thoughts that we are unaware of. Freud said that the unconscious was full of repressed thoughts and feelings that would be too disturbing to the conscious. Contemporary research focuses on the adaptive unconscious. The adaptive unconscious is responsible automatically evaluating the environment. We don’t think about tying our shoes or our daily drive home from work. Implicit motivation is the opposite of goals, plans and self-concept. It is the emotional experiences, attitudes, and judgments that we are not exactly aware of. Subliminal motivation deals with our unconscious as well. The first thing I thought of when I read the header of subliminal motivation was the presidential ad that flashed “rats” quickly about an opponent. Subliminal motivation occurs when a weak stimulus is introduced. We do not commonly act on subliminal messages.
Freud introduced the will and couterwill into psychodynamics. The ego is the advocate for the will and the unconscious id is the advocate for the couterwill. These two come into conflict quite often. Repression is behind the idea that there are some things that we do not want to know about ourselves. We harbor feelings and urges that are too disturbing for our conscious. Repression is unintentional and automatic. Suppression is the conscious form of repression. It is when we deliberately remove a troubling thought.
The ego represent maturity and growth. When we are infants, the ego is constantly defeated by the id. As we grow, so does the ego. Eventually the sugerego emerges and represents superiour moral conduct. The id, ego, and superego are the source of our anxieties. There are many defense mechanisms in place to protect the ego. Ranging from immature to fully mature are the defense mechanisms of denial, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, sublimination and humor. Ego effectance deals the our ability to manage challenges and demands from the environment.
Object relations theory focus on how people satisfy their emotional and psychological needs. When a child experiences traumas and weak attachments to parents, the child is more likely to grow up and develop unsatisfying adult relationships.
I think the most memorable part of the chapter for me was ego development. I fully understood it and could see why Freud was fascinated by it.
Chapter 14 discusses the topic of unconscious motivation and how it is associated with psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a deterministic approach to human nature in that it believes that the main cause of a person’s motivation and behavior derives from biologically endowed and socially acquired impulses that regulates and dictates a person’s desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, whether they like it or not. Psychoanalysis theory also believes that personality changes a little after a person goes through puberty, which means that motivational impulses of an adult can be associated with events that happened in a person’s youth. The subject matter that people focus on when discussing psychoanalysis tends to focus on sex, aggression, psychopathology, revenge and other similar topics.
Freud is created the concept of psychoanalysis and believed that motivation was on a biological based model which stated that the two instinctual drives a person has are of sex and aggression (Eros and Thantaos) which supplies a person’s body with its physical and mental energies. Modern psychoanalysts choose believe that motivation importance comes from psychological wishes verses biological drives, and from cognitive information processing.
The book went onto discuss the four postulates that help define modern psychodynamic theory. The first out of the fours suggests most of mental life is unconscious and argues that thoughts, feelings and desires exist at an unconscious level, which then affects behavior without any explanation; even to the person that is behavior in such a way. There are then three views: Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious, and implicit motivation. Adaptive unconscious automatically appraises the environment, sets goals, makes judgments, and initiates action while we are busy consciously thinking about other things. Implicit motivation is embedded in emotional associations that are outside of a person’s conscious awareness. When the emotional associations are cues by encountering cue-activating environmental events, orients, directs, and selects attention such that people will automatically attend to emotionally linked environmental events.
The second postulate of a contemporary psychodynamic understanding of motivation and emotion is that mental processes operate side by side which explains why people fear and want the same thing at the same time. This postulate best explains psychodynamics because it is well known that people will have conflicting feelings that motivate them to act in opposing ways. Thus it can be determined that people will often have divergent and unconscious thoughts, feeling, and attitudes on many aspects of their life. For example, wanting to do your homework so you will get a good grade in your class, but you hate doing it because you find it to be boring and uninteresting.
The next postulate discusses ego development. If a person has healthy development of their ego they will progress from an immature/dependent state to a mature/independent state. Neo-Freudians believe the ego develops through this progression: symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. Through gaining resources and strengths (ability to cope with inevitable anxieties in life and knowledge about the changing environment) a person should be able to mature their ego for the better.
The final postulate believes that mental representations of self and others form in a person’s youth and guide adult social motivations. This postulate supports the idea that lifelong personality patterns begin to form in childhood while people are formulating mental representations of self, others, and relationships. Then once they are formed their beliefs for the basis of motivational states that guide a person’s interpersonal relationships.
From this reading I think what I will remember most from this chapter is about the second postulate. I feel that I personally experience having opposing motivations about various aspects of my life. One that I experience most recently is my choice to change my major as a junior. I debated for a long time whether I would benefit from changing it or not, and in the long run I choose to. Plus, I know that I have many years ahead of me where I will experience this internal debate on whether I should do something or not, which I’m sure that all people do too.
Terms used: unconscious motivation, psychoanalysis, Eros, Thanatos, sex, aggression, unconscious, psychodynamic, conscious, biological based model, cognitive information processing, thoughts, feelings, desires, Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, ego,
Chapter 14 was about unconscious motivation. The chapter opened with a story about hypnotism. This was to illustrate that human beings can experience thought and feelings that were not originally their own. Motivation can arise from a source outside conscious awareness and volitional intent.
The psychodynamic perspective views motivation from a deterministic and a pessimistic viewpoint. It is deterministic because it theorizes that the ultimate cause of motivation and behavior derives from biologically endowed and socially acquired impulses that determine our desires, thoughts, feelings and behavior whether we like it or not. It is also deterministic because personality changes little after puberty. Thus, motivational impulses of an adult and be traced to childhood. Psychoanalysis also has pessimistic undertones because it focuses on sexual and aggressive urges, conflict, anxiety, defense mechanisms, repression and other emotional burdens and shortcomings. Psychoanalysis is appealing because it offers insight into the 'secrets of the mind.' Psychodynamic theory differs from psychoanalytic because it rejects some psychoanalytic theories and is outside Freudian tradition.
The duals instinct theory was originally stated by Freud, who was a physician by training. It states that motivation is fueled by biological forces. Some behaviors increase bodily energy and some decrease. In the dual instinct theory, there are 2 classes of instinct. Life instincts, or Eros, are instincts to ensure individual and collective survival. These include sex and affiliation. 2nd class instincts, which are a bit less definable, are Thanatos, or death instincts. These include death, rest and aggression. They are instincts that motivate the self to create and absence of bodily disturbance.
Not many contemporary scientists support the Dual Instinct Theory. Today, psychodynamic theory is defined by four postulates: The unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development and object relations theory. After many years of debate, it has been concluded that much of mental life is unconscious, meaning that many of our motives and intentions lie outside of our awareness.
Psychodynamics explains that motivational and emotional processes exist parallel to each other. Sometimes people have couterideas and counterwills that cause them to engage in behavior they may not neccessarily wish to. Ego is defined by one's conscious will and id is defined by unconscious counterwill. The human mind is continually plagued by conflict between the id and ego. This clash of will and counterwill is what is meant by the term psychodynamics. Ego development empowers a person to interact more effectively with their surroundings and helps to eliminate anxiety caused by mediating demands of the self and it's environment. Ego defense is a way of protecting the vulnerable ego from the risks of day to day existence. Defense mechanisms protect against anxiety and are categorized in levels according to the complexity and maturity level of the type of defense. Ego effectence is a reactive coping mechanism to protect the ego, rather than simply a defensive one. When a person succesfully interacts with their environment, their ego effectence motivation increases. Objects relations theory goes further than Freud's initial studies of the unconscious. Instead of simply studying the 'object' aspects of uncoscious motivation as Freud did, this theory studies the mental representation of self and other significant people as influenced by one's drives.
What I'm most likely to retain from this chapter is the table of ego defense mechanisms and the way they are categorized from immature to mature. I had no idea so many defense mechanism existed, and I'm a defensive person so this was fun and interesting to read.
Terms: Psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, dual-instinct theory, unconscious, Freudian unconscious, implicit motivation, subliminal motiation, will vs. counterwill, repression, suppression, id, ego, superego, ego development, ego defense, ego effectence, sublimation, denial, object-relations theory
Chapter 14 focused on unconscious motivation. The chapter mainly focused on psychodynamic theories but started out talking about Freud's psychoanalytic theory. According to Freud, motivation was regulated by impulse-driven biological forces. In his dual-instinct theory he described these forces as Eros, the life instincts, and Thanatos, the death instinct. These forces are what provides the energy to motivate our behavior. Freud also divided the mind into three components: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious.
Contemporary studies of the unconscious looked into the adaptive unconscious, or the autopilot of our mind. The adaptive unconscious appraises the environment, sets goals, makes judgments, and initiates action, all while we are thinking about something else.
Psychodynamics is the study of dynamic unconscious mental processes and refers to the clashing of forces such as will and counterwill, desire versus repression, and idea versus counteridea. The original definition of psychodynamics referred to the concept of repression. Repression is the process of forgetting information or an experience 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. Suppression does not actually work, instead it precedes the undesired action you were trying to avoid in the first place.
The last part of the chapter focused on the role of the ego. The ego is a developmental progression toward what is possible in terms of psychological growth, maturity, adjustment, prosocial interdependence, competence, and autonomous functioning. It unfolds along six stages: symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. The role of the ego is to prevent and buffer against overwhelming levels of anxiety. Defenses mechanisms employed include denial and fantasy, projection, and rationalization and reaction formation.
The part of this chapter that I will remember down the road will be about repression and suppression as well as subliminal motivation. I found it interesting, yet somewhat obvious, that trying to suppress a thought can lead to an obsession with the suppressed thought. I also found it interesting that subliminal motivation do not actually lead to a direct behavior. These two examples prove that our unconscious mind plays a much larger role than we can even imagine.
Chapter 14 is titled ”Unconscious Motivation”. I am excited to read through this chapter and find out what motivates me that I am unaware of. The chapter started off by walking through a hypnosis patient who has thoughts, feelings, and motivations that were implanted in his mind by his therapist which he thought were his own. This is part of the reason why I don’t want to be hypnotized. It then went on to discuss Freud and his psychoanalytic way of thinking. Freud’s hypothesis of what drives people to act is our impulses to satisfy our biological needs. He broke these biological needs into two groupings, life instincts and death instincts, in his dual-instinct theory, which is now not an accepted theory. Life instincts are things that we need to continue living and for the species to continue, which includes things such as eating, drinking, and sex. Our death instincts cause us to pursue activities which lead us towards rest, death being the ultimate accomplishment of this. Other, less drastic, death instinct behaviors include aggression, depression, alcoholism, and rivalry. Modern psychodynamic lines of thought make a distinction that Freud did not make. They call needs such as hunger and thirst physiological drives because they are necessary for our survival. However, feelings such as sex or aggression do not fit as easily in to this model because they are not essential for survival; therefore, they are categorized as wishes. This is very important to the motivational aspect of this because it creates contrast between what we currently have, our present state, and what we could have, our ideal state.
The next aspect examined in the chapter was the unconscious mind. I have always wondered how psychologists examined and measured the unconscious. It turns out that there are three different views of the unconscious; Freudian, Adaptive, and Implicit. Freudian unconscious holds that the unconscious mind acts as a storehouse for thoughts, experiences, memories, and unfulfilled dreams that are inaccessible by the conscious mind. Freud believed that dreams were the pathway that connected our unconscious mind with our conscious mind and utilized this to help clients. The adaptive unconscious model believes that our unconsciousness acts as an automatic pilot and makes the necessary adjustments needed while we perform various activities. For example, when I drive my car I don’t always focus on how much pressure I have on the gas pedal or even focus on staying between the lines, I just readjust automatically. Lastly, implicit motivation is our unconscious motivational forces that cause us to act. Because these are unbeknownst to us we cannot explain them to ourselves or to others. These are linked to our social needs and the emotions elicited by events that address meeting these needs. For example, if I have a wonderful conversation with a complete stranger I will experience positive emotions. The unconscious mind remembers these positive emotions and then motivates you to engage in the behavior again.
The last bit of the chapter discussed various aspects of Freud’s theories including the id, superego, and ego. The main thrust of much of Freud’s theories was the repression of the unconscious. By repressing he means filtering how we act and what we say before we put it out there for the world to see. However, much of this filtering is done subconsciously so we don’t actually know what our true desires were before we filtered them. Freud hypothesized that this was our ego (our balance between the id, which demands we indulge in our every desire, and our superego, which wants us to be a superhero) shuts out some of the demands of the id. The book then went on to discuss our ego, or our personality, and how it is developed and protected. It is developed by many factors including our life experiences, maturity level, how well we handle a task, and how well we cope with different situations. This is very much like our perceived self back in chapter 10 that we sought to preserve a constant sense of self by engaging in self-verifying behaviors or changing our values and beliefs do diminish the cognitive dissonance we may experience. Our ego acts in a similar way by having many built in defense mechanisms to allow us to maintain a constant ego and diminish dissonance. One defense mechanism is denial in which an individual will pretend like an event didn’t even happen. Another is humor with which an individual will not take themselves or their failures seriously and talk to others as though these bad events aren’t that important. In the end Freud and many of his theories were rethought, replaced, or thrown out for various reasons including the inability to verify them, new discoveries, and the poor predictability of his psychodynamic theory. Well, it was fun while it lasted, Freud.
One thing I will remember long after this class has passed is that almost all motivational theories arise out of some sort of disparity between our present self and our ideal self. Unless we realize this difference we cannot develop a plan, take actions to change ourselves, and monitor our progress. So basically, unless we realize this deficit we will not be motivated to do anything.
This chapter was titled unconscious motivation and stemmed off of the teachings of Sigmund Freud. All of his teachings are not accepted but they laid the ground work for current beliefs. Freud and people who follow his teachings to the letter believe in the psychoanalytic perspective. This includes the dual-instinct theory. This theory states that motivation is driven by the two classes of biological instincts of Eros (life instincts) and Thanatos (death instincts). The two main drives or motivators would therefore be sex and aggression. However, this view was latter rejected because sex and aggression do not follow the cyclical pattern of homeostasis and was therefore classified as a psychological wish instead of a drive. The more recent view is the contemporary psychodynamic theory. This perspective has put Freud’s thoughts into actual tests and came up with four main core postulates that hold true. They include the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory.
The unconscious is hard to explore or examine because it is the part of our mind we are unaware of and don’t think about. Freud divided the mental life into three categories; the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. The Freudian unconscious was considered the biggest and most important part of our mental life and most unconscious thoughts were kept from the conscious because they were either anxiety-provoking or ego-threatening. The adaptive unconscious is the view that the brain can be put on “auto-pilot” and make its own decisions such as judging the environment, set goals, or initiate action without conscious thought. The unconscious is also responsible for implicit motivation which is all of the motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments that occur without our conscious knowledge.
Psychodynamics first came about because Freud observed that people often participated in things that they did not want to do. He then came up with the idea that people have in inner will that is continually working against a counter-will. This idea then led to the notion of repression. Repression is when a person forgets information and does so unintentionally. This happens because the ego’s psychodynamic counterforce finds the id’s demanding wishes to stressful to deal with. However, because people cannot remember their repressed experiences it is very hard to study. This then leads to suppression which are thoughts we try to forget and not think about. This is easier to study because it turns out no matter how hard you consciously try to forget something you can’t. In fact the more you try not to think about something, the more you do.
Ego psychology is the third postulate in the contemporary psychodynamic theory. It is what is thought of as the individual’s personality. The ego also goes through a specific set of stages that are considered ego development. They are the symbiotic phase, impulsive phase, self-protective phase, conformist phase, conscientious phase, and finally the autonomous phase. The ego is also responsible for one of the mind’s defense mechanisms. Throughout a period of time changes in internal or external reality take place and lead to anxiety, distress and depression. The ego acts as a buffer to these changes and tries to lesson or prevent the individual from feeling anxious, distressed or depressed.
Object relations theory is the study of how people go about satisfying their need for relatedness through their imagined or actual attachments to social and sexual objects. It focuses on how people develop mental representations of themselves and others. This is important because it has been found that the relationships we form as children affect and shape the relationships we make as adults. For example if one has a good healthy relationship with their parents they are likely to find and form a healthy relationship with a significant other. However, if a person’s parents were abusive it is most likely that this person will choose an abusive significant other as well.
The thing I am most likely to remember from this chapter is the concept of suppression. My parents always have told me to just not think about something when I am upset about that something. It has never helped. Now I know why and I don’t have to feel so bad when I can’t just get over something by simply “not thinking about it”.
Chapter 14 was about the unconscious motivations. Unconscious motivation occurs when you do not even know it. The chapter first talks about the psychodynamic perspective. This approach presents a largely deterministic and pessimistic image of human nature. It is deterministic because it holds the ultimate cause of motivation and behavior derives from biologically endowed and socially acquired impulses that determine our desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This theory also says that much of the motivation impulses that we feel as adults comes from the events that you has as a child. Basically, motivation comes across as something that happens to us rather than something we choose. It is an innate impulse. A theory arises from the psychodynamic perspective, which is the dual-instinct theory. Sigmund Freud founded the theory and talks about 2 significant instincts in which we live our lives by. The first one is life instincts, which refer to food, water, air, sleep, and other things that contribute to survival of an individual. The second type of instincts that are talked about is death instincts, which push the individual s toward rest, inactivity, and energy conservation. The psychodynamic theory has changed significantly after Freud.
Much of mental life is unconscious. Freud rejected the idea that consciousness was the essence of mental life and therefore divided the mind into three components which include the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Freud referred to the unconscious as the mental storehouse of inaccessible instinctual impulses, repressed experiences, childhood memories, and strong unfulfilled wishes and desires. The next thing that was talked about in chapter 14 is the adaptive unconscious. This runs on automatic pilot as it carries out countless computations and innumerable adjustments during acts such as tying your shoes, driving a car, or playing the piano. Implicit motivation refers to all those motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments that operate outside of a person’s conscious awareness and that are fundamentally distinct from self-report motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments.
Psychodynamics is the next thing discussed in the chapter. The main thing they talked about was the clashing of will and counterwill. Freud talked about psychodynamics as concerned with the conflict between the id and the ego. On concept that is talked about in this section is suppression. It refers to the process of removing a thought by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate. Then they talk about ego development which is the healthy development that involves moving from an immature, socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and interdependent with others. Ego defense helps to reduce anxiety and depression. The last thing in the chapter talks about the objects relations theory, which is all about mental representations of self and others form in childhood that guide the person’s later social motivations and relationships.
The thing that I will remember years from now was the section on subluminal messaging. This was interesting to me because it took the concept of the unconscious and applied it to real-life scenarios. I will remember this because I am quite interested and entertained by hypnotic-type information.
TERMS: Psychodynamic Perspective; Unconscious Mind; Life Instincts; Death Instincts; Dual Instinct Theory; Adaptive Unconsciousness; Suppression; Ego Development; Ego Defense; Object Relations Theory
Chapter 14 discusses how we may know what we want, think, and feel but many times we will have little or no idea what is causing those wants, thoughts, or feelings. This chapter begins by explaining that how psychodynamic principles are different from psychoanalysis. Both look at unconscious mental processes but psychodynamics does not embrace the entire Freudian theories that go into psychoanalysis. The dual-instinct theory within psychodynamics discusses two types of bodily needs that influenced instincts. These instincts were the instinct for life and the instinct for death. The instinct for life was called Eros and it consists of instincts that work to maintain individual and collective life. Thanatos, the instinct for death, drives us to rest and save energy. These instincts provide the energy for behaviors but the ego is the direction of that energy. The ego is essentially how those instincts will manifest themselves. The text discusses that Eros is typically the instinct for sex while thanatos is typically aggression. Nowadays, the idea of the two as drives is being rejected and they are being called “wishes” because aggression and sex don’t fit very well into the concept of drive discussed earlier in the text.
The second topic discussed in the chapter was the unconscious. Freud’s research was focused on the unconscious processes. He researched the unconscious through hypnosis, dream analysis, free association, and much more. The text says that after being debated frequently, the idea that the unconscious makes up the majority of our mental life is now considered true. Freud had three areas of the conscious: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. The conscious was everything mentally that we are currently aware of. The preconscious is things that aren’t in the consciousness but can be easily pulled into the conscious. The unconscious is as the text put it, “the mental storehouse” of inaccessible childhood memories, strong wishes and desires, forgotten experiences, and impulses. Freud believed that the tension in the unconscious could be retrieved through dreams and that by analyzing those dreams, you can reveal the true thoughts and desires of a person.
An idea of the unconscious has developed, called the adaptive unconscious. The adaptive unconscious performs routine activities and can learn new motor skills. It was interesting that a man that had no memory, was still able to improve a motor skill even though he had no memory of having worked on that motor skill before. The text discusses that people are able to use their adaptive unconscious to make accurate judgments on a person after only a brief period of time. Another idea of the unconscious that was discussed was implicit motivation. Implicit motivations are all of the emotions, attitudes, motives, and judgments that occur without conscious awareness and cannot be self-reported. Implicit motivations are based off of emotional experiences. The last idea of the unconscious is subliminal motivation. It was thought that subliminal messaging worked to get people to “Drink Coke” or “Eat popcorn.” However, it has been found that the unconscious does not act on those messages. It is difficult to tell if the unconscious actually does understand the message. It was found, though, that it does not have an effect on emotions or memory, either.
The third topic discussed in chapter 14 is psychodynamics (again). Freud looked at how not everything people do is intentional. He said that conscious trying to do something sometimes must fight with unconscious counterwill. Psychodynamics refers to the constant battle between conscious and unconscious things. Some of the text examples were idea versus counteridea, desire versus repression, and excitation versus inhibition. Contemporary psychoanalysts discuss that the battle between the conscious and unconscious is constantly occurring and always will. Freud defined the central concept of psychodynamics as repression. Repression is what determines what will stay in the unconscious and what will come into the conscious. I like the textbook’s example of the unconscious being an overcrowded room where repression is the body guard that decides who gets to leave that room and come into the conscious. However, it is difficult to come to many conclusions because it is almost impossible to study repression. You are essentially asking someone to report on something that they don’t remember.
The second idea in psychodynamics is suppression. In a way, suppression is the opposite of repression. Repression is determining what will come into the conscious. Suppression is when a thought is already in the conscious and you are trying to put it back into the unconscious. The bad things is that when we try to suppress a thought, it comes back and typically increases in strength and awareness. The rebound effect occurs when the suppressed thought keeps coming back even after it’s relevance has passed.
The final concept that chapter 14 discusses is ego psychology. The ego develops through a process. It begins as an infant in symbiotic and goes through impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and ends at autonomous. During the symbiotic stage, it is very immature, consists mostly of impulses, and is reliant on others. The final stage, autonomous, is self-motivating and self-regulating. It no longer relies on others. The text discusses how the ego is always vulnerable and has many defense mechanisms that work to protect the consciousness from too much anxiety. There are many different defense mechanisms. The basic ones are denial and fantasy because they try to protect the consciousness from reality. The fourth level is the most mature. This level includes sublimation and humor. Sublimation takes impulses and releases them through socially acceptable and beneficial ways. Humor allows someone to deal with difficult things in a social acceptable way. How well someone deals with the environment is called ego effectance. Ego effectance evolves as we do from crawling and walking to a better feeling of competence.
One other item the text discusses is the object relations theory. The text discusses how unconscious motivation began with physiological motivations of sex and aggression and developed into a more interpersonal idea. Interpersonal connectedness is central to the object relations theory. The name makes sense because it is how a person seeks a relationship (relations) with a person (object) to satisfy the need for relatedness.
With every scientific thought, idea, and theory there are criticisms. The text did discuss the criticisms of psychodynamic theory. The biggest criticism is that Freud’s ideas are not scientifically testable. As discussed with repression, you can’t ask someone to report on something they don’t remember. The second criticism is that it works really well for looking at past events but cannot be used to make predictions.
Years from now, I will still remember the general ideas of the unconscious including repression and suppression. I am the type of person that when I try to not think about something my next thought will be, “I learned that suppressing a thought doesn’t do any good because it will just keep coming back more intensely.” I’ll then probably give in to the thought – especially if it is like the suppression example in the text about the chocolate candy bar. I will look at my unconscious thoughts from spacing out in class and write them down. The big reason for this is that I usually have a lot on my plate and that if it did make its way into my consciousness, it is important and I will be worrying about it later. So, if I write it down, I will be able to put it on my list of things to do. Then, I will be more apt to accomplish it and worry less. If they aren’t practical (like having to do an assignment), I will focus on coming up with a solution or way to deal with it so that the thought doesn’t keep occurring like with suppression. Repression and suppression have everyday applications that impact my life greatly because of the many things that life throws at a person. I find the other information fascinating and I will remember it. However, since suppression and repression are easily applicable, I will be more apt to remember them many years down the road and actually use them.
Chapter fourteen discussed unconscious motivation and how psychoanalysis offers a chance to talk about the content of our own private subjective experience and why unwanted desires and fears make their home there. The first point that the author wanted to make clear is the difference between psychoanalytic and psychodynamic. Though at one time thought to be the same thing, psychoanalytic and psychodynamic are now considered two different mental processes. Psychoanalytic now refers to those practitioners who remain committed to most traditional Freudian principles, whereas the term psychodynamic refers to the study of dynamic unconscious mental processes. Freud’s Dual-Instinct Theory viewed motivation as regulated by impulse-driven biological forces. Freud believed there were as many biological drives as there were different bodily demands. He divided them into two main categories. These categories were instincts for life and instincts for death. Also, as a substitute of motivational principle, sex and aggression are conceptualized as psychological wishes, rather than as psychological drives. Today there are four postulates that define psychodynamic theory. These postulates include the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory. The unconscious postulate depicts much of the mental life. Though this has been disputed over the last 100 years, the conclusion that much of mental life is unconscious is now largely accepted as true. The fundamental premise of psychoanalysis is the division of mental life into what is conscious and what is unconscious. Freud rejected the idea that consciousness was the essence of mental life and he therefore divided the mind into three components: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. It was also determined that Freud’s concept of the dream was too limited. In addition to a venting function, dreams serve as neurophysiologic activity, memory consolidating, a stress-buffering or coping function, and a problem- solving function. The adaptive consciousness was also discussed in the chapter. The adaptive consciousness appraises the environment, sets goals, makes judgments, and initiates action, all while we are consciously thinking about something else. Implicit motivation was described in the chapter as 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, and judgments. Subliminal motivation was also discussed as a stimulus that is presented at a very weak energy level to an unsuspecting research participant. This however, was determined to not be processed in a way that would affect thoughts or behavior. Under psychodynamics, repression and suppression were discussed as ways of guarding the mind (repressions). It is the process of forgetting information or an experience by ways that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic. On the other hand, suppression is the process of removing a thought by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate. Ego development was described as a developmental progression toward what is possible in terms of psychological growth, maturity, adjustment, pro-social interdependence, competence, and autonomous functioning. Ego defense is necessary since the ego is always in a state of vulnerability. Defense mechanisms exist in a hierarchical ordering from least to most mature, from least to most adaptive. Ego effectance concerns the individual’s competence in dealing with environmental challenges, demands, and opportunities. Object Relations Theory focuses on the nature and the development of mental representations of the self and others and on the affective processes associated with these representations. According to this theory, the quality of any one’s mental representations of relationships can be characterized by three chief dimensions: unconscious tone, capacity for emotional involvement, and mutuality of autonomy with others.
One of the most memorable things from the chapter that I will likely remember years from now is the story about the man who had his hippocampus removed because of the bad seizures he was having. As a result he had amnesia, and every time he went to the laboratory to practice his motor skills it was as if it was the first day he had ever been there every time he went. All the people were new and the place seemed new to him, however despite his memory lapses he still showed marked improvement of the motor skills each day. This showed the existence of an adaptive unconscious. I found this story to be so interesting. I try to picture myself in that mans condition and it seems so strange. I know I will remember this because I was really intrigued by the story, I find that I remember stories much better than facts. Ego defense mechanisms were also very interesting in that they describe how and why people act a certain way. The illustration in the book gave some very good examples and allowed me to examine myself to see the areas that I have a mature or immature defense mechanism.
Chapter 14 talked about unconscious motivation. The first approach is the psychodynamic perspective. Psychoanalysis say the cause of motivation and behavior is from biology and social impulses that determine our desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Psychoanalysis think that personality changes little after puberty and motivational impulses of adults are from childhood events. Psychoanalysis focus on sexual and aggressive urges, conflict, anxiety, repression, and defense mechanisms. In the dual-instinct theory, there are two instincts, Eros and Thanatos. Eros is the life instinct, the instinct for water, food, air, and sleep. Thanatos is the death instinct, the instinct towards rest, inactivity, and energy conservation. Physiological drives are depicted as the homeostasis is disturbed and causes the need. The need leads to the drive, which causes goal-directed behavior. The goal-directed behavior leads to consummatory behavior and the return of homeostasis. Sex and aggression are psychological wishes.
Freud thought the unconscious is the mental storehouse of inaccessible instinctual impulses, repressed experiences, childhood memories, and strong unfulfilled wishes and desires. Freud also said that dreams vent unconscious tensions. Psychodynamics are metal processes that operate in parallel with one another. Freud thought that the mind was in conflict; idea versus counteridea, will versus counterwill, ad desire versus repression. Repression is forgetting information or an experience by ways of the unconscious, unintentional, and automatic. Suppression is removing a thought by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate.
Freud said that the psychical energy originated in the id and the ego was the personality. Neo-Freudians said the ego developed through learning and experience. The ego has stages of development. In the symbiotic stage, the ego is extremely immature and is overwhelmed with impulses. The ego is taken care of by its caretaker not by itself. In the impulsive stage, external forces curb the ego's impulses not themselves. I the self-protective stage, self control happens when the child anticipates consequences and understands that rules exist. In the conformist stage, the ego internalizes group accepted rule and anxiety of group disapproval. The conscientious ego has a conscience, an internalized set of internal standards. In the autonomous ego, thoughts, plans. goals, and behaviors originated from the ego. The ego defends against anxiety and the ego develops to empower the person to interact more effectively and more proactively with its surroundings. The ego is vulnerable and so it has defense mechanism to protect it. There are denial, fantasy, projection, displacement, identification, regression, reaction formation, rationalization, anticipation, humor, and sublimation.
The object relations theory focuses on the nature and the development of mental representation of the self and others and the affective processes associated with these representation. Like how childhood metal representation of their caretakers and shown in their personality and into adulthood. The quality of one's mental representations of relationships are characterized under, unconscious tone (benevolent vs. malevolent), capacity for emotional involvement (selfishness/narcissism vs. mutual concern), and mutuality of autonomy with others. Research on the object relations theory are fundamental for the psychological need for relatedness.
The thing that I will remember about this chapter even years from now are the defense mechanisms. Even before this class, I have always been interested in them. At some point in our lives, or many times, we have all used defense mechanisms. Some knowing they are, and some unaware that they are. It is something we all do when we do bad on a test, loss of a loved one, a horrific accident, or some upsetting situation at work. We use them almost every day to protect ourselves.
TERMS: psychodynamic, dual-instinct theory, drive, wish, unconscious, repression, suppression, id, ego, ego development, defense mechanisms, object relations theory
Chapter 14 explained all the different aspects of unconscious motivation. The first key player in the discussion of unconscious motivation was Sigmund Freud. Freud proposed the idea of a dual-instinct theory. This theory stated that biological drive is what motivates us. He defined two classes of instincts, Eros, the life instincts, and Thanatos, the death instincts. Eros can be defined as what drives us to seek food, water, and other things necessary to life. Thanatos, are the instincts that make us rest.
Today, there are now four postulates in psychodynamic theory. The unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory. The unconscious postulate states that many of our thoughts and desires exist at an unconscious level. Following this theory, this explains why people do things for reasons they do not know or understand. Psychodynamics states that everyone has conflicting feelings that motivate them in two different directions. The study of how we develop and change from babies into responsible people is called ego development. The final postulate in the object relations theory which states that personality begins to develop very early in life and guides the choices we make as adults.
This chapter also discussed the differences between repression and suppression. Repression is more or less the process of forgetting. Because repression is all about not knowing, it is very hard to study. Suppression is easier to study, and doesn’t really work. In order to suppress something, you need to tell yourself not to think about it. By not telling yourself to think about it, you are in fact thinking about it.
Freud divided the unconscious into three parts, the id, ego and super ego. The id was where all physical energy originated. While a child is born with the id intact, the ego slowly develops throughout infancy.
Chapter 14 is about the hidden thoughts of the mind. We have many thoughts, feelings, and wants, but how do we know where they come from and what’s real or not? Chapter 14 is about the unconscious and the motivations that we have coming from biological and social impulses and not necessarily a matter of our choosing. The unconscious has negative thoughts or feelings such as repression, aggression, defense mechanisms, and anxiety that seem to be reflex in our actions and motivations. The chapter looks at (what I believe to be one of Freud’s actually reasonable ideas) psychoanalysis of the unconscious mind and the importance of psychodynamics.
Freud’s dual-Instinct Theory is also mentioned in the chapter. This theory states that the body controls energy levels through its natural instincts or biological drives. The instincts may be survival or life based behaviors or death based (depression).
Psychodynamics:
The constructs of Psychodynamics include 4 principles: the unconscious, ego development, object-relations theory, and psychodynamics. The unconscious is the majority of our mental life. Most of what we do, is not consciously thought about (indirect perception/shadow phenomena. The ego development is all about our basic impulses. Object-relations theory is the idea that who we are now or in the future is based on the care that we received as children. Our childhood essentially shapes our personality. It also helps to explain our future relationships and how we work to satisfy our social needs. Our unconscious is based on our experiences and those unconscious thoughts and past experiences effect our actions now and in the future. Though it is clear that our past/unconscious effects our future, it is difficult to actually test and truly know exactly how and how much it effects us. Finally, psychodynamics is the struggle that we have between our id and ego or conscious and unconscious thoughts.
Through psychosocial development, or the development of one’s personality through natural experiences in one’s surroundings, individuals may also learn about drives and how to manage sexual or aggression drives. However, when looking at the psychodynamic therapies sex and aggression are not really included as they are now excluding biological forces more and including cognitive factors in addition to interpersonal factors.
When it comes to the idea from this chapter that will stick with me most, it is safe to say that I am a big picture person. I will remember to intro that set the stage and had a fun story. It talked about the hypnotist and the newspaper. I will remember that we all have unconscious thoughts, feelings, and wants. I will further remember that our unconscious plays a HUGE role in our life! I was unaware (or unconscious-ha ha punny) or how big of a role it played. In reality, the ego it the giant, submerged base or the tiny floating iceberg we are able to see or conscious/aware of.
Chapter 14 discusses the different aspects of unconscious motivation.
Unlike other motivations, we are unaware of unconscious emotion.
Psychodynamic perspective the first topic discussed, which presents human nature in a deterministic and pessimistic way. Whether we like it or not psychoanalysis is deterministic in that it holds ultimate case for motivation that motivation and behavior derive from biologically. Psychodynamics makes it possible to study topics such as repressed memories, fantasies, suicidal thoughts etc.
freud suggested that two classes of instincts that drive towards life and death- sex and aggression. The individual learns how to control and direct their behavior to manage their sexual and aggressive behavior.
The dual-instinct theory of motivation is representive of psychoanalysis, this focuses on psychological wishes and cognitive information processing.
There are four postulates that make up the contemporary psychodynamic theory. The first is that much of our mental life is unconscious. For example our thoughts and feelings and desires occur at an unconscious level.
The second is understanding that the motivation and emotion process are parallel to one another. They function and rely on one another.
People have feelings that motivate them to act and behave in a certain way.
The third postulate is who development. the ego must gain resources and strengths by being submerged in environments that allow them to progress and mature.
The ego thrives off of component
Healthy environments.
The 4th postulate is reliant on the understanding of mental representations of the self and others. This is what personality and life long life beliefs derive from. Being around positive mental models produces great results while being around negative mental models produces dysfunctional results and relationships.
The topic I found most interesting and that I feel will be most useful for the future is
Subliminal messaging, I think it's interesting how our minds are capable of reacting without us being aware.
Key terms: motivation, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic dual-instinct theory of motivation perspective, Cognitive information processing, ego development
Chapter 14 focuses on the mysterious unconscious mind, more specifically, Unconscious Motivation. The chapter covers the whole realm of unconscious motivation which includes but is not limited to The Psychodynamic Perspective, The Unconscious, Psychodynamics, and Ego Psychology. It’s also important to note that the author mentions Freud several times throughout the chapter along with many of his ideas.
The chapter kicks off with the Psychodynamic perspective and more specifically, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory or psychoanalysis. This particular approach is very traditional, as one might say. Psychoanalysis is quoted in the book as being able to retrieve the “secrets of the mind”. It’s based off the notion that all motivations and behaviors are caused from underlying biological coding as well as traits or wants that have been socially acquired by someone throughout their life. These biological and social factors are said to determine what our different desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors may be. These innate desires that we possess are not subject to change throughout the course of life, according to psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalysis tends to focus on the negative emotions or the negative individual traits one may possess. Psychodynamic is directly related to psychoanalysis. One could say that psychodynamic theory is the modern day version of psychoanalysis. They are basically the same thing, however, psychodynamic theory studies the dynamics of unconscious processes. Both theories study the unconscious, but those who choose to practice psychoanalysis are following strict Freudian guidelines. Psychodynamics does not embrace Freudian views.
Freud’s infamous dual-instinct theory devotes attention to various impulse-driven biological traits. These traits seem to ignite certain instincts within the human body. The instincts are separated into two different groups. The first group has been termed Eros, and is supposedly responsible for the life instincts. These instincts are concerned with keeping the organism (human) alive, driving the body to seek various resources that are necessary for survival. The next and last group of instincts is Thanatos. Thanatos has been coined by Freud as the death instincts. These instincts seemingly create discreet desires to rest and conserve energy. These behaviors are necessary if an injury is prevalent or if the organism has entered starvation mode.
Importantly, we must not forget that the psychodynamic theory is defined by four different postulates. These four postulates are the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory. The unconscious postulate is just that, the unconscious. It focuses on describing that the majority of our daily mental processes are made “unconsciously”. This is a hard concept to put into layman’s terms. I’ll try my best though. It’s as if the unconscious makes decisions for us automatically and then has an influence on our behavior, even though we have no idea it’s doing it. The psychodynamic postulate has already been discussed, so, we will move to the Ego development and Object relations theory. Ego development regards the process of someone moving from an immature state (younger person) to a mature state (older person). Lastly, object relations theory. Object relations theory states that mental representations of the individual and their acquaintances are created during childhood, thus influencing later social groups and types of relationships the individual is involved in.
The most interesting thing to me in this chapter was the section on the unconscious. I will remember most of this section forever, in part because it has been a previous interest of mine and another part because I have just revisited this interest by reading this chapter, solidifying it further in my memory banks. There seem to be many different views on the unconscious, which get touched on in this chapter. The major views are the Freudian unconscious, adaptive unconscious, and implicit motivation. Once again, it’s noted that most of our mental processes take place unconsciously. This is very odd to me. As I’m sitting here, writing this blog assignment, I feel very conscious and very unaware of my unconscious, but I’m being told that there is many things going on behind the scenes, in my unconsciousness. It’s a weird concept to get a grasp on. The adaptive unconscious supposedly reacts directly to the environment, setting various goals and starting different behaviors that are invisible to us. Implicit motivations are determined by emotional factors that are buried deep within our minds and are put in motion by various environmental stimuli. This is why this stuff will stick with me forever, because it’s incredible just how complex and mysterious our mind is… consciously and subconsciously.
Terms: Psychoanalysis, Psychodynamics, Dual-instinct theory, Instinctual behavior, The unconscious, ego-development, object relations theory, Eros and Thanatos, Adaptive unconscious, Implicit motivation, Conscious, Freudian perspectives
Please read the following link:http://www.psychologicalscience.com/kim_maclin/2010/01/i-learned-it-at-the-movies.html as well as the 3 resource links at the bottom of that article.This semester's movies:Teen DreamsCast…
Chapter 14 explains the concept of unconscious motivation, which states motivation comes from biological and social impulses that tends to happen rather than us choosing it (largely by negative things such as aggression, anxiety, and defense mechanisms). It’s also important to explain that Freud’s psychoanalysis began the emphasis of the unconscious mind, but psychodynamics (which is not totally consistent with Freud’s principles) is the more popular approach of the two today.
The roots of all this can be traced back to Freud’s Dual-Instinct Theory, in which the body increased or decreased energies through biological drives (instincts). There were two types of instincts: life instincts (survival behaviors) and death instincts (inactivity, which was linked to aggression and depression). The idea was that people went through psychosocial development (personality development) by experiencing their surroundings, and learned to manage sexual and aggressive drives. However, contemporary psychoanalysts dropped sex and aggression from drive concepts, because they didn’t match physiological models, and were instead considered psychological wishes. An important difference between modern psychoanalysts and psychodynamic therapists is instead to trying to focus on intrapersonal and biological forces, psychodynamics focuses on interpersonal and cognitive forces.
Psychodynamics is constructed on four principles dealing with the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object-relations theory. First, the unconscious is assumed to contain most mental life via shadow phenomena (indirect perception). Freud believed the unconscious controlled the primary process and the conscious controlled the secondary process of this urges. The entire idea has had lasting debates and split into three views. The Freudian unconscious states there are a conscious for memories and feelings, a preconcious for unconscious but retrievable thoughts, and an unconscious for inaccessible impulses. Adaptive unconscious states one’s unconscious acts sort of as autopilot to deal with the environment while our conscious thought focuses on other things. Finally, implicit motivation is emotional imprints that affect our behavior based on the quality of the underlying emotion.
The second principle of psychodynamics is ironically termed psychodynamics, which describes one’s struggle between the id and the ego. This arises in us when approached with things we want but also fear, such as marriage. Furthermore, our thoughts can be affected by repression or suppression. Repression is when we unconsciously forget information and avoid situations that may help reemerge it. Suppression is when we consciously try to forget something, which does not work but actually ends up getting fixated on our minds. It does; however, serve a useful purpose to inhibit us from social outbursts in public.
The third principle is ego development, which brings us to maturity and independence. It begins with the symbiotic stage when we are infants and a caregiver tends our needs, because we are overwhelmed with impulses. The impulsive stage uses external force to regulate our behaviors (i.e. time out). The self-protective stage arises when we realize there are rules and consequences (i.e. grounded for missing curfew). The conformist stage regulates our behavior using disproval. The conscience stage relies on our internal selves. Finally, we develop autonomous ego to mediate anxiety using defense mechanisms. Defense mechanisms range by maturity, denial and fantasy being the most immature. Projection is at the next level, because it recognizes reality. Reaction formation and rationalization are the most common, and deal with short-term anxiety well, but not long-term. Finally, sublimation and humor are the most mature, because they accept reality. The ego also helps build confidence to deal with the environment effectively (called ego effectance).
The final principle is object-relations theory. This deals with how childhood mental representations of their caregivers are reflected in their future personalities. Furthermore, it explains how they use other people to satisfy their own sexual and social needs. The qualities of their representations of relationships are based on good vs. bad unconscious tone, level of emotional involvement, and mutual autonomy. Although it’s been around awhile, psychodynamics does not go without its criticisms. Mainly, it cannot be tested for the most part and many testable points were refuted. Another popular criticism is despite understanding the past well enough; it fails to give predictive power to situations, making real-life applications difficult.
Something that stood out to me, which I’ll likely remember from this chapter was the segment on subliminal messaging. This was an interesting aspect, because it took the concept of the unconscious and applied it to real-life scenarios. I’ll probably remember this particular section, because I find hypnotic-type information interesting. I also did a high school project for psychology on the effects of hypnotism (which included subliminal messaging). During my research, I found many examples of (supposedly) messages in movies and songs, which has sort of remained in the back of my head when interacting with music or movies (I try to analyze my feelings afterward and use that stimulus in case I want that specific emotion again). Basically, the subliminal messaging section was consistent with an already established interest of mine and will not likely be forgotten anytime soon.
Terms: psychoanalysis, psychodynamics, unconscious mind, biological impulses, social impulses, Dual-Instinct Theory, instincts, life instincts, death instincts, wishes, shadow phenomenon, primary process, secondary process, Freudian unconscious, preconcious, conscious, adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, repression, suppression, ego development, ego stages, defense mechanisms, ego effectance, object-relations theory
Chapter 14 dealt with unconscious motivation and items that were related to unconscious motivation. Unlike the motivation that we have talked about thus far, this type of motivation occurs when you don't even know it is. The first thing that the chapter talks about is the psychodynamic persepective. This approach presents a largely deterministic and pessimistic image of human nature. It is deterministic because 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. This theory also says that much of the motivation impulses that we feel as adults comes from events that you had as a child. This means that motivation comes across as something that happens to us rather than something we choose. It is an innate impulse. There is a theory that arises from the psychodynamic perspective. Dual-instinct theory is what I am talking about. Sigmund Freud is the person who founded this theory as his own and he talks about two significant instincts in which we live our lives by. The first one is life instincts. These instincts refer to food, water, air, sleep, and others that contribute to survival of an individual. The second type of instincts that are talked about is death instincts. These instincts push the individuals toward rest, inactivity, and energy conservation. Freud focused this instinct on talking about aggression. Since Freud, the psychodynamic theory has changed significantly. The four big changes relate to the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory. I will talk about these in the rest of this discussion.
With the unconscious, it talks about it simply as saying that much of mental life is unconscious. Freud talked about the unconscious. He rejected the idea that conciousness, was the essence of mental life and therefore divided the mind into three components which include the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. He referred to the unconscious as the mental storehouse of inaccessible instinctual impulses, repressed experiences, childhood memories, and strong but unfulfilled wishes and desires. The chaapter goes into talking about the adaptive unconscious. This runs on automatic pilot as it carries out countless computations and innumerable adjustments during acts such as tying your shoes, driving a car, or playing the piano for example. Implicit motivation is talked about and it 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 judgements. Psychodynamics is talked about next. The main concept that is talked about here is the clashing of will and counterwill. Freud talked about psychodynamics as concerned with the conflict between the id and the ego. One concept that is talked about in this section is suppression. It refers to the process of removing a thought by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate. The next section talks about ego development which is the healthy development that involves moving from an immature, socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and interdependent with others. When referring to the development of ego, they talk about symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. There is also something called ego defense which helps us to reduce anxiety and depression. The last section refers to the object relations theory. This theory is all about mental representations of self and others form in childhood that guide the person's later social motivations and relationships.
I think the thing that I am going to take away from this chapter is the discussion on if the id and ego actually exist. I have always heard of the id and ego and also remember it specifically from my intro to psychology class that I took. I didn't really know that there was a discussion on whether it actually existed or not. They mainly talk about difference biological responses in the body when they are discussing this topic. I feel like the author believes that there is an id and an ego(also can't forget about the superego which they don't talk about in this book). More contemporary research says otherwise though.
Terms: Psychodynamic perspective, Unconscious mind, Life Instincts, Death Instincts, Dual Instinct Theory, Adaptive Unconscious, Suppression, Ego Development, Ego Defense, Object Relations Theory
Chapter 14 talks about unconscious motivation. Automatically my mind think to Freud and the Id, Ego, and the Superego. Psychoanalytic theory does in fact apply here and the chapter talks about Freud and his various ideas. First we start out with Psychodynamic principals. This approach is largely pessimistic image of the mid. They say you can trace many motivational aspects back to your childhood. This theory also places the spotlight on sexual urges and conflicts. One theory the chapter discusses is Dual-Instinct Theory. In this Sigmund Freud identified two major class of instincts. Eros of life and Thantos of death instinct. These two would provide motivation of behavior. On another hand contemporary Psychodynamic theory suggests that some of Freud's concepts were correct. Those include the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development and object relations theory.
The unconscious is believe to be a hidden part of the mind that is unknown to anyone and contains urges and impulses. Freud believed that one must vent this urges and impulses. We now agree with Freud when saying that many motivational aspects lie beyond our conscious awareness. Freud also believe that we vent our unconsciousness in our dreams which is why he went on to develop dream analysis. The adaptive unconscious is a system that is said to adapt to the environment, set goals, make judgement s and initiate action. During this the conscious mind is thinking about something else. Implicit motivation is all the motives, emotions, attitudes and judgement that operate outside of our awareness of it. Implicit is more about processes that are indirect and implied. Finally in the last section under the unconscious we have subliminal motivation. This includes subliminal advertising. To subliminally activate one's unconscious information, a stimuli is presented at a weak energy level for a brief time. After research on this topic is shows that subliminal advertising is ineffective.
Next we have psychodymics. Under this topic we have repression, suppression and id and ego existence. Repression is what keeps some thoughts unconscious and others conscious. This could be thought like those that don't fit into our self schema about ourselves. This is the process of forgetting information by ways that are unconscious and automatic. Suppression is the ability to stop a thought. This is impossible for human to achieve, you cannot stop a thought once is has occurred. Suppression can be an ally allowing people to suppress actions and thoughts when they are occurring in a not socially acceptable environment. Finally we talk about id and ego existence. The chapter states that the limbic structures make a good id and the neocortex qualifies as the ego. So in this instances yes they do exist.
Next we move onto Ego Psychology. The ego is the process of maturation that is independent for the id. The ego develops through out age and is the system that curbs instincts. When we are infants the ego is under matured and we consistently succumb to our instincts. Our developing ego helps us to defend against anxiety and to empower person's to interact better with their environment. Ego defenses refers to the deference mechanisms that Freud came up with. These protect the person from anxiety. Finally we have ego effectance. this is concerned with the individual's competence in dealing with challenges and demands in their world. This can develop in skills and coping responses.
Lastly we discuss object relations theory. This is focused on the nature and development of mental representations of the self and others on the effective processes. Really, it is the study of how childhood representations of one's caretakers are captured and those personality traits are ingrained and persist through out adulthood. This stresses the importance of proper parenting and the suffering from abuse. This can be very determinate of how a child may grow and the person they may become as an adult.
Terms: Psychodynamic perspective, dual-instinct theory, unconscious, adaptive c., implicit c., subliminal c., psychodynamics, repression, suppression, id, ego, superego, ego psychology, ego development, ego defense, ego effectance, object relations theory, motivation, defense mechanisms.
Chapter 14 focuses on unconscious motivation. The main topics that go along with this chapter are the psychodynamic perspective, the unconscious, and psychodynamics in general, ego psychology and the relations theory.
The psychodynamic perspective states that our motivation and drive come specifically from our biology; in that it is determined by our desires, thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Psychodynamic theory is something that is actually very popular in that people are very interested in the topic. Human nature is an interesting topic and it is something that related to psychoanalysis. It honestly relates to everything, and like the text said, it takes us to where nothing else has. It relates to our dreams, unconscious, fantasies, and every little force in the world that relates to our motivation and our emotions. Yet, even though back in the day psychodynamic and psychoanalytic could be used interchangeably, today many practitioners differ in many ways. Psychoanalytic relates to the Freudian process, and some people do not feel comfortable relating to that such thing. Psychodynamic deals with the study of unconscious mental processes. The dual instinct theory relates to Freud and this theory states that our emotions come from impulses that come from biological forces. Freud believed that there were too many needs, so instead he came up with instincts. There are two of these: instincts for life as well as instincts for deaths. Instincts for life are called Eros. This relates to our ability of survival. Death instincts are called Thanatos, which take us towards rest and inactivity. It is stated that it is these that motivate our behaviors, energizes our behavior and shows us which direction to go to. Although this is still looked and at practiced, we have come a long way since Freud. There is now contemporary psychodynamic theory. This is more modern and contemporary, and really does not really relate to Freud and his theory. This relates to four different areas: the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development and object relations theory.
The unconscious is something that has been debated throughout the years when it comes to Freud and his theories. Freud divided things up into three categories: The conscious, preconscious and unconscious. It then goes on to talk about adaptive unconscious, which is related to an automatic pilot. It states that it is very good at what it does, such as set our goals, make judgments, and constantly think. Implicit motivation is the next branch discussed in the book. This relates to all of our inner motives, such as emotions, attitudes, judgments, etc. It was stated that we need to make sure that we recognize that this relates to our emotions and our emotional experiences.
Psychodynamics was the next topics explained in the chapter. Freud started to realize that people did many things that they did not often want to do, so he started thinking more deep into it. This then relates to something called the id and ego. Motivations that related to the id were things that were unconscious. Yet with the ego, these were partly conscious and partly unconscious. Although many people do not realize it (according to the text), repression was the central concept of Freud’s psychodynamics. This is the process of forgetting information. It is something that is very hard to test because it is obviously hard to ask people things that they do not remember. Suppression is the next topic that relates to psychodynamics. People rely on this throughout their lives to control their thoughts. Ego psychology was the next topic that was covered in the text, this was pretty much just explain the ego development, which explains how it grows with age, and how it starts out when we are very young, and then it is extremely immature, but as we grow, it grows. Ego defense was also talked about in the next section, which explains our defense mechanisms and how it relates to our ego. The last topic explained was the relations theory, which I already discussed a little. This refers to the nature and development of our mental representations of our self and others.
I think that there are many things from this chapter that I am going to remember; mostly because it is stuff that I have already somewhat learned in other classes that I have taken. Yet, one thing that I thought as interesting and that I will remember is the section about the id and ego, do they really exist. Ever since I took my first psychology class in high school we have discussed the id and ego, and there was never a question of do they actually exist. I thought it was just something that we already knew. Now I guess this is something that can be kept in mind while thinking about the id and ego.
TERMS: unconscious motivation, psychodynamic perspective, the unconscious, psychodynamics in general, ego psychology, relations theory, drives, emotion, psychodynamic theory, dual instinct theory, Freudian, needs, instincts, Eros, Thanatos, Freudian unconscious, adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, id, ego, repression, suppression, ego defense, defense mechanisms.
This chapter focused on the unconscious motivations. As soon as I read the title of this chapter, automatically Freud popped into my head. And of course Freud's view of motivation and how it affects us was the main concept of this chapter. Psychoanalysis has a pessimistic feel to it because it focuses on bad experiences and memories in the unconscious and how we deal with those. There are four main postulates that describe the psychodynamic theory.
The first focus is the unconscious and that the majority of mental life is unconscious such as desires, thoughts and feelings. There were 3 views on the unconscious. The first is Freudian unconscious. Freud said that there is a conscious which is aware and available at any time, a preconscious which is absent from mind, but can be called forth to conscious when prompted to and the unconcsious which is full of repressed experiences and memories, most negative. The second view is the adaptive unconscious which is the unconscious automatically evaluates the environment, makes judgements and decides their goals. The third view is implicit motivation which is the emotions and attidues that are in the unconsicous, they are emotional experiences.
The second postulate is psychodynamics. Freud talks about how people do things they don't want to, like if you have OCD and have ritual you must perform. This is will vs. conterwill, the conflict between the id and the ego. Freud talks about the defenses that are used, such as repression which acts like a security guard. To repress something is to hide something so that you don't remember it and it doesn't affect your every day actions. Suppression is another act of defense, which is when someone stops a thought. To me this is impossible, because when someone tells me to stop thinking or want a certain thing, its all I can think about!
The third postulate is ego psychology. This talks about the development of the ego. There are six developmental stages to the ego. The process starts at symbiotic, which is overwhelmed by impulses than moves onto impulsive, which is when outside sources (rules) impact your thoughts and desires. Next is the self protective defensiveness followed by the conformist which is the anxiety of group rejection (bet this happens during middle school/high school!). Than is the conscientious stage which is following your own rules and accepting responsibility. And the final stage is autonomous. This person has their own thoughts and goals that they came up with, without any outside sources. The ego is always vulnerable so they must grow in strength and use defense mechanisms to learn how to cope with life.
The last postulate is object relations theory. This is how people relate to others to satisfy their emotional needs for relatedness, and that it starts in childhood (id). Mental models, positive or negative, affect adult levels of confidence, careers, relationships etc.
A lot of this stuff in this chapter is very interesting, and I have learned a little bit about it in other psych classes. The one thing that I really find interesting and stuck out to me was about the adaptive unconscious. People are able to make a pretty accurate judgment of others emotions in less than a second due to their facial expressions. This reminds me of the MIT activity that we did a couple weeks back where we saw the facial expression and had to see if we could figure it out. I find it interesting that it doesn't take much time at all to get the other persons feeling. First impressions really do matter!
Terms: Unconscious, Freudian unconscious, Conscious, Preconscious, Adaptive unconscious, Implicit motivation, Psychodynamics, Id, Ego, Repression, Suppresion, Defense mechanism, Ego psychology, Object relations theory
Good old Freud. He is often the person people associate with psychology, which can be seen as both a good thing and a bad thing. Sigmund Freud established the psychoanalysis perspective, which focuses on unconscious mental processes such as repression or suppression. The psychodynamic perspective, which is related to psychoanalysis but not synonymous with it, has a mostly deterministic and pessimistic view of human nature. The emphasis is placed on sex, aggression, conflict, and other flaws in human nature. While psychoanalytic refers to traditional Freudian principles, psychodynamic refers to the study of dynamic unconscious mental processes (such as prejudice or depression). This is important because this means a psychologist can take a psychodynamic approach without adhering to the psychoanalytic framework.
According to Freud’s Dual-Instinct Theory, impulse-driven biological forces regulate motivation. He emphasized two categories of motivation: 1) instincts for life (Eros) and 2) instincts for death (Thanatos). Life instincts maintain life and ensure individual and collective (species) survival. This includes self-preservation (individual survival) needs such as food, water, air and sleep and species preservation needs such as sex, nurturance, and affiliation. Freud placed the most emphasis on sex. On the other hand, death instincts push the individual towards rest, inactivity, and energy conservation. The main emphasis for this type of motivation is on aggression. This aggression can be directed at the self, possibly resulting in depression, suicide, or alcoholism, or it can be directed at others, possibly resulting in anger, hate, prejudice, murder, or war. The underlying idea behind Dual-Instinct Theory is that these innate drives (life instincts and death instincts), which originate from impulse-driven biological forces, provide the energy for behaviors.
However, contemporary psychoanalysts do not adhere to Freud’s Dual-Instinct Theory because sex and aggression do not fit the cyclical pattern seen in drives (such as thirst and hunger). Instead, contemporary psychoanalysts adhere to the “wish model”, which says that motivation comes from psychological wishes. The idea behind psychological wishes is that individuals are aware (consciously or unconsciously) of their present state and ideal state, and this discrepancy generates motivation to act so as to attain their ideal state (sounds familiar, huh?). This is just one example of how contemporary psychoanalysts reinterpreted Freud’s theories.
There are four main postulates in contemporary psychodynamic theory: 1) much of mental life is unconscious, 2) mental processes operate in parallel with one another, 3) healthy development involves moving from an immature, socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and interdependent with others and 4) mental representations of the self and others form in childhood that guide the person’s later social motivations and relationships.
The chapter then focuses in depth on each postulate. The unconscious is a difficult thing to study because it cannot be known directly. Instead, researchers must use indirect approaches. Some of the early research on the unconscious included hypnosis, dream analyses, and Freudian slips. But even with its difficulties, it is now accepted that much of mental life is unconscious. There are three main views of the unconscious: 1) Freudian unconscious, 2) the adaptive unconscious, and 3) implicit motivation.
The Freudian unconscious divides the mind into three parts: the 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, on the other hand, stores all the thoughts, feelings, and memories that are absent from the immediate consciousness but can be readily retrieved into consciousness with little effort. Most importantly, the unconscious is the mental storehouse of inaccessible instinctual impulses, repressed experiences, and strong but unfulfilled wishes and desires. Because the unconscious is inaccessible, Freud used techniques such as dream analysis to study it indirectly. There are two types of dream content: latent and manifest content. Manifest content is the storyline of the dream, or the defensive façade whereas the latent content is the underlying meaning and wishful core. It is in the latent content that the unconscious becomes known. In other words, Freud felt that dreams were meant to be venting functions for unconscious desires. However, we now know that Freud’s concept of dreams is way too narrow. Dreams serve many purposes, including neurophysiological activity, memory consolidation, stress-buffering or coping, and problem solving functions.
The second model for the conscious is the adaptive unconscious, which acts almost like an automatic pilot. It appraises the environment, sets goals, makes judgments, and initiates action all while we are consciously thinking about something else. The last model for the unconscious is implicit motivation, which refers to all those motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments that operate outside a person’s conscious awareness and are fundamentally distinct from self-report motives, emotions, and judgments. Implicit motivation is linked to emotional experiences. However, in order for implicit motivation to affect behavior, a person must be mindful of their emotional reactions to certain situations. Mindfulness is defined as a receptive attention to and awareness of present events and experiences.
The next postulate is discussed in the chapter is psychodynamics. Freud saw the human mind as a conflict between the will (Id) and a counterwill (Ego). This clashing of forces is what he meant by the term psychodynamics. For Freud, psychodynamics concerns the conflict between the personality structures of the Id, Ego, and Superego. The Id is unconscious, involuntary, impulse-driven, and hedonistic (or pleasure driven), whereas the Ego is partly conscious and partly unconscious, steeped in defenses, and organized around a delay of gratification (or reality principle). Some concepts central to psychodynamics include repression (the process of forgetting info or an experience by ways that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic) and suppression (the process of removing a thought by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate). Interestingly, research has found support for the existence of the Id and the Ego.
The third postulate concerns the nature of the Ego and its development (“Ego Psychology”). While we are born with the impulse-driven Id, our Ego develops and matures through learning and experience. There are actually five stages of Ego development (symbiotic > impulsive > conformist > conscientious > autonomous ). The more mature the Ego becomes, the more self-motivating and self-regulating it becomes. However, the Ego is always in a state of vulnerability, and therefore we need defense mechanisms to protect the Ego. There are fourteen defense mechanisms that exist in a hierarchy from least mature/adaptive to most mature/adaptive. The maturity level of a person’s defense mechanisms is called their Ego strength, which can predict life adjustment and psychological well-being. Our Ego can also be strengthened when we effectively interact with our environments. This is called Ego effectance, which concerns the individual’s competence in dealing with environmental challenges, demands, and opportunities. When we have multiple positive experiences interacting with the environment, these perceptions and feelings accumulate into a general sense of competence. When there is a high level of Ego effectance, a person often reacts in approach-oriented behaviors towards their environment.
The last postulate in the psychodynamic theory relates to object relations theory. Initially, Freud thought drives came from biological forces, but now they are thought to come from psychological sources (remember those things called psychological wishes?) For instance, sexual behavior is not driven by a need for sexual gratification, but by the psychological need for relatedness. Object Relations Theory studies how people relate to objects (others) to satisfy that emotional and psychological need for relatedness. More specifically, object relations theory focuses on the nature and development of the mental representations we have created for ourselves and others. Our mental representations are formed in early childhood, with the parent-child relationship as a template for later relationships. If the relationship between the child and parent is positive, then the person will be able to develop and relate to others in ways that are healthy, growth-oriented, and resistant to psychopathology.
The one thing I will remember from this chapter is that even though many of Freud’s theories have been refuted in empirical studies, he has made significant contributions to the field of psychology. It has been hard for me to determine how I feel towards Freud because while some of my professors seem to view Freud as a dark mark on psychology’s history, others seem to be completely devoted to his teachings. Taking the middle road seems to be the most difficult, because it requires that you evaluate every theory that Freud had and what contemporary research has found. I think this chapter clearly illustrates that many of Freud’s ideas have developed into a prominent field of thought (psychodynamics) that does have empirical evidence to support it. However, there are criticisms mentioned in the book and it seems to me that this approach (psychodynamics) aims to improve its theories by addressing those concerns.
Terms: psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, Dual-Instinct Theory, Life instincts, self-preservation, species preservation, death instincts, psychological wishes, unconscious, Freudian unconscious, preconscious, conscious, unconscious, dream analysis, manifest content, latent content, adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, mindfulness, psychodynamics, Id, Ego, repression, suppression, defense mechanisms, ego strength, ego effectance, & Object Relations Theory
Reeves starts off chapter 14 with psychodynamic perspective in the chapter that explains unconscious motivation. Psychodynamic perspective says that biological nature and social ques determine our motivation and the behaviors following. Freud came up with this theory very early on, but called it psychoanalytic theory instead. The terms were synonymous, but basically now it just means that one can study mental processes inside or outside freudian perspectives.
In Freud's dual-instinct theory he states that there are two main categories that drive us, the instincts for life and the instincts for death. The first class of instincts for life called Eros are very simple in nature. They are motivations that keep us alive like the drive for food, water, sleep, oxygen, sex, etc. The second category is a called Thanatos and they are the death instincts. These behaviors are basically anything that moves us towards self-destruction like alcohol, drugs, gambling, aggression, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Although these instincts play an important role in Freud's theory they are still regulated by what he calls personality that is fully developed just after puberty. There are many criticism of this theory and today we look more towards a 4 postulate construct of psychodynamic theory. The first is the unconscious made up of mental life constructs. The second is psychodynamics which takes all mental processes and makes them work in parallel unity. The third is the development of the ego. This basically means that you mature from being socially dependent child to a socially responsible adult. The final one is the objects relation theory which takes our early associations and helps shape our future perspectives.
Reeves discusses four types of unconscious. Freud asserts in his ideas about unconscious, subconscious, and conscious that we experience in the conscious, place in the subconscious during the day and then during our dreams those experiences are played about in a randomized dream sequence that can be later analyzed by a professional. Adaptive conscious was theorized by studying a patient who had his hippocampus removed in order stop seizures. Researchers found that when they brought him to the lab day in and day out he never remembered being there. So they believed that the unconscious was in fact adaptive in nature. Implicit motivation is the next topic Reeves discusses. Implicit motivation is hard to study because it is not found through self-report data because it happens without us thinking. Basically whenever we encounter an emotion activating event we already feel the emotion before we have time to really analyze what we are feeling. Many times people are scared when someone jumps out and they react accordingly and its only after many seconds that people will say, "Jeez you scared me!"
The basics of contemporary psychodynamics says that people are motivated in such different ways that we all want different things out of life and we also want the things that oppose those wants as well. A great example is the way we have racist beliefs socially, but morally we know that we shouldn't.
Reeves also talks about the development the ego. Going from an immature irresponsible child to a well rounded adult. The development includes many areas like symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientiousness, and autonomy. Through development as an adolescent we gain tools and resources that help us develop into beings that can function and defend in the contemporary world. When we reach this stage we have fully developed the ego, although technically we really never stop learning.
The postulate of objects relation theory is the last postulate that says personalities are created through relations. As we age we make associations with objects, people, places, and situations and as our personality develops we become accustomed to circumstances. We develop both positive self models and negative self models that guide our behavior based on the way we have adapted in the past during development. These four postulates guide what our motivation does in the conscious, subconscious, and the unconscious.
I've always been interested in what makes up our dreams and how they can be explained. Although many people have since thrown many of Freud's ideas out the window I found Unconscious theory of dream venting very interesting. The fact that our daily interactions don't dwell in our present state of thought, but rather they linger in "the back of the mind" or the subconscious. Only later do those events play out in a weird way during a random sequence of dreaming. Until science can come up with a definitive answer I can except this notion as well as any other.
Terms Used: psychodynamic perspective,unconscious, psychodynamics,ego, objects relation theory, dual-instinct theory, Eros, Thanatos, Freudian unconscious, Adaptive conscious, implicit motivation
This chapter looks at the unconscious motivation of human beings and the psychoanalytical perspective. This means topics such as traumatic memories, revenge, fantasies, and hypnosis - basically all the stuff a person thinks about but doesn't want to directly discuss with their neighbor. Overall it reflects what is popular in contemporary movies at a particular time. For example, sex, aggression, psychopathology, revenge and the like. The father of the psychoanalytical perspective is Sigmund Freud. He developed this biologically based model that displays 2 instinctual drives of sex and aggression supplied to the body with physical and mental energies. This is the dated ways of looking at it but today contemporary psychoanalysts have modified the motivation importance of the psychoanalytical perspective. They now emphasize motivational importance of psychological wishes rather than the biological drive. They also included the cognitive informational processing. This retains the idea that Freud's motivation but overcomes the contradictory evidence that sex and aggression don't function like the psychological drive does. They are completely different.
There are four different contemporary postulates that explain the psychodynamic theory. The first principle says that mental life is unconscious. Our thoughts, feelings, and desires exist at an unconscious level the majority of the time. Because the unconscious mental life affects our behavior, people will behave in ways that they can't explain. There are also different views on the unconscious, first the Freudian view, secondly, the adaptive unconscious, and lastly the implicit motivation. The adaptive unconscious automatically appraises the environment, sets different goals, makes judgements, and initiates action while consciously thinking about something else. For example, something as simple as tying your shoes or driving a car, one doesn't consciously think about these events once they are experienced. The implicit motivation is rooted in an emotional association that lies outside our conscious awareness when cued by encountering environment events. This orients, directs, and selects our attention toward people that automatically link to the emotional environment events. Lastly, Freud's rejected the conscious and divided the mind into three parts: the conscious, preconscious, and the unconscious. The unconscious served as the mental storehouse of instinctual impulses, childhood memories, and represses experiences.
The second postulate is the one of psychodynamics. This is the mental processes that operate in parallel with another where people commonly want and fear the same thing at the same time. Basically it follows the rule and not the exception that people have conflicting feelings that motivate them in opposite ways. For example, racial attitudes, gender biases, love/hate relationships with parents, or jobs. The third postulate is about ego development. It states that healthy development of the ego involves moving from an immature, socially dependent personality to one that is mature and socially responsible. The ego develops motives of its own by moving through the progression of symbiosis, impulsiveness, self protection, conformists, conscientiousness, and autonomy in order to cope with the anxieties of life. It also helps provide a sense of competence that gives a generative capacity for changing environments for the better. The last postulate deals with object relations. This is understanding the mental representations of the self and others formed in childhood to guide adult social motivation. Life long personality patterns begin to form in their childhood as people construct mental representations of themself, others, and relationships. Once these are formed the beliefs forms the basis of motivational states guiding an adult in their interpersonal relationships. These can be positive mental models that can help predict the levels of self reliance, social confidences, self esteem, and loving committed partnerships. The negative models, on the other hand, may predict dysfunctional interpersonal relationships.
I think the thing I will take away from this chapter is where we stand now with contemporary psychoanalysts and how it differs from Freud when this part of psychology was still developing. It has always been very difficult for me to understand how Freud thought about these concepts. The fact that everything is based around sex and aggression seemed so limiting for human beings because I see us as much more complex creatures. It was interesting to see how contemporary psychoanalysts say that their perspective is still spirited by Freud but they have made the changes necessary to move forward in this chapter. There is more of the psychological and cognitive importance when dealing with motivation rather than the strict biological basis of motivation. It is not so black and white anymore, rather there are more explanations that still remain within the psychoanalytical perspective.
TERMS: unconscious motivation, psychoanalytical perspective, Freud, Freud's biologically based model, contemporary views, 4 postulates of psychodynamic theory, Freudian view on unconscious, adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, psychodynamic postulate, ego development, object relations
Psychodynamic theory focuses on the unwanted fears that lurk around us every day. Anxiety has the biggest effect on the general population, springing up as soon as an aversive event occurs. I thought it was interesting to learn the difference between psychoanalytic and psychodynamic, because they were once referred to as synonyms. Psychodynamic practitioners have adopted some aspects of the psychodynamic theory but choose to deny others; whereas psychoanalytic practitioners remain the most traditional to Freudian principles.
Although the dual-instinct theory goes unutilized by psychodynamic practitioners, it is still a useful concept to consider. I think it is logical to think that motivation is an impulse-driven biological force. The term instinctual refers to something that is innate. Instinct are not acquired, we are born with them. When a child is in danger for the first time instincts will kick in, such as fight or flight, to protect them. With this in mind, our body needs energy to function and without instinctual behavior to motivate individuals, we wouldn’t get off the couch to eat, or hydrate our bodies when needed. Therefore, I agree that instinctual body drives are “a” source of motivation but not the only one. There are many other extraneous variables that motivate our behavior other than instincts, such as rewards. I am going to college to get a degree and to get a good job, but without my instincts telling me what to do; I might not get out of bed in the morning.
I thought the shadow phenomenon was rather interesting and something I won’t forget because the idea of studying the unconscious mind is incredible to me. There seems to be no right answer because there is no sure way of proving it. Yet decades ago, Freud and his colleagues were able to come up with various techniques to analyze unconscious behavior, such as slip-of-the-tongue, hypnosis and more. Knowing that much of our mental life is unconscious makes me wonder what motives and intentions I have thought about today that I am unaware of. Freud divided the mental process of thought into three components. Conscious memory is all the short term experiences we have at any given time. Preconscious stores memories that are in the past but can still be retrieved. Lastly, the unconscious mind stores all inaccessible memories that are associated with repression and implicit memories, information is not stored in an unconscious state of mind.
I commonly confuse explicit and implicit memory. To help myself remember the difference, explicit memories relates to experiences. Such as learned values and aspects of self-concept. Implicit refers to indirect or implied motivational processes. Also, I learned that repression is unconsciously used to forget memories that conflict with our self-view. I wish suppression were easier, because unfortunately for those who have repressed memories about traumatic life events, there are others in the same situation that haven’t repressed the memory and fail to intentionally suppress it.
Ego development is a process that occurs over a lifespan. First, infants experience the symbiotic stage, where they are extremely immature because they don’t know any better. The impulsive stage occurs while children are learning from their parents and mentors. Self-protective stage occurs when rules and consequences are understood, which leads to the conformist stage. Naturally, individuals will conform to the norms in which they were taught. The conscientious stage set personal boundaries based on what knowledge they have acquired. Lastly, autonomous stage stems from independence. The stage in life that we realize what is right and wrong but no longer have to abide by households rules, the choice is our own.
Terms: psychodynamic theory, anxiety, psychoanalytic, Freudian principles, dual-instinct theory, motivation, impulse-driven biological force, instinctual behavior, hypnosis, shadow phenomenon, unconscious mind, intentions, mental life, preconscious, conscious, repression, inaccessible memories, implicit memories, explicit, suppression, ego development, symbiotic, self-protective, conformist, autonomous
Chapter 14
This chapter was about psychoanalysis and how it opens up new study topics such as 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 that we would probably not want our neighbors to know about us. This is all done by studying and embracing a rather pessimistic view of human nature. Psychoanalysis reflects what is popular in contemporary society: sex, aggression, psychopathology, and revenge. Sigmund Fred was the father of this theory and 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. However, contemporary psychoanalysts emphasized the motivational importance of psychological wishes rather than biological drives and cognitive information processing. The concept of the psychological wish retains the full spirit of Freudian motivation, but it overcomes the contradictory evidence that sex and aggression do not function like physiological drives. The contemporary psychodynamic theory is defined by four postulates. First is that much of the mental life in unconscious and argues empathetically that thoughts, feelings, and desires exist at the unconscious level. People can behave in inexplicable behaviors because unconscious mental life affects behavior. Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious, and implicit motivation are three contemporary views on the unconscious. The adaptive unconscious automatically appraises the environment, sets goals, makes judgments, and indicates action all while we are consciously thinking about something else. Implicit motivation is rooted in emotional associations that lie outside of our conscious awareness. Emotional associations are cued by encountering cue-activating environmental events, orients, directs, ad selects attention such that people automatically attend to emotionally linked environmental events. Secondly, mental processes operate parallel from one another such that people commonly want and fear the same thing at the same time. It is the rule, not the exception, that people have conflicting feelings that motivate them in opposing ways. This explains why people commonly hold divergent conscious and unconscious racial attitudes, gender biases, or loves/hate relationships with their parents, job, and everything else in their life. Third, is ego development which involves moving from an immature, socially dependent personality to one is more mature and socially responsible. According to neo-Freudians, the ego develops motives of its own by moving through the following developmental progression: symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. In order for us to develop and overcome immaturity and vulnerability, the ego must gain resources and strengths including resilient defense mechanisms for coping successfully with the inevitable anxieties, or ego defense, of life and a sense of competence that provides a generative capacity for changing the environment for the better, or ego effectance. Finally 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 and argues that lifelong personality patterns begin to form in childhood as peoples construct mental representations of the self, others and relationships. Once formed, these beliefs make up the basis of motivational states such as relatedness or anxiety that guide the course of adult’s interpersonal relationships. A positive mental model of oneself would predict the adult levels of self-reliance, social confidence, self-esteem, and loving/committees partnerships where as a negative mental model of oneself would forecast dysfunctional interpersonal relationships.
What I will remember most about this chapter is how are thoughts, feeling, and desires including 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 are all unconscious. As curious as humans are, we want answers to everything. I always figured majority of the things listed above came from a certain reaction or at least was a conscious decision of our own, so it is crazy to think that we truly have no control over such things. Even when we think we are or are not having such detailed mental processes; we really don’t know what our mind is telling us.
Terms: psychoanalysis, sex, aggression, psychopathology, revenge, contemporary psychoanalysts, contemporary psychodynamic theory, Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, autonomous, ego effectance, self-reliance, social confidence, self-esteem
Chapter 14 covers unconscious motivation. It is an interesting and difficulty topic to discuss and research because by definition you cannot be consciously aware of what is going on in your unconscious, making it rather difficult to study and measure. The origins of unconscious study begin with Freud. Freud was a genius and gave us many interesting ideas, a whole new perspective on motivation along with a new set of vocabulary to describe his ideas. Ultimately though, Freud ideas where more philosophical than scientific, meaning there are no real good ways to measure or test most of his ideas. For that reason I am not going to spend too much time focusing on his views, they are better placed in a history of psychology class rather than in a motivation and emotion class with a modern perspective.
Modern psychodynamic theory proposes four basic themes. The first of which is the unconscious. There are two ways in which modern thought has changed in its thoughts on the unconscious. They first being that it is rather dumb as compared to the smart and complex version Freud postulated. The second being it is cold rather than hot. It is mechanical and automatic unlike Freud’s view that it is filled with lust and anger. Subliminal messages are those that are picked perceived by us but we are not always consciously aware of that fact. Research shows that people do not act on these types of messages.
Psychodynamics hold the idea that mental processes operate parallel to one another. This can explain why people sometimes do things they do not really want to be doing. There are two concepts that one needs to be able to differentiate: repression and suppression. Repression is the process of forgetting things unconsciously. It is likely a defense mechanism. Suppression is the process of trying to remove a thought consciously and deliberately. Research shows that suppression generally fails and ever has the opposite effect, meaning you think about something more when you intentionally try not to think about it.
Ego development entails moving from a immature socially dependent personality type to one that is mature and interdependent with other people. Freud concentrated on sexual and aggressive drives while modern thought expands to include a variety of motives. It is under this topic that defense mechanisms like denial, projection, and regression are discussed. Defense mechanisms are ways people protect themselves from anxiety provoking changes in their concept of reality. Ego effectance is a coping mechanism people develop in response to the demands of life. It is similar to the idea intrinsic motivation.
Objects relation theory focuses on the development of our mental representations of the self and others with particular interest given to its development during childhood. We construct these mental representations of our self and others and these mental models construct and guide our future patterns of motivation. The quality of these ideas of relationships can be chiefly described through unconscious tone, capacity of emotional involvement, and mutuality of autonomy with others. Positive mental models predict things self-esteem and social confident while negative mental models predict future dysfunctional relationships with others.
The thing I will likely remember years from now is the information on suppression. It is interesting that trying to suppress thoughts has the opposite effect as evidenced by the study telling people not to think of a white bear and then that is all they can think about. It is fun to mess with friends and tell them not to think about something in order to make them think about it incessantly. For example, when golfing you can tell a friend don’t think about something in their swing so they then over think about it causing them to hit a bad shot.
Terms: Unconscious, subliminal message, psychodynamic, repression, suppression, ego development, defense mechanism, ego effectance, objects relation theory
Chapter 14 was highly interesting to me for I am constantly engaging interest in Freud and his theories on motivation through the unconscious mind. It first starts by describing psychodynamic perspectives and the dual-instinct theory which states that instinctual bodily drives explain the source of all motivation. Freud's input on this involved creating two different categories: instincts for life and instincts for death. He claimed that the first class of instincts (Eros) are life instincts and they maintain life and ensure individual and collective survival. Examples of this would be needing water, food, shelter, etc. to survive life. The second class, the instincts for death, are called Thanatos. Freud claimed that they push the individual towards rest, inactivity, and energy conservation. He also believed that total rest was death but it did resolve any bodily disturbance. He really focuses on sex and aggression within this category to push our motivation, but it is argued later that sex and aggression are simply just psychological wishes, not drives. This leads into understanding the psychodynamic theory and it's four core postulates that require overviews: the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and the Object Relations Theory. The unconscious is seen as an unreachable, yet powerhouse of the body and brain and Freud believed it is the primary processor of information. Freud tried many different ways to understand the unconscious mind through hypnosis, free association, dream analysis, etc., but today the debate over mental life being mostly unconscious; it focuses around three different views.
These views are of course the Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious, and the implicit motivation. To begin with Freud's view, he separated the unconscious into three different parts: the conscious, preconscious, and the unconscious. He described the conscious as having all thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, and experiences that a person is aware of at any given time. The preconscious compliments this by storing all these thoughts, feelings, and memories absent from the immediate conscious but can still be retrieved by it when trying (such as knowing colors and shapes of things while also thinking about where to hand in an assignment that is due). The unconscious is seen by Freud as the mental storehouse of all inaccessible instinctual impulses, repressed experiences, childhood memories, and as well as strong, unfulfilled wishes and desires (hence his orientation around sexual motivators). He claims that all of these are not expressed openly through the conscious, but rather through symbols and other nonverbal behaviors. Dreams are a big symbol to Freud of unconscious wants and desires. He claims four supportive facts that dreams serve as: neurophysiological activity, memory consolidating function, stress-buffering or coping function, and lastly, a problem solving function. To Freud, dreams were the answer to understanding the unconscious.
The adaptive unconscious view explains how we unconscious adapt to our surroundings without even knowing it, such as making actions occur while thinking about something completely different. An example of our adaptive conscious would be walking and talking on the phone. While one is thinking and interacting through a conversation with someone over the phone, they are also watching out for cars and moving out of the way for other people. We also use our adaptive unconscious to be able to emotionally read what other people are feeling or thinking. Within a split second judgment, we are usually correct.
Implicit motivation is the most difficult to understand because it is so indirect, implied, and not well understood. It orients, direct, and selects attention towards environments that support the person's wants and abilities that need to be expressed appropriately. We react to these processes through thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Mindfulness helps explain when our implicit motivation affects our behavior and mindfulness helps explain when it fails to affect our behavior. This shows that when we consciously are aware that we do not like the situation we are in, that our unconscious will lead us to behave in a certain way that copes with our feelings, emotions to direct our behavior from that situation. Our conscious and unconscious are actually connected in some way. Subliminal motivation ties in with this part of the unconscious, but does not exactly direct behavior, only thoughts.
Psychodynamics is a very complex aspect of understanding the unconscious. Freud's depiction involved people having ideas and wills, but also having counterparts to each. One's Will and Counterwill must balance in order to maintain peace within the unconscious mind. Repression was claimed as the central concept of psychodynamics and is said to be the check point of each thought's identification before entering into the public world. When an unwanted desire arises, repression occurs through anxiety to push that information into an unforgotten field unconsciously, unintentionally, and automatically. Suppression is kind of the same, except unwanted thoughts are conscious, intentional, and deliberately. But when we try to tell ourselves to NOT think about something, or do something, etc., we tend to have a rebound effect that keeps us preoccupied with that thought, resulting in exactly what we did want to happen with those thoughts.
Chapter 14 also discusses terms of Ego Psychology. The ego development processes towards psychological growth, maturity, adjustment, prosocial interdependence, competence, and autonomous functioning. It unfolds as symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. It's defense is highly vulnerable and comes into conflict with the id (causing neurotic anxiety), the superego (moral anxiety), and environmental dangers (realistic anxiety). To stop ourselves from becoming overly anxious about a situation, we use defense mechanisms. These range from the most mature to the most immature reactions. It has been found that people who react more immaturely open themselves up to be more depressed and have more life long difficulties than people who react maturely. By our ego effectance, we can understand our desires to interact effectively within our environments. By using a positive coping response to environmental situations, our ego develops a great sense of competence and strong defense mechanisms over challenges.
The Object Relations Theory is probably one of my favorite theories ever. It focuses on people's need of relatedness that is expressed by their mental representations of attachments to different social and sexual objects. There are three dimensions in which one's mental representations can be categorized: unconscious tone, capacity for emotional involvement, and mutuality of autonomy with others.
Overall, Freud is a weird, interesting psychologist who had a unique way of gathering information about the human brain and it's unconscious domains. Many of his psychodynamic views have been accepted why others have been proven to be ignored, or just set aside for now until proven worthy through research. Years from now I will remember the dream part of this chapter and how Freud's dream analysis brought out certain roots of an underlying problem within individuals' unconscious parts. Every time I dream or have a nightmare, I will try and analyze what is going on in my current life that is causing me anxiety or worry and try to relate it to my dreams. I will also remember to always try and respond as maturely as possible to situations because in the long run it will free me of depression and anxiety. As a psychology student, I will keep in mind the slowly processing work of current contemporary psychodynamic theorists and how much more input is needed to understand the psychodynamics of our beautiful minds.
Chapter 14 discussed the topics psychodynamic, unconscious, and ego psychology and how it relates and influences motivation. It starts off with defining psychoanalysis, which is a deterministic, pessimistic approach to understand the unconscious motivational impulses. Freud was a pioneer of this approach. He believed that motivation was regulated by impulse-driven biological forces, that some behaviors increase energy, and other deplete energy. According to Freud, there are two types of instincts, the life instinct or Eros, and the death instinct or Thanatos. Eros produces sexual desires and Thanatos produces aggressive behavior - which are wishes not drives. Freud then defines the unconscious as the shadow phenomenon because it cannot be observed or thought of consciously. The Freudian Unconscious view asserts that there are three components: the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. He was also an advocate of dream analysis and free association to draw out the unconscious motives. However, we now know that dreams serve as neurophysiological, memory consolidating, stress-buffering, and a problem solving function. A non-Freudian view is the adaptive unconscious, which are behaviors such as tying your shoes and riding a bike. Another non-Freudian is the implicit motivation view, which describes the indirect, implied, and not understood aspect of motivation. These motives are linked to emotional experience. Subliminal motivation is when phrases are blended into a video clip or the like to change the behavior in the viewer, however this view is shown to not actually work.
Psychodynamics is defined as that clashing of forces such as idea vs. counteridea, will vs. counterwill, and desire vs. repression. Freud believed it was because of the conflict between the id and ego. The id is unconscious, involuntary, impulse-driven, and plays on the pleasure principle. On the other hand the ego is partly unconscious and conscious, defensive, and plays on the reality principle. Freud also believed repression was the central concept of psychodynamics. Repression is the process of forgetting information/experiences through unconscious and automatic ways. When these thoughts try to emerge, then anxiety also emerges. On the other hand, suppression is the process of removing a thought through conscious and voluntary ways, however, no one can stop a thought because it'll end up opening doors to thought obsession. The id is located in the limbic system while the ego is located in the neocortex where they can be interrelated. Ego psychologists assert that ego develops from learning and experiences through a series of developmental phases. Since the ego is always in a vulnerable state, it builds ego defense mechanisms to calm anxiety. These mechanism are rated from immature to mature on a hierarchical ordering. Mature defenses promote well-being, and immature defenses promote depression. Ego effectance deals with a persons ability to deal with challenges, demands, and opportunities. It can also lead to feelings of a sense of competence, effective, and satisfaction. The object relations theory study how people satisfy their need for relatedness through mental representations of social objects. However this model may underscore the psychological need for relatedness.
Something that I learned from this chapter that stuck with me is on the topic of suppression. It is known that thought suppression only induced thought-obsession. Only unconscious thoughts that we welcome into consciousness are we actually able to forget. This is kind of funny to me. Something that we want to forget will only get replayed in our minds over and over, yet a memory we let in our consciousness that we don't necessarily want to suppress gets forgotten. Yet, this is good advice. If there is something embarrassing i'd like to forget then I'd have to accept it and allow it into my consciousness in order to be forgotten. Although I'm not sure how to go about not-forgetting something that i'd like to remember besides writing it down on paper and re-reading it later on. Learning this fact though put me at ease, because I thought I was the only one who couldn't get a nasty thought out of my head and over-analysed things.
TERMS: psychoanalysis, sex, agression, unconscious, wish, eros, thanatos, freudian unconscious, adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, subliminal motivation, psychodynamics, repression, suppression, id, ego, ego psychology, defense mechanisms, object relations theory.
Chapter 14 talks about unconscious motivation and mainly deal with the Psychodynamic Perspective.
That chapter starts off with Freud’s Dual-Instinct Theory. The first instincts in the Dural-Instinct Theory are life instincts. Life instincts are instincts that maintain life and ensure individual and collective survival. The second instincts are death instincts, which push the individual toward res, inactivity, and energy conservation. These two sets of instincts work together to provide the energy to motivate someone to something.
There are four postulates that define the contemporary psychodynamic theory. The first is unconscious. Unconscious is a “shadow phenomenon” that cannot be known directly but can be inferred only from its indirect manifestations. In the Unconscious postulate there is the Freudian unconscious. Freud talked about the unconscious. He rejected the idea that consciousness was the essence of mental life and therefore divided the mind into three components: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Conscious includes all the thoughts, feelings, memories, experiences, and etc. that a person is aware of at any given time. Preconscious stores all the thoughts, feelings, and memories that are absent from the immediate consciousness. The largest and most important component is the unconscious, which, is the mental storehouse of inaccessible instinctual impulses, repressed experiences, childhood memories and unfilled wishes and desires. There is also the adaptive unconscious. The adaptive unconscious runs on auto pilot as it carries out countless computations and innumerable adjustments during acts. The book gives a few examples like tying your shoes, driving a car, or playing a piano. Implicit motivation is another aspect of the unconscious postulate. 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.
The second postulate is postulate of psychodynamics. For Freud, psychodynamics concerned the conflict between the personality structure of the id and the ego. Psychodynamics deals with repression and suppression. 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.
The third postulate is Ego Psychology and ego development. The essence of ego development is a developmental progression towards what is possible in psychological growth, maturity, adjustments, prosocial interdependence, competence, and autonomous functioning. Ego defense is another part of this postulate, along with ego effectance. Ego defense is to develop and to overcome immaturity and vulnerability, the ego must gain resources and strengths, including resilient defense mechanisms for coping successfully with inevitable anxieties of life. Ego effectance is what concerns the individual’s competence in dealing with environmental challenges, demands, and opportunities.
The fourth and final postulate is the postulate of object relations. It argues that lifelong personality patterns begin to form in childhood as people construct mental representations of their self, others and relationships.
Well besides pry leaning about Freud in other classes and pry in future classes, I think I will take a lot from the ego development section because as I continue to change over time and look at myself from the past to now, and now to later in life, it will be interesting to see how I continue to change and the major events that assist in my ego changing.
Terms Used: Freud’s Dual-Instinct Theory, unconscious, Freudian unconscious, adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, psychodynamics, repression, suppression, ego psychology, ego development, ego defense, ego effectance, object relations
Chapter 14 starts the chapter by describing the psychodynamic theory. This theory describes motivation that comes biologically. It happens to us rather than something we choose to do. This theory also focuses on psychoanalysis, which refers to one’s repressed memories, urges anxiety, and many emotional shortcomings. Freud was the main psychologist that presented the idea of psychoanalysis, which is not practiced by many psychologists today; rather they have switched to focusing on psychodynamic theory.
Freud viewed motivation as a biological source that needed to replenish physical and mental energy. His theory included the belief of life and death instincts and these instincts (sex and aggression) give individuals the energy for motivation. This is referred to as the dual-instinct theory. Modern psychoanalysts believe human wishes to be the motivation behind certain behaviors, not instinctive drive. The idea coincides with the concept of the current self vs. the ideal self. The current beliefs and research done by psychologists using the psychodynamic theory are quite different than the focus during Freud’s time. There are four main postulates that current researchers and psychologists focus on. These postulates are the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory.
The first postulate, the unconscious, is one of the most notable concepts from Freud and is one of the most controversial in psychology. The controversy has created three forms of the unconscious, which are Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious, and implicit motivation. Freudian unconscious stored all of the repressed memories, unfulfilled desires, and childhood trauma one may have. This was measured through dream story telling from by subjects. This is unsteady ground for research because of recent research showing that there is much more to dreams that unconscious desires. The adaptive unconscious is continuously on. It is an automatic part of our every day lives. It can take into account things that may be unfamiliar by making judgments and scanning the environment. The final unconscious is implicit motivation. This is described as the motivation that occurs outside of our own consciousness. They are indirect and implied with a connection to emotional roots.
Psychodynamics is the second postulate that the text describes. This is described as the battle between the id (unconscious) and the ego (conscious). The id focuses on gaining pleasure and avoiding pain and distress. The ego is similar, yet states that one will gravitate to pleasure until it is socially acceptable. The concept of repression is also important in psychodynamics. Repression is described as an individual forgetting something unconsciously and automatically. Freud viewed it as the id bringing up bad memories and this is the ego’s response to keep the brain from danger. Suppression is similar to repression and also important. Suppression is totally eliminating thoughts unconsciously. Suppression often does not result in the way it is expected and instead the thought becomes obsessive.
Ego development is the third principle described. The ego counteracts for the id’s desires and wants. It also is developed through learning and experiences. It progresses through the life through stages (symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, autonomous). The development of the ego helps avoid anxiety and allows the individual to interact with their environment more effectively. The ego also creates boundaries as a defense from outside anxiety created by the id, the environment, and the superego. The defenses perform as a hierarchy from immature (denial and fantasy) to mature (humor and sublimation). The final category of ego development is ego effectance. It relates to the person’s competence to interact with problems and complications in their environment. The ego develops through the person’s life to adapt and be able to deal with the challenges faced with in the environment.
The final principle described in the text is objects relations theory. This theory adapts to the idea of a person’s need for relatedness. The object is what the person may desire. It is how a person relates to objects for emotional or psychological needs of relatedness. The mother-child relationship is the main focus of research. The way a mother interacts with her child can reflect on their need for relatedness later in life. The objects relations theory characterizes relationships by the unconscious tone, the level of emotional involvement, and mutuality of autonomy with other people.
What I will remember down the road about this chapter is the crazy ideas that Freud came up with has lead to a study of psychology. The information provided about the battle between the id and ego is intriguing and questionable. Freud was an interesting man that came up with a lot of ideas that were outside of the box at the time and still are. The id and ego are at the heart of that.
Terms: Psychoanalysis, Psychodynamic theory, Freud, dual-instinct theory, the unconscious, Freudian unconscious, adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, id, ego, repression, suppression, ego development, ego defense, ego effectance, objects relations theory
The first part of this chapter on the unconscious mind talks about psychodynamic perspective and psychoanalysis, which looks at topics such as traumatic memories, addictions, anxieties about the future, dreams, hypnosis, repressed memories, fantasies, repression, self-defeating behaviors, and a few others that we may not want other people to know about if they didn’t have to.
Freud was the father of the psychoanalytic view and his idea of motivation was biologically based where sex and aggression is where people go their motivation and energy. This is the thing I will remember from this chapter in years to come. It always amazes me. The more contemporary view is importance in motivation of our psychological wishes, and cognitive information processing. This idea still has the same idea as Freud’s but it doesn’t say that sex and aggression are physiological drives.
There are four ideas that go into the psychodynamic theory. The first is that a lot of our mental life is unconscious, meaning that our thoughts, feelings and emotions and desires are happening unconsciously. Because the unconscious life affects our behaviors, people can act in a way that are not easily understood, even to themselves. (So, this is my excuse) there are three different view on this unconsciousness; Freudian, adapative and implicit. The adaptive unconscious sts goals and make judgements while we are consciously thinking about something else. Implicit motivation is the emotional part that is outside of our awareness.
The second idea in the understanding of motivation and emotion is that mental processes operate in parallel with each other. For example, people want and fear the same thing at the same time. people have conflicting feelings that motivate them in different ways. People lots of times have unconscoious racial attitudes, gender biases, feelings about their parents or jobs, etc. I think a good example of this is I hear a lot of people when telling a story about a person of a different race than them, they emphasize the idea that they are black or Asian, etc. but if they are telling the exact same story about their own race, they would never even mention the race of the person. We have these biases all over in our lives and lots of times not aware of it that all.
The third idea is that of ego development. We develop healthy by moving from our immature personality to a more mature and socially responsible personality. the book talks about how neo-Freudians, the ego develops motives of its own by moving thru a developmental progression. To overcome these things the ego must then gain resources and strengths for coping with anxieties.
The final idea is that mental representation of self and others form in childhood to guide adult social motivations. This is called object relations. It is the argument that personality begins to form in childhood as we gain mental representations of the self, others and relationships. Later in life these beliefs form the basis of the motivational states that guide our adult interpersonal relationships. Positive models predict positive outcomes like self esteem and loving relationships, and negative predict the opposite like dysfunctional relationships.
Terms used: psychodynamic perspective, drive, Freudian unconscious, adaptive, implicit motivation, repression, ego, object relations.
Chapter 14 is titled Unconscious Motivation. The main concepts from this chapter include; psychodynamic perspective, the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego psychology, objects relations theory and criticisms. Psychoanalysis holds the ultimate cause of motivation and behavior derives from biologically endowed and socially experienced impulses that determine our desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This occurs whether we like it or not. Psychoanalysis is further deterministic in that individual’s personality changes very little after puberty. Many motivational impulses that occur as an adult can be linked back to impulses that were had in childhood. Motivation is thought of as something that happens to us, rather than something someone chooses or creates. Part of the appeal of psychoanalysis is that the subject matter is the unconscious. Many people have trouble accepting Freud’s theory that goes along with psychoanalysis. His theory goes where no other theory has gone. It looks into dreams, hypnosis, inaccessible memories and fantasy. Freud categorized drives into two general categories. The first class of instincts is life instincts – Eros, the life instincts are easier to define. Eros instincts maintain life and ensure individual and collective survival. The second class of instincts – Thanatos, the death instincts push the individual towards rest, inactivity, and energy conservation The book gives the example of telling a hostile joke about an ethnic group is an expression of the Thantos. There are four core postulates; 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 guides that person’s later motivations and relationships.
The unconscious is thought of as a “shadow phenomenon” that cannot be known directly but can be inferred only from its indirect manifestations. Feud believed that unconscious constituted the “primary process” while consciousness was but a “secondary process”. Freud and his colleagues explored the contents and processes of the unconscious through hypnosis, free association, dream analysis, humor, and slips of the tongue. He rejected the idea that consciousness was the essence of mental life and therefore divided the mind into three components: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious.
Psychodynamics, according to Freud, concerned the conflict between personality structures of the id and ego. The motivations of the id were unconscious, involuntary, impulse-driven, and hedonistic, as the id obeyed the pleasure principle. The pleasure principle is to obtain pleasure and avoid pain and to do so at all costs and without delay.
Defining ego is difficult to do because it is not so much a thing as it is a developmental process. From its infantile origins through its progression toward what is possible, the ego unfolds along the following developmental trajectory: symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. Object Relations Theory focuses more on the nature and the development of mental representations of the self and others and on the affective processes associated with these representations. In particular, this theory focuses on how childhood mental representations of one’s caretakers are captured within the personality and persist into adulthood.
I believe the main thing that I will remember from this chapter down the road is the theory of object relations. Today I was offered a job at Lutheran Services of Iowa working as a Youth Specialist. This job involves working with youth that have neglected and abused. Object relations often stress the impact that parental abuse or neglect has on the infant’s emerging representations of self and others. The bond between caregiver and child becomes the child’s template for self and other mental representations. When a caregiver is warn and nurturing, the infants need of approval is met and vise versa. This concept is what my future job will be all about. I will be in the position to act as a positive role model to help encourage children social confidence, self-esteem and self-reliance.
Terms: unconscious motivation, psychodynamic perspective, unconscious, psychodynamics, ego psychology, objects relations theory, criticisms, Freud, drive, Eros, Thanatos, primary process, conscious, preconscious, involuntary, hedonistic, symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, autonomous
Chapter 14 discusses unconscious motivation. First off, psychoanalysis is deterministic and pessimistic. It is deterministic in that the ultimate cause of motivation and behavior comes from biology and socially acquired impulses that determine desires, thoughts, feelings and behaviors. It is pessimistic in that it focuses on sexual and aggressive urges that relate to conflict, anxiety, and defense mechanisms and so on. Psychoanalytic refers to those who practice traditional, Freudian principles and views. Psychodynamic is the study of dynamic unconscious mental processes. The Dual-Instinct Theory, introduced by Freud, views motivation as regulated by impulse-driven biological forces. The body is therefore a system that through certain behaviors increases energy and through other behaviors it decreases energy. There are two instincts that Freud chose to focus on; life and death. Eros, the instinct for life, is an instinct to maintain life and ensure individual and collective survival. Freud centers this instinct on sex; species preservation. The second instinct, death or Thanatos, pushes the individual toward rest, inactivity, and energy conservation. Freud centers this instinct on aggression. Therefore sex and aggression provide the energy to motivate behavior. However, through further studies this theory no longer holds true. Sex and aggression do not conform to a physiological model of drive. Therefore contemporary psychoanalysts waive the idea of the instinctual drive as a central motivational construct. Sex and aggression are now viewed as psychological wishes, rather than drives. The wish model is yet another discrepancy theory. When individuals are aware, unconsciously or consciously, of their present state and perceive a more potentially desirable state motivation arises and directs and regulates behavior. The unconsciousness is something that is not only hard to describe, but hard to study. However, we do know that much of mental life is unconscious; people have motives and intentions that lie outside of their everyday awareness. There are three views of the unconsciousness; Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious and implicit motivation. The Freudian unconscious is divided into three parts: conscious, preconscious and unconscious. The conscious includes the thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, and experiences that a person is currently aware of. The preconscious are stored thoughts, feelings and memories that while not in immediate consciousness can be retrieved at any time with little prompting. The unconscious contains the inaccessible impulses, repressed experiences, early childhood memories, and strong unfulfilled wishes and desires. The adaptive conscious appraises the environment, sets goals, makes judgments, and initiates actions while and individual is consciously thinking about something else. Implicit motivation is described as 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. Implicit motives are linked to emotional experiences. They orient, direct, and select attention so that people automatically attend to environmental events that have emotional associations. Clashing forces such as idea versus conteridea is known as psychodynamics. People sometimes do what they do not want to do, therefore the clash occurs. Freud studied psychodynamics in terms of the id and the ego. The id is unconscious, involuntary, and impulse-driven. The ego is conscious, defensive, and non-impulsive. People go out of their way to avoid certain motivations because they do not want to know things about themselves that contradict self-schemas. Repression is defined as forgetting information or an experience by ways that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic. Suppression is the process of removing a thought once it has already occurred, because thoughts cannot be stopped. However, suppression can backfire into an obsession. A person focuses energy on forgetting the thought ultimately giving the thought more attention through the unconscious conterprocess. Ego psychology is a developmental study. The ego grows, matures, adjusts, and becomes autonomous over time. During the infantile, symbolic stage, the ego is immature and overwhelmed by impulses. It goes through a series of phases before reaching autonomy. The autonomous ego has thoughts, plans, goals and behaviors that come from the self-motivating, self-regulating ego rather than the impulsive id. Ego development defends against anxiety and allows a person to interact more effectively with their surroundings. The ego is in a constant state of vulnerability. Mature defense mechanisms for this vulnerability allow a person to live a well-adjusted life, keep a fulfilling job, develop friendships, avoid divorce, and have a higher income level and so on. Ego effectance is the individual’s competence in dealing with environmental challenges, demands, and opportunities. The greater ego effectance motivation, the greater the person’s willingness to use ego properties proactively change the environment. The object relations theory involves how people relate to objects to satisfy their need of relatedness. Childhood mental representations of an individual’s caretaker continue into adulthood. This involves the theory of attachment. The connection made or not made between the caregiver and child is a base for the self and other mental representations. Feud faced many criticisms in his studies. First, that his studies are not scientifically testable. Second is that his theories are not predictive. A scientific theory must be able to predict future events to be credible.
The concept that stuck with me throughout reading Chapter 14 was suppression. As soon as I read the section on it I couldn’t stop thinking of thought that I would like to never think of. It’s interesting to learn that suppression backfires into obsession. I know this occurs for me almost daily. Instead of attempting to avoid the thoughts it might be best to simply confront them and obtain closure.
Terms: psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, Dual-Instinct Theory, Eros, Thanatos, wish model, unconscious, Freudian unconscious, conscious, preconscious, unconscious, adaptive conscious, implicit motivation, id, ego, repression, suppression, ego psychology, ego effectance, object relations theory
Chapter 14 is about unconscious motivation which includes the psychodynamic perspective, the unconscious, psychodynamics, and ego psychology. The psychodynamic perspective looks to an adults childhood to see how that effects their motivations for behaviors as an adult. Psychodynamic and psychoanalysis were formerly used interchangeably, but now psychoanalysis is considered to be following traditional Freudian views whereas psychodynamic is a more modern view on Freud’s original theories. Freud had the dual-instinct theory which said that biological impulses drive motivation. Freud argued that there are two primary motivations which are life and death, and said that these are what motivates behavior. Today, the psychodynamic theory has a more modern approach with empirical evidence to support it.
The unconscious is included in the psychodynamic theory and it is things that are hidden from our conscious mind. Freud believed that one key to the unconscious mind was through dreams that show our impulses that are suppressed in our conscious mind. Modern psychology views this as the adaptive unconscious and argues that this is what appraises our environment while consciously we are doing other behaviors and having other thoughts. The last aspect is subliminal motivation which is a message that is sent to the unconscious that we are consciously unaware of, but effects individuals because it was seen by the unconscious.
Psychodynamics is where our (conscious) will and our (unconscious) counterwill meet. Freud had the theory of the id (unconscious), ego (half conscious half unconscious), and superego. Freud’s theory was that these three things were intertwined and was actually the cause of our motivation. Two aspects of this are repression and suppression. Repression refers to an individual’s filter for what remains internal and what becomes public. Often individuals unconsciously repress information or experiences because it is something they don’t like, or is painful. Suppression is a conscious way of trying to stop a thought or behavior such as an individual trying to not think about their upcoming presentation because it will cause anxiety throughout their day.
The last aspect is ego psychology which is a developmental process. The stages of this process are symbiotic, impulse, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. The ego is constantly at a state of vulnerability, so it created defense mechanisms to try to protect themselves. An example of one of these defense mechanisms is humor. An individual can use humor to mask their insecurities and just turn it into a joke. Another example is reaction formation which is when an individual is unhappy about something in their life so they portray a strong opposition to their true feelings or behaviors. The last aspect of ego psychology is ego effectance which essentially is how competent an individual is in their environment.
The final topic discussed in this chapter is the object relation theory which is how well and individual achieves their desire for relatedness. This starts in childhood and then continues to adulthood and is a result of how a child related with their primary caretaker (typically parents) if the caretaker was warm and loving and satisfied their need for relatedness or not. This is thought to effect how an adult’s behavior is motivated.
I have learned a lot of this information in previous psychology courses, and a lot of it has stuck with me. I find Freud very interesting, and I definitely think he had some good theories but most people just think of his strange views when it came to certain theories. The psychodynamic field is based off Freud’s ideas and has empirical evidence supporting them, so Freud was not always far off. I think that looking to ones past to see their motivation for behaviors is very important and can tell a lot for some individuals. I also think the defense mechanisms are important, because it can explain why someone would act a certain way and can help to understand them better. This can also help an individual to realize why they are behaving in a certain way and help them to cope with things in a more healthy and proactive way.
Terms: psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, unconscious, conscious, motivation, suppression, repression, will, counterwill, id, superego, ego, symbiotic, impulse, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, autonomous, defense mechanism, ego effectance, object-relation theory
Chapter 14 discusses the subject of unconscious motivation. The first topic in this chapter is psychodynamic perspective. This perspective states that we are unable to control our motivations and behaviors, and that they are biologically and socially determined. Motivation happens to us, our text explains, it isn’t something we can choose. Psychoanalysis includes such behaviors as aggression, anxiety, conflict, sexual urges, as well as other “emotional burdens”. Psychoanalysis focuses on the unconscious human behaviors. Today, psychoanalytic is the term used to refer to Freud’s methods and principles, while the term psychodynamic has coined the unconscious mental processes without the Freudian association.
Sigmund Freud began his study of motivation with the view that impulse-driven biological forces were at work in the human body, where certain behaviors controlled bodily energy. He claimed there were two classes of instincts: Eros, the life instincts, and Thanatos, the death instincts. The first motivated the body to survive-namely to eat, drink, breathe, sleep, have sex, etc. The second instinct motivated the person towards inactivity, energy conservation, and overall- pushed towards death or eternal sleep. This second instinct category also involved aggression, which focused on hostility, self-criticism, addictions, revenge, anger, hate, unnecessary risk-taking, and others. These two categories of instinct provide the energy, Freud claimed, to motivate peoples’ behavior, thus managing life and death impulses and sex and aggression. According to Freud’s Psychoanalytic theory, individuals act impulsively as well as through learning experiences (psychosexual development)-giving us humans our “ego”.
Contemporary psychoanalysts do not follow this theory anymore. Today, the focus is on cognitive and interpersonal forces rather than biological and intrapersonal ones, chapter 14 states. Also, four postulates replace the former theory; contemporary theorists follow the core postulates of 1) the Unconscious, 2) Psychodynamics, 3) Ego development, and 4) Object relations theory. These four postulates tell us that our feelings and drives are at the unconscious level, that motivational and emotional processes operate parallel to one another, that we grow and develop, leaving our immature, fragile, and egocentric selves behind to make room for the more mature and socially responsible beings we will become, and that our personality patterns form at childhood as we construct mental representations of ourselves and others.
Freud believed that our unconscious was a “shadow phenomenon” which could be interpreted through the indirect manifestations of its expressions. The unconscious was the “primary process” and the conscious was the “secondary process”. It was at this time that we gain the knowledge of the unconscious mind through hypnosis, free-association, projection tests, and the analysis of dreams, among other ways. People today have accepted that the unconscious is a great part of mental life. But instead of the above methods used by Freud to discover the unconscious mental processes, psychologists now focus on subliminal activation, priming, selective attention, and implicit memory.
According to Freud, our minds should be divided into three parts: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. The preconscious was where our thoughts and feelings were stored that were not readily accessible to our conscious, but could easily be attained, and the unconscious was the place the thoughts and feelings we do not want known were kept. The unconscious stored painful memories, early childhood experiences, and unfulfilled wishes and desires, and was the largest storage unit in the human mind. During adaptive unconscious, we can do things as if we are on auto pilot, so to speak. The mind can learn new things, but we may not remember learning these things. Implicit motivations are those we have indirectly gained, possibly through emotional experiences in childhood or the like. Chapter 7 discussed implicit motivations as being those needs related to achievement power, intimacy, and so on. Also, to subliminally activate motivation, a stimulus is presented at a weak level, thus sparking a memory or behavior in a subject. An example of this is the flashing of a message during the 1960s that read “Drink Coke”- this subliminal message thought up by marketing execs was meant to plant the thought into peoples’ heads in order to motivate them to buy and drink their product. Another example is the self-help motivational tapes that were popular some years ago. These were meant to boost self-esteem and even help patients to quit smoking or other unhealthy habits, resulting in a better lifestyle.
Psychodynamics is the term coined to describe the mind’s constant clashing within itself. Freud claimed that the human mind was always in conflict; mentally, we are struggling ideas versus counter ideas, desire versus repression, and sexual attraction versus guilt. Freud stated that the id and ego were always in combat, causing the human mind to do things it did not want to do at times. While repression is the process of forgetting experiences and possibly important information, suppression is the human mind’s ability to stop a certain thought. One is consciously achieved and the other is unconscious. However, suppression is not a very successful process. When someone tells you not to remember something, more than likely you WILL remember it, even if you try not to. Studies have shown that different parts of the brain correspond with Freud’s Id and Ego, and that the Id and Ego are separate entities. The Ego forms through a developmental process including symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous stages, and is always very vulnerable. The Ego buffers against anxiety-laden situations in order to protect the mind. Without these defense mechanisms, our lives would be filled with anxieties stemming from internal and external reality changes. Some examples of the Ego’s defense mechanisms are: fantasy, regression, humor, sublimation, displacement, and denial. The presence or non-existence of these defense mechanisms may determine the depression level in subjects, as well as the stress levels. How effective the Ego is determines the person’s competence in dealing with challenges in the environment, everyday demands, and afforded opportunities.
Object Relations Theory studies how peoples’ need for relatedness is satisfied through their attachments to sexual and social objects and through their mental representations of such needs. One’s quality of mental representations is characterized through three dimensions: 1) unconscious tone, 2) capacity for emotional involvement, and 3) mutuality of autonomy with others.
Criticisms against Freud are twofold. One states that many of his concepts are not testable scientifically speaking. The other states that although psychodynamic theory works to interpret past events, it does not correctly predict.
Years down the road, I can see the parts concerning the Id and Ego being separate entities sticking out in my memory. It fascinates me that within each of our minds there are constant battles and workings, some of which we know about and others we do not, aiding in our decisions and behaviors. Also, I remember hearing about the subliminal studies regarding the Coke commercials. I still remember those studies to this day. Anything relating to marketing strategies involving the human mind amazes me. It kind of scares me to a point as well. How do we know what we have been “secretly” motivated to do during our lives? That is something to think about.
TERMS: Object relations theory, ego effectance, defense mechanisms (denial, regression, humor, sublimation, displacement, fantasy), ego defense/development, Id/Ego, Ego psychology, suppression, repression, subliminal motivation, Psychodynamics, adaptive unconscious implicit motivation, Freudian unconscious, preconscious, conscious, power, relatedness, selective attention, priming, psychoanalysis, impulse-driven biological forces
Chapter 14 discusses the aspect of unconscious motivation, which basically the social and biological impulses that comes from motives that we don’t necessarily chose to happen. People’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions can come from other sources, yet subjectively be their own. This chapter explains the difference between psychoanalytic and psychodynamic. Psychodynamic is the study of dynamic unconscious mental processes, whereas psychoanalytic refers to focus of Freudian principles. With psychodynamic therapy, the focus is more cognitive and interpersonal forces; however, the psychoanalytic therapy, the focus is to understand the confusing activities of the unconscious and force the person to deal with reality.
Psychodynamic theory consists of four parts. The unconscious, this focuses on thoughts, feelings, and desires that exist at the unconscious level and how life affects people to behave in unexplainable ways. Dreams are discussed that they are neurophysical, cognitive, coping, and problem-solving events, but have little to do with unconscious wishes. The neurophysiological activity makes sense of the memory consolidating function; which move memories from short-term to long-term memory. Dreams are also a stress-buffering/ coping function by providing to pair defense mechanisms against threatening events. Lastly, problem-solving function helps people process information during dreams. The adaptive unconscious appraises the environment, sets goals, makes judgments, and initiates action, while consciously thinking about something else. This is when the body recognizes a routine action and proceeds to do without a second thought. Implicit motivation is all the motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments that occur outside a person’s conscious awareness. These are indirect, implied and not well understood. Subliminal motivation is motives through stimuli appearing when at a weak energy level. However, it is shown in research that subliminal messages don’t really affect people.
Psychodynamics discusses that motivational and emotional processes work hand in hand, where people will feel two different emotions at the same time. It’s a clashing of forces. If a person has a job interview they experience this. They are fearful and nervous to see if the interview will go well, but they also experience want because they desire the job. The id is unconscious, involuntary, impulse-driven, meaning that a person must achieve what they want no matter what. The ego is partly conscious and not, steeped in defenses, and organized around the delay of gratification. This is meaning that a person will get what they want only when they find the opportunity when it is socially acceptable. Repression is the process of forgetting information or experiences through unconscious, unintentional, and automatic ways. It is the tough minded security guard who turns down most unconscious thoughts’ request to exit. It is hard to study because you can’t ask about something one doesn’t remember. Suppression is a process to remove thought consciously, intentionally, and deliberately. However, it only works for a little while before it creeps back to prove that people don’t have much control over what they think. Studies show that not wanting to think about something, will cause it to come back more frequently.
Ego development focuses on how people grow, develop, and move past immature parts to become mature. This is a progression of development to grow, mature, adjust, become independent, competent, and autonomous functioning. The symbiotic stage is extremely immature and overwhelmed by impulses because it depends on the caretaker. The impulsive stage parents or rule guide the child to stop impulses and desires. When the child realizes there are rules, they go into the self-control stage. During the conformist stage the child learns social norms basically, whereas the conscientious ego sets the rules and responsibility. Autonomous ego learns to self-motivate and self-regulate.
Finally, Object Relations Theory states that stable personality pattern form in childhood as people form mental representations of the self and others. It studies how people satisfy their need for relatedness; how they relate to objects that satisfy the need for emotional and psychological relatedness. It stresses the impact created on infants from parental abuse or neglect. The bond between parents and children is very important.
Freud has two categories for bodily needs; instincts for life and instincts for death. The life category refers to maintaining life with food, water, air, sleep, and survival. The death category refers to rest, inactivity, and energy conservation. “Wish Model” proposes that at any time people are aware consciously or not, of their current state, encountering many situations, see a more desirable state. This is meaning that a person may go about their day without any negative urges, but once they are negatively affected, they desire a more ideal state which directs the motive behavior.
I will take with me from this chapter, the repression and suppression topics. I find it very interesting how people, including myself, are afraid to face the real problems in their lives. I can really relate to this topic because I feel there are many repressed memories from my life that have caused me to act the way I do. Also, I suppress a lot of thoughts to get through my life, however they do tend to keep popping back up. I enjoyed reading this chapter very much. It was very informative and helpful for me to understand my thoughts a little better.
Terms Used: unconscious motivation, psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, instincts for life, instincts for death, wish model, The Unconscious, Psychodynamics, Ego Development, Object Relations Theory, neurophysiological activity, memory consolidation, coping function, problem-solving function, adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, subliminal motivation, id, ego, repression, suppression, stages: symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, autonomous,
Chapter fourteen talked about unconscious motivation and also spent a great deal discussing Freudian theory. The chapter started off with Freud’s dual-instinct theory. This theory basically broke down all biological drives into two groups: Eros and Thanatos. Eros stood for life instincts, which included things such as instincts for food, water, air, sleep, and sex. Thanatos stood for death instincts, which included topics such as aggression. The underlying idea behind Dual-Instinct Theory is that these innate drives (life instincts and death instincts), which originate from impulse-driven biological forces, provide the energy for behaviors.
The book then went on to talk about the unconscious, which is pretty much known throughout the field of psychology. The unconscious can be defined as the idea that people have motives and intentions that lie outside of their everyday awareness. There are three views on the unconscious and those are Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious, and implicit motivation.
Freudian unconscious is part of his theory of psychoanalysis, which states that there are three components of the mind: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Conscious included thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, and experiences that a person is aware of at any point in time. The preconscious consists of all thoughts, feelings, and memories that are absent from immediate consciousness. The unconscious according to Freud is the mental storehouse of instinctual impulses, repressed memories, and unfulfilled wishes and desires.
The adaptive unconscious is the concept that learning occurs without it being present in our conscious. The example of the patient with amnesia really made me think about this concept and how it applies to my life. I don’t remember learning how to tie my shoes, yet I do it everyday without even thinking about it or where I learned it.
Implicit motivation refers to the motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments that operate outside a person’s conscious awareness. These motivational processes are indirect and include such things as: needs for achievement, affiliation, intimacy, and power.
Ego psychology talks about the development of the ego throughout life. There are six stages of ego development and they are: symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. Symbiotic stage is where the welfare of the being depends on its caretaker. Impulsive stage is when external forces curb the child’s desires. Self-protective stage occurs when the child firsts understands that rules exist. In the conformist stage, the ego internalizes group-accepted rules. Conscientious stage is when the person develops his or her own internalized set of rules. Finally, the autonomous stage is when thoughts, plans, and goals originate from within. Each one of these stages is important in the field of motivation by allowing the person to interact more effectively with their surroundings.
Defense mechanisms are tools to deal with potentially overwhelming levels of anxiety. These defense mechanisms are hierarchical from least to most mature. Each one of these defense mechanisms has its own effectiveness with the higher categories being more effective. There are many different defense mechanisms but some examples are: fantasy, regression, rationalization, and humor.
Object relations theory is the last concept that the chapter talked about and it mainly focuses on the development of mental representations of the self. The basis behind object relations theory is to study how people relate to objects to satisfy their emotional and psychological need for relatedness.
I believe that I will remember bits and pieces from this chapter because I have learned them in several different classes. Freudian theory seems to be a very debated topic in the field of psychology but his theories have led to great research in the field of the unconsciousness.
If there was one particular topic from this chapter that I believe I will remember the best, it would be the section on subliminal motivation. I always found this topic to be interesting and this section helped me to understand it a little better and the results on its effectiveness really made me consider all of the instances that occur throughout the day.
Dual-instinct theory, Eros, Thanatos, unconscious, psychoanalysis, conscious, preconscious, adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, ego psychology, ego, defense mechanisms, object relations theory, subliminal motivation
Chapter 14 talks about unconscious motivation. Psychodynamic perspective, the unconscious, psychodynamics, and ego psychology all deal with the unconscious mind. The psychodynamic approach is largely based on the image of human nature. It determines our biological and social desires, thoughts and feelings and there is no way to change it. Often times psychoanalysis come off with a pessimistic tone and places an emphasis on conflict, anxiety, repression, defense mechanisms and many other emotional issues. Subject matter becomes the psychoanalysis appeal. For many people psychoanalysis is very popular because it talks about different aspects of human nature and people enjoy reading about it. The book states that people often are more interested in getting sexual pleasure than they will admit and I definitely agree. People don't like to share about their sexual pleasures. Psychoanalysis refers to the study of unconscious mental processes. A lot has changed throughout the years and psychodynamic has definitely changed. There are now four principles that define the psychodynamic theory. The unconscious is the first one. Unconscious mental processes, electrons, and velocity are expanding the universe to measure the study scientifically. These are all parts of Freud's theory and he thought we had to express our unconscious impulses through a disguised form that we didn't know we had. Freud studied this theory is multiple ways. The debate on the unconscious mental life has ceased and now it's focused on the three views of the Fruedian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious and the implicit motivation. Psychodynamics focused on the things people normally did not want to do. Freud thought that there had to be some sort of motivation behind doing some things that you didn't wish to do. Psychodynamics can also be known as fearing and wanting the same things, such as a wedding proposal. As much as you fear doing the proposal you go through with it because you want to. Repression was Freud's first concept of psychodynamics. Repression is a way to forget information that is unconscious, unintention and/or automatic. Anxiety helps move the unconscious mind into the repression stage. Suppression also deals with psychodynamics and unconscious motivation. Suppression is the ability to remove a thought by ways that are conscious, intentional and deliberate. There is no way to completely stop a thought but suppression is the closest way to push it away. Ego psychology is developmental process. The process of ego psychology happens through a development of psychological growth, maturity, adjustment, prosocial interdependence, and infantile origins. The ego development is important to the unconscious world because it helps the body defend anxiety. Also, the ego helps the individual interaction more effectively in it's surroundings. The unconscious mind has a lot more to do with the body than I ever though it did.
One of the things that I will take from this chapter and remember it years from now is ego psychology is developed throughout our life and that it is just developed in general. I didn't know that their was a process that we went through to get the ego psychology that we had. I often struggle with anxiety and to know that my ego psychology helps defending my body from even worse anxiety that makes me feel better. I know that my anxiety could be a lot worse if I didn't go through ego development.
Terms: psychodynamic perspective, the unconscious, psychodynamics, repression, suppression, ego psychology, ego development.
Chapter 14 discusses unconscious motivations. The main concepts of this chapter are psychoanalytic perspective, the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego psychology, and object relations theory.
The psychoanalytic theory 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. So it’s known as the pessimistic image of human nature. But oddly it is very popular with people because there is so much to learn about it. This theory is all about the mind and its secrets. The Freudian process relates to the psychoanalytic theory. Freud says that our emotions come from impulses from biological forces. Freud, the smart man that he is, came up with instincts because he thought there were too many needs. The instincts for life are known as eros. Which is our ability of survival. Death instincts are known as thanatos, which take us towards rest and inactivity. Freud helped psychology a lot but things have changed and now we use the contemporary psychodynamic theory, which is more modern and doesn’t connect with Freud and his theories as much.
The unconscious makes empirical exploration difficult because it’s hidden from private consciousness and public observation. Freud divided the unconscious into three parts to make understanding it easier. The three categories are: the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Adaptive unconscious helps people to set goals, make judgments, and think. This of course will help us in motivating ourselves in life.
Psychodynamics is the idea that people engage in behaviors that they do not want to, but they can’t help it. Freud looked into these strange behaviors and explained ego and id. The ego is the conscious and the id is the unconscious. Repression is the process of forgetting information. The ego or id may use repression to help you forget certain things. Suppression is the process of removing a though by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate. Suppression can be used when certain thoughts come into consciousness that people don’t want to remember.
Ego psychology is the idea that the ego grows as people grow older. So as we get wiser, our ego gets wiser. Ego defense uses its defense mechanisms to help fight of the constant vulnerability. There are many different defense mechanisms that can be used, some of them are: Denial, regression, rationalization, humor, anticipation, and fantasy. The last concept I read about was object relations theory which is the nature and development of our mental representations of our self and others. This starts when we are young and helps us develop our thoughts of our self compared to others and what we think is correct or normal.
What I will remember from this chapter and from other psychology classes that I’ve learned a little about it is the ego and id. There are certain things about myself I can’t explain or why I think a certain way. I make conscious and unconscious decisions daily and I don’t know how to control them. The human brain is an amazing and complicated organ. Although I did find it interesting that the book wonders if they really do exist. To me the id and ego have always seemed a skeptical but I went along with it because it seemed to be proven. I still believe they id and ego exist with some stipulations and contradictions.
Terms: psychoanalytic perspective, the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego psychology, object relations theory, eros, id, ego, conscious, preconscious, unconscious, adaptive unconscious, motivation, repression, suppression, ego defense, ego psychology, defense mechanisms.
Chapter 14 talks about the concept of unconscious motivation, and psychoanalysis determines that motivation comes from biological and social impulses along with sexual urges, conflict, anxiety, and other shortcomings. It is something that happens to us rather than something someone chooses, an idea all on its own by Sigmund Freud. Today’s focus falls on psychodynamic, the study of dynamic unconscious mental processes like (prejudice, depression), allowing one can study the unconscious within the traditional Freudian perspective or outside.
In Freud’s Dual-Instinct theory he viewed motivation to be regulated by impulse-driven biological forces. He emphasized two general categories of motivation: instincts for life and instincts for death. Life instincts also known as (Eros) maintain life and ensure individual collective (species) survival. These are food, water, air, and sleep along with self-preservation (individual survival) such as sex, nurturance, and affiliation. Freud placed the most emphasis in this area more in particularly sex. The other hand death instinct (Thanatos) pushed the individual toward rest, inactivity, and over all energy conservation, with the ultimate rest being death. The primary emphasis toward this motivation is aggression. When focused on the self leads to self-criticism, sadism, depression, and so on, but when focused on other leads to anger, hate, cruelty, and even war. Although sex and aggression are instinctual drives they can be managed through psychosocial development (personality) by experiencing their surroundings. However, contemporary psychoanalysts dropped sex and aggression from the drive concepts because they didn’t match physiological models, like hunger and thirst, and were instead considered psychological wishes.
Psychodynamic theory is based on four postulates (principles): the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory. First is the unconscious, assumed to constitute the primary process through a shadow phenomenon (indirect manifestation) while the conscious controlled the secondary process of this urges. After much debate the idea was split into three views. The Freudian Unconscious split he mind into three components; a conscious for short-term memory and feelings, a preconscious for the unconscious to store thoughts and feeling that are retrievable, and an unconscious a mental storehouse of inaccessible impulses. An Adaptive unconscious that states that our unconscious acts as an autopilot, dealing with the environment while our conscious thoughts focus on other things. Finally, implicit motivation which are mindful emotions that affect our behavior based on the underlying emotional association.
The second postulate is psychodynamics in it-self. It describes the conflict between the conscious (ego’s) and unconscious (id’s). When the ego wants something but at the same time the id fears it, such as a job interview. It is the clashing of these forces that gives the psychodynamic its meaning. The mental combatants of our thoughts can be effected due to repression and suppression. Repression is an unconscious way of forgetting information and avoiding situations that may reemerge them. Suppression is the conscious process of removing a thought, but generally fails and ends up being a thought obsession. One way that thought suppression is an ally is preventing social out bursts of our thoughts.
The third postulate brings us to ego psychology or more so ego development. It starts during infantile (symbiotic stage) when a caretaker tends to our needs due to a overwhelming amount of impulses. The impulsive stage is when external forces (time outs, punishments) regulate our behavior. Self-protective stage arises when we anticipate consequences and understand that there are rules. The conformist stage acts against impulses using disapproval. The conscientious is a set of internalized rules that allows us to rely on our selves. Lastly is autonomous ego is developed, self-motivating and self-regulating, to mediate against anxiety using defense mechanisms. Defense mechanisms are used to buffer conflict with id impulses (neurotic anxiety), superego demands (moral anxiety), and environmental dangers (realistic anxiety). They exit in a hierarchical order ranging in maturity.
The final postulate is object relations theory. The nature and development of mental representations of the self and other and the affective processes. How the childhood mental representation of one’s caretaker are present in adulthood. Positive or negative mental models of one’s self predict the level of the adults confidence and relationships.
I found a lot of things interesting in this chapter, and I always like reading about Freud. If I had to pick one thing that I would remember from this chapter more than the others….it would have to be the ego defense mechanisms. I say this because dealing with vulnerability everyday and having to adapt to new situations makes the maturity process between individuals difficult. Having a way to measure someone’s maturity level in a day-to-day atmosphere makes it easy to see where someone is coming from’ a cranialagical age.
Terms: cranialagical age, psychoanalysis, psychodynamics, unconscious mind, biological impulses, social impulses, Dual-Instinct Theory, instincts, life instincts, death instincts, wishes, shadow phenomenon, primary process, secondary process, Freudian unconscious, preconscious, conscious, adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, repression, suppression, ego development, ego stages, defense mechanisms, ego effectance, object-relations theory
Chapter 14 related to unconscious motivation. By studying the unconscious and by embracing a rather pessimistic view of human nature, psychoanalysis opens the door to study topics such as traumatic memories, inexplicable addictions, anxieties about the future, dreams, hypnosis, inaccessible and repressed memories and a slew of other hidden forces that shape our needs and ways of thinking and behaving. The subject matter of psychoanalysis reflects what seems to be so popular contemporary movies such as: sex, aggression, psychopathology, revenge, and sorts.
Sigmund Freud is the father of the psychoanalytic perspective. 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. The concept of the psychological with retains the full spirit of Freudian motivation.
Four postulates define contemporary psycho dynamic theory. The first is that much of mental life is unconscious. The second postulate of a contemporary psycho-dynamic understanding of motivation and emotion is that mental processes operate in parallel with one another, such that people commonly want and fear the same thing at the same time. The third postulate is that of ego development. Healthy development involves moving from an immature, socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and socially responsible. The fourth postulate of a contemporary psycho-dynamic understanding is that mental representations of self and others form in childhood to guide adult social motivations.
One thing that I found interesting and will remember down the road is the Dual-Instinct Theory. It states that the mind received psychic energy from the body's physical energy. The source of all physical energy was biological drive, which was a biologically rooted force “emanating within the organism and penetrating to the mind”. It basically states that instinctual bodily drives explained the source of all motivation. I'll remember this because it is important to remember this to keep a healthy body and mind.
Terms: unconscious motivation, psychoanalysis, anxieties, hypnosis, motivation, instinctual drives, sex, aggression, psycho dynamic theory, personality, immature, physical energy, bodily drives.
This chapter focused on unconscious motivation. According to the psychodynamic approach, motivation is derived from biology and society. This determines our desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Psychoanalysis is very popular because it focuses on the unconscious and therefore explores “the unknown.” Freud is very important in psychoanalysis. His dual-instinct theory separated all instincts into two categories- Eros (life instincts) and Thanatos (death instincts); In other words, sex and aggression. Individuals learned socially acceptable ways to manage their energies. What one does repeatedly is Freud’s concept of the ego. Contemporary psychoanalysts do not see instinctual drive as the center of motivation like Freud did. The focus is now on cognitive and interpersonal forces. Sex and aggression are seen as psychological wishes in the “wish model.” This chapter also explained that dreams are not just unconscious desires making themselves known. They are neurophysiological, cognitive, coping, and problem-solving events. Implicit motivations are inside of us and have to do with emotional experiences. They include needs for achievement, affiliation, power, and intimacy. According to the chapter, subliminal messages do not affect your actions. They might affect your unconscious, but they do not make you act in a certain way. People have conflicting feelings that motivate in opposite ways. For Freud, this was a conflict between the id and ego. According to the book, conflicting motivations occur in many aspects of our lives. Unconscious motivation is a complicated matter that everyone seems to want to know more about.
I will remember that the patterns learned in childhood often shapes interpersonal relationships in adulthood. I will remember this because I plan on having kids someday, and I will keep it in mind when raising them. I will do my best to help them be successful in loving and committed partnerships. I will also remember the concepts of ego defense and ego effectance because I found them very interesting. The difference between men who were depressed and men who were not depressed is what caught my eye. Those with effective coping strategies and mature defenses did not experience depression, as would be expected. Those with ineffective and immature coping strategies did. I think this clearly states that there is a correlation between the types of ego defenses and depression. I would be interested to see what the spread of ego defenses used in depressed individuals was.
Terms: ego defense, ego effectance, object relations theory, unconscious motivation, psychodynamic approach, psychoanalysis, Freud, dual-instinct theory, eros, thanatos, ego, wish model
Chapter 14 of the textbook deals with unconscious motivation. I immediately thought of Freud when I read the title of the chapter. Sure enough, the first heading in the chapter was called psychodynamic perspective. Freud had a dual-instinct theory that said motivation was made up of biological impulses for life, Eros, and death, Thanatos. Life instincts included eating and sex. Death instincts included sleeping and aggression. As we have learned through out the textbook and class, drives are not quite right when it comes to motivation. The core postulates of contemporary psychodynamic theory are the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory.
The unconscious regards the thoughts that we are unaware of. Freud said that the unconscious was full of repressed thoughts and feelings that would be too disturbing to the conscious. Contemporary research focuses on the adaptive unconscious. The adaptive unconscious is responsible automatically evaluating the environment. We don’t think about tying our shoes or our daily drive home from work. Implicit motivation is the opposite of goals, plans and self-concept. It is the emotional experiences, attitudes, and judgments that we are not exactly aware of. Subliminal motivation deals with our unconscious as well. The first thing I thought of when I read the header of subliminal motivation was the presidential ad that flashed “rats” quickly about an opponent. Subliminal motivation occurs when a weak stimulus is introduced. We do not commonly act on subliminal messages.
Freud introduced the will and couterwill into psychodynamics. The ego is the advocate for the will and the unconscious id is the advocate for the couterwill. These two come into conflict quite often. Repression is behind the idea that there are some things that we do not want to know about ourselves. We harbor feelings and urges that are too disturbing for our conscious. Repression is unintentional and automatic. Suppression is the conscious form of repression. It is when we deliberately remove a troubling thought.
The ego represent maturity and growth. When we are infants, the ego is constantly defeated by the id. As we grow, so does the ego. Eventually the sugerego emerges and represents superiour moral conduct. The id, ego, and superego are the source of our anxieties. There are many defense mechanisms in place to protect the ego. Ranging from immature to fully mature are the defense mechanisms of denial, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, sublimination and humor. Ego effectance deals the our ability to manage challenges and demands from the environment.
Object relations theory focus on how people satisfy their emotional and psychological needs. When a child experiences traumas and weak attachments to parents, the child is more likely to grow up and develop unsatisfying adult relationships.
I think the most memorable part of the chapter for me was ego development. I fully understood it and could see why Freud was fascinated by it.
Terms: Freud, Psychodynamic perspective, Psychoanalysis, Dual-instinct theory, Eros, Thanatos, Unconcious, Psychodynamics, Ego Development, Object Relaitons theory, adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, subliminal motivation, Will, Counterwill, Repression, Suppression, ego, id, superego, defense mechanisms, denial, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, sublimination, ego effectance
Chapter 14 discusses the topic of unconscious motivation and how it is associated with psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a deterministic approach to human nature in that it believes that the main cause of a person’s motivation and behavior derives from biologically endowed and socially acquired impulses that regulates and dictates a person’s desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, whether they like it or not. Psychoanalysis theory also believes that personality changes a little after a person goes through puberty, which means that motivational impulses of an adult can be associated with events that happened in a person’s youth. The subject matter that people focus on when discussing psychoanalysis tends to focus on sex, aggression, psychopathology, revenge and other similar topics.
Freud is created the concept of psychoanalysis and believed that motivation was on a biological based model which stated that the two instinctual drives a person has are of sex and aggression (Eros and Thantaos) which supplies a person’s body with its physical and mental energies. Modern psychoanalysts choose believe that motivation importance comes from psychological wishes verses biological drives, and from cognitive information processing.
The book went onto discuss the four postulates that help define modern psychodynamic theory. The first out of the fours suggests most of mental life is unconscious and argues that thoughts, feelings and desires exist at an unconscious level, which then affects behavior without any explanation; even to the person that is behavior in such a way. There are then three views: Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious, and implicit motivation. Adaptive unconscious automatically appraises the environment, sets goals, makes judgments, and initiates action while we are busy consciously thinking about other things. Implicit motivation is embedded in emotional associations that are outside of a person’s conscious awareness. When the emotional associations are cues by encountering cue-activating environmental events, orients, directs, and selects attention such that people will automatically attend to emotionally linked environmental events.
The second postulate of a contemporary psychodynamic understanding of motivation and emotion is that mental processes operate side by side which explains why people fear and want the same thing at the same time. This postulate best explains psychodynamics because it is well known that people will have conflicting feelings that motivate them to act in opposing ways. Thus it can be determined that people will often have divergent and unconscious thoughts, feeling, and attitudes on many aspects of their life. For example, wanting to do your homework so you will get a good grade in your class, but you hate doing it because you find it to be boring and uninteresting.
The next postulate discusses ego development. If a person has healthy development of their ego they will progress from an immature/dependent state to a mature/independent state. Neo-Freudians believe the ego develops through this progression: symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. Through gaining resources and strengths (ability to cope with inevitable anxieties in life and knowledge about the changing environment) a person should be able to mature their ego for the better.
The final postulate believes that mental representations of self and others form in a person’s youth and guide adult social motivations. This postulate supports the idea that lifelong personality patterns begin to form in childhood while people are formulating mental representations of self, others, and relationships. Then once they are formed their beliefs for the basis of motivational states that guide a person’s interpersonal relationships.
From this reading I think what I will remember most from this chapter is about the second postulate. I feel that I personally experience having opposing motivations about various aspects of my life. One that I experience most recently is my choice to change my major as a junior. I debated for a long time whether I would benefit from changing it or not, and in the long run I choose to. Plus, I know that I have many years ahead of me where I will experience this internal debate on whether I should do something or not, which I’m sure that all people do too.
Terms used: unconscious motivation, psychoanalysis, Eros, Thanatos, sex, aggression, unconscious, psychodynamic, conscious, biological based model, cognitive information processing, thoughts, feelings, desires, Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, ego,
Chapter 14 was about unconscious motivation. The chapter opened with a story about hypnotism. This was to illustrate that human beings can experience thought and feelings that were not originally their own. Motivation can arise from a source outside conscious awareness and volitional intent.
The psychodynamic perspective views motivation from a deterministic and a pessimistic viewpoint. It is deterministic because it theorizes that the ultimate cause of motivation and behavior derives from biologically endowed and socially acquired impulses that determine our desires, thoughts, feelings and behavior whether we like it or not. It is also deterministic because personality changes little after puberty. Thus, motivational impulses of an adult and be traced to childhood. Psychoanalysis also has pessimistic undertones because it focuses on sexual and aggressive urges, conflict, anxiety, defense mechanisms, repression and other emotional burdens and shortcomings. Psychoanalysis is appealing because it offers insight into the 'secrets of the mind.' Psychodynamic theory differs from psychoanalytic because it rejects some psychoanalytic theories and is outside Freudian tradition.
The duals instinct theory was originally stated by Freud, who was a physician by training. It states that motivation is fueled by biological forces. Some behaviors increase bodily energy and some decrease. In the dual instinct theory, there are 2 classes of instinct. Life instincts, or Eros, are instincts to ensure individual and collective survival. These include sex and affiliation. 2nd class instincts, which are a bit less definable, are Thanatos, or death instincts. These include death, rest and aggression. They are instincts that motivate the self to create and absence of bodily disturbance.
Not many contemporary scientists support the Dual Instinct Theory. Today, psychodynamic theory is defined by four postulates: The unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development and object relations theory. After many years of debate, it has been concluded that much of mental life is unconscious, meaning that many of our motives and intentions lie outside of our awareness.
Psychodynamics explains that motivational and emotional processes exist parallel to each other. Sometimes people have couterideas and counterwills that cause them to engage in behavior they may not neccessarily wish to. Ego is defined by one's conscious will and id is defined by unconscious counterwill. The human mind is continually plagued by conflict between the id and ego. This clash of will and counterwill is what is meant by the term psychodynamics. Ego development empowers a person to interact more effectively with their surroundings and helps to eliminate anxiety caused by mediating demands of the self and it's environment. Ego defense is a way of protecting the vulnerable ego from the risks of day to day existence. Defense mechanisms protect against anxiety and are categorized in levels according to the complexity and maturity level of the type of defense. Ego effectence is a reactive coping mechanism to protect the ego, rather than simply a defensive one. When a person succesfully interacts with their environment, their ego effectence motivation increases. Objects relations theory goes further than Freud's initial studies of the unconscious. Instead of simply studying the 'object' aspects of uncoscious motivation as Freud did, this theory studies the mental representation of self and other significant people as influenced by one's drives.
What I'm most likely to retain from this chapter is the table of ego defense mechanisms and the way they are categorized from immature to mature. I had no idea so many defense mechanism existed, and I'm a defensive person so this was fun and interesting to read.
Terms: Psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, dual-instinct theory, unconscious, Freudian unconscious, implicit motivation, subliminal motiation, will vs. counterwill, repression, suppression, id, ego, superego, ego development, ego defense, ego effectence, sublimation, denial, object-relations theory
Chapter 14 focused on unconscious motivation. The chapter mainly focused on psychodynamic theories but started out talking about Freud's psychoanalytic theory. According to Freud, motivation was regulated by impulse-driven biological forces. In his dual-instinct theory he described these forces as Eros, the life instincts, and Thanatos, the death instinct. These forces are what provides the energy to motivate our behavior. Freud also divided the mind into three components: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious.
Contemporary studies of the unconscious looked into the adaptive unconscious, or the autopilot of our mind. The adaptive unconscious appraises the environment, sets goals, makes judgments, and initiates action, all while we are thinking about something else.
Psychodynamics is the study of dynamic unconscious mental processes and refers to the clashing of forces such as will and counterwill, desire versus repression, and idea versus counteridea. The original definition of psychodynamics referred to the concept of repression. Repression is the process of forgetting information or an experience 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. Suppression does not actually work, instead it precedes the undesired action you were trying to avoid in the first place.
The last part of the chapter focused on the role of the ego. The ego is a developmental progression toward what is possible in terms of psychological growth, maturity, adjustment, prosocial interdependence, competence, and autonomous functioning. It unfolds along six stages: symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and autonomous. The role of the ego is to prevent and buffer against overwhelming levels of anxiety. Defenses mechanisms employed include denial and fantasy, projection, and rationalization and reaction formation.
The part of this chapter that I will remember down the road will be about repression and suppression as well as subliminal motivation. I found it interesting, yet somewhat obvious, that trying to suppress a thought can lead to an obsession with the suppressed thought. I also found it interesting that subliminal motivation do not actually lead to a direct behavior. These two examples prove that our unconscious mind plays a much larger role than we can even imagine.
Terms: psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, Dual-Instinct Theory, eros, thanatos, unconscious, preconscious, conscious, adaptive unconscious, subliminal motivation, suppression, repression, ego, ego development, ego defense
Chapter 14 is titled ”Unconscious Motivation”. I am excited to read through this chapter and find out what motivates me that I am unaware of. The chapter started off by walking through a hypnosis patient who has thoughts, feelings, and motivations that were implanted in his mind by his therapist which he thought were his own. This is part of the reason why I don’t want to be hypnotized. It then went on to discuss Freud and his psychoanalytic way of thinking. Freud’s hypothesis of what drives people to act is our impulses to satisfy our biological needs. He broke these biological needs into two groupings, life instincts and death instincts, in his dual-instinct theory, which is now not an accepted theory. Life instincts are things that we need to continue living and for the species to continue, which includes things such as eating, drinking, and sex. Our death instincts cause us to pursue activities which lead us towards rest, death being the ultimate accomplishment of this. Other, less drastic, death instinct behaviors include aggression, depression, alcoholism, and rivalry. Modern psychodynamic lines of thought make a distinction that Freud did not make. They call needs such as hunger and thirst physiological drives because they are necessary for our survival. However, feelings such as sex or aggression do not fit as easily in to this model because they are not essential for survival; therefore, they are categorized as wishes. This is very important to the motivational aspect of this because it creates contrast between what we currently have, our present state, and what we could have, our ideal state.
The next aspect examined in the chapter was the unconscious mind. I have always wondered how psychologists examined and measured the unconscious. It turns out that there are three different views of the unconscious; Freudian, Adaptive, and Implicit. Freudian unconscious holds that the unconscious mind acts as a storehouse for thoughts, experiences, memories, and unfulfilled dreams that are inaccessible by the conscious mind. Freud believed that dreams were the pathway that connected our unconscious mind with our conscious mind and utilized this to help clients. The adaptive unconscious model believes that our unconsciousness acts as an automatic pilot and makes the necessary adjustments needed while we perform various activities. For example, when I drive my car I don’t always focus on how much pressure I have on the gas pedal or even focus on staying between the lines, I just readjust automatically. Lastly, implicit motivation is our unconscious motivational forces that cause us to act. Because these are unbeknownst to us we cannot explain them to ourselves or to others. These are linked to our social needs and the emotions elicited by events that address meeting these needs. For example, if I have a wonderful conversation with a complete stranger I will experience positive emotions. The unconscious mind remembers these positive emotions and then motivates you to engage in the behavior again.
The last bit of the chapter discussed various aspects of Freud’s theories including the id, superego, and ego. The main thrust of much of Freud’s theories was the repression of the unconscious. By repressing he means filtering how we act and what we say before we put it out there for the world to see. However, much of this filtering is done subconsciously so we don’t actually know what our true desires were before we filtered them. Freud hypothesized that this was our ego (our balance between the id, which demands we indulge in our every desire, and our superego, which wants us to be a superhero) shuts out some of the demands of the id. The book then went on to discuss our ego, or our personality, and how it is developed and protected. It is developed by many factors including our life experiences, maturity level, how well we handle a task, and how well we cope with different situations. This is very much like our perceived self back in chapter 10 that we sought to preserve a constant sense of self by engaging in self-verifying behaviors or changing our values and beliefs do diminish the cognitive dissonance we may experience. Our ego acts in a similar way by having many built in defense mechanisms to allow us to maintain a constant ego and diminish dissonance. One defense mechanism is denial in which an individual will pretend like an event didn’t even happen. Another is humor with which an individual will not take themselves or their failures seriously and talk to others as though these bad events aren’t that important. In the end Freud and many of his theories were rethought, replaced, or thrown out for various reasons including the inability to verify them, new discoveries, and the poor predictability of his psychodynamic theory. Well, it was fun while it lasted, Freud.
One thing I will remember long after this class has passed is that almost all motivational theories arise out of some sort of disparity between our present self and our ideal self. Unless we realize this difference we cannot develop a plan, take actions to change ourselves, and monitor our progress. So basically, unless we realize this deficit we will not be motivated to do anything.
Terms: hypnosis, psychoanalytic, Freud, drive, life instincts, death instincts, dual-instinct theory, psychodynamic, Freudian unconscious, Adaptive unconscious, Implicit unconscious, social needs, unconscious, repression, ego, id, superego, self verify, cognitive dissonance, defense mechanisms, humor, denial
Chapter 14
This chapter was titled unconscious motivation and stemmed off of the teachings of Sigmund Freud. All of his teachings are not accepted but they laid the ground work for current beliefs. Freud and people who follow his teachings to the letter believe in the psychoanalytic perspective. This includes the dual-instinct theory. This theory states that motivation is driven by the two classes of biological instincts of Eros (life instincts) and Thanatos (death instincts). The two main drives or motivators would therefore be sex and aggression. However, this view was latter rejected because sex and aggression do not follow the cyclical pattern of homeostasis and was therefore classified as a psychological wish instead of a drive. The more recent view is the contemporary psychodynamic theory. This perspective has put Freud’s thoughts into actual tests and came up with four main core postulates that hold true. They include the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory.
The unconscious is hard to explore or examine because it is the part of our mind we are unaware of and don’t think about. Freud divided the mental life into three categories; the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. The Freudian unconscious was considered the biggest and most important part of our mental life and most unconscious thoughts were kept from the conscious because they were either anxiety-provoking or ego-threatening. The adaptive unconscious is the view that the brain can be put on “auto-pilot” and make its own decisions such as judging the environment, set goals, or initiate action without conscious thought. The unconscious is also responsible for implicit motivation which is all of the motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments that occur without our conscious knowledge.
Psychodynamics first came about because Freud observed that people often participated in things that they did not want to do. He then came up with the idea that people have in inner will that is continually working against a counter-will. This idea then led to the notion of repression. Repression is when a person forgets information and does so unintentionally. This happens because the ego’s psychodynamic counterforce finds the id’s demanding wishes to stressful to deal with. However, because people cannot remember their repressed experiences it is very hard to study. This then leads to suppression which are thoughts we try to forget and not think about. This is easier to study because it turns out no matter how hard you consciously try to forget something you can’t. In fact the more you try not to think about something, the more you do.
Ego psychology is the third postulate in the contemporary psychodynamic theory. It is what is thought of as the individual’s personality. The ego also goes through a specific set of stages that are considered ego development. They are the symbiotic phase, impulsive phase, self-protective phase, conformist phase, conscientious phase, and finally the autonomous phase. The ego is also responsible for one of the mind’s defense mechanisms. Throughout a period of time changes in internal or external reality take place and lead to anxiety, distress and depression. The ego acts as a buffer to these changes and tries to lesson or prevent the individual from feeling anxious, distressed or depressed.
Object relations theory is the study of how people go about satisfying their need for relatedness through their imagined or actual attachments to social and sexual objects. It focuses on how people develop mental representations of themselves and others. This is important because it has been found that the relationships we form as children affect and shape the relationships we make as adults. For example if one has a good healthy relationship with their parents they are likely to find and form a healthy relationship with a significant other. However, if a person’s parents were abusive it is most likely that this person will choose an abusive significant other as well.
The thing I am most likely to remember from this chapter is the concept of suppression. My parents always have told me to just not think about something when I am upset about that something. It has never helped. Now I know why and I don’t have to feel so bad when I can’t just get over something by simply “not thinking about it”.
Terms: psychoanalytic perspective, dual-instinct theory, wish, contemporary psychodynamic theory, the unconscious, Freudian unconscious, adaptive unconscious, implicit motivation, psychodynamics, repression, suppression, ego psychology, ego development, ego defense, object relations theory
Chapter 14 was about the unconscious motivations. Unconscious motivation occurs when you do not even know it. The chapter first talks about the psychodynamic perspective. This approach presents a largely deterministic and pessimistic image of human nature. It is deterministic because it holds the ultimate cause of motivation and behavior derives from biologically endowed and socially acquired impulses that determine our desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This theory also says that much of the motivation impulses that we feel as adults comes from the events that you has as a child. Basically, motivation comes across as something that happens to us rather than something we choose. It is an innate impulse. A theory arises from the psychodynamic perspective, which is the dual-instinct theory. Sigmund Freud founded the theory and talks about 2 significant instincts in which we live our lives by. The first one is life instincts, which refer to food, water, air, sleep, and other things that contribute to survival of an individual. The second type of instincts that are talked about is death instincts, which push the individual s toward rest, inactivity, and energy conservation. The psychodynamic theory has changed significantly after Freud.
Much of mental life is unconscious. Freud rejected the idea that consciousness was the essence of mental life and therefore divided the mind into three components which include the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Freud referred to the unconscious as the mental storehouse of inaccessible instinctual impulses, repressed experiences, childhood memories, and strong unfulfilled wishes and desires. The next thing that was talked about in chapter 14 is the adaptive unconscious. This runs on automatic pilot as it carries out countless computations and innumerable adjustments during acts such as tying your shoes, driving a car, or playing the piano. Implicit motivation refers to all those motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments that operate outside of a person’s conscious awareness and that are fundamentally distinct from self-report motives, emotions, attitudes, and judgments.
Psychodynamics is the next thing discussed in the chapter. The main thing they talked about was the clashing of will and counterwill. Freud talked about psychodynamics as concerned with the conflict between the id and the ego. On concept that is talked about in this section is suppression. It refers to the process of removing a thought by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate. Then they talk about ego development which is the healthy development that involves moving from an immature, socially dependent personality to one that is more mature and interdependent with others. Ego defense helps to reduce anxiety and depression. The last thing in the chapter talks about the objects relations theory, which is all about mental representations of self and others form in childhood that guide the person’s later social motivations and relationships.
The thing that I will remember years from now was the section on subluminal messaging. This was interesting to me because it took the concept of the unconscious and applied it to real-life scenarios. I will remember this because I am quite interested and entertained by hypnotic-type information.
TERMS: Psychodynamic Perspective; Unconscious Mind; Life Instincts; Death Instincts; Dual Instinct Theory; Adaptive Unconsciousness; Suppression; Ego Development; Ego Defense; Object Relations Theory
Chapter 14 discusses how we may know what we want, think, and feel but many times we will have little or no idea what is causing those wants, thoughts, or feelings. This chapter begins by explaining that how psychodynamic principles are different from psychoanalysis. Both look at unconscious mental processes but psychodynamics does not embrace the entire Freudian theories that go into psychoanalysis. The dual-instinct theory within psychodynamics discusses two types of bodily needs that influenced instincts. These instincts were the instinct for life and the instinct for death. The instinct for life was called Eros and it consists of instincts that work to maintain individual and collective life. Thanatos, the instinct for death, drives us to rest and save energy. These instincts provide the energy for behaviors but the ego is the direction of that energy. The ego is essentially how those instincts will manifest themselves. The text discusses that Eros is typically the instinct for sex while thanatos is typically aggression. Nowadays, the idea of the two as drives is being rejected and they are being called “wishes” because aggression and sex don’t fit very well into the concept of drive discussed earlier in the text.
The second topic discussed in the chapter was the unconscious. Freud’s research was focused on the unconscious processes. He researched the unconscious through hypnosis, dream analysis, free association, and much more. The text says that after being debated frequently, the idea that the unconscious makes up the majority of our mental life is now considered true. Freud had three areas of the conscious: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. The conscious was everything mentally that we are currently aware of. The preconscious is things that aren’t in the consciousness but can be easily pulled into the conscious. The unconscious is as the text put it, “the mental storehouse” of inaccessible childhood memories, strong wishes and desires, forgotten experiences, and impulses. Freud believed that the tension in the unconscious could be retrieved through dreams and that by analyzing those dreams, you can reveal the true thoughts and desires of a person.
An idea of the unconscious has developed, called the adaptive unconscious. The adaptive unconscious performs routine activities and can learn new motor skills. It was interesting that a man that had no memory, was still able to improve a motor skill even though he had no memory of having worked on that motor skill before. The text discusses that people are able to use their adaptive unconscious to make accurate judgments on a person after only a brief period of time. Another idea of the unconscious that was discussed was implicit motivation. Implicit motivations are all of the emotions, attitudes, motives, and judgments that occur without conscious awareness and cannot be self-reported. Implicit motivations are based off of emotional experiences. The last idea of the unconscious is subliminal motivation. It was thought that subliminal messaging worked to get people to “Drink Coke” or “Eat popcorn.” However, it has been found that the unconscious does not act on those messages. It is difficult to tell if the unconscious actually does understand the message. It was found, though, that it does not have an effect on emotions or memory, either.
The third topic discussed in chapter 14 is psychodynamics (again). Freud looked at how not everything people do is intentional. He said that conscious trying to do something sometimes must fight with unconscious counterwill. Psychodynamics refers to the constant battle between conscious and unconscious things. Some of the text examples were idea versus counteridea, desire versus repression, and excitation versus inhibition. Contemporary psychoanalysts discuss that the battle between the conscious and unconscious is constantly occurring and always will. Freud defined the central concept of psychodynamics as repression. Repression is what determines what will stay in the unconscious and what will come into the conscious. I like the textbook’s example of the unconscious being an overcrowded room where repression is the body guard that decides who gets to leave that room and come into the conscious. However, it is difficult to come to many conclusions because it is almost impossible to study repression. You are essentially asking someone to report on something that they don’t remember.
The second idea in psychodynamics is suppression. In a way, suppression is the opposite of repression. Repression is determining what will come into the conscious. Suppression is when a thought is already in the conscious and you are trying to put it back into the unconscious. The bad things is that when we try to suppress a thought, it comes back and typically increases in strength and awareness. The rebound effect occurs when the suppressed thought keeps coming back even after it’s relevance has passed.
The final concept that chapter 14 discusses is ego psychology. The ego develops through a process. It begins as an infant in symbiotic and goes through impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, and ends at autonomous. During the symbiotic stage, it is very immature, consists mostly of impulses, and is reliant on others. The final stage, autonomous, is self-motivating and self-regulating. It no longer relies on others. The text discusses how the ego is always vulnerable and has many defense mechanisms that work to protect the consciousness from too much anxiety. There are many different defense mechanisms. The basic ones are denial and fantasy because they try to protect the consciousness from reality. The fourth level is the most mature. This level includes sublimation and humor. Sublimation takes impulses and releases them through socially acceptable and beneficial ways. Humor allows someone to deal with difficult things in a social acceptable way. How well someone deals with the environment is called ego effectance. Ego effectance evolves as we do from crawling and walking to a better feeling of competence.
One other item the text discusses is the object relations theory. The text discusses how unconscious motivation began with physiological motivations of sex and aggression and developed into a more interpersonal idea. Interpersonal connectedness is central to the object relations theory. The name makes sense because it is how a person seeks a relationship (relations) with a person (object) to satisfy the need for relatedness.
With every scientific thought, idea, and theory there are criticisms. The text did discuss the criticisms of psychodynamic theory. The biggest criticism is that Freud’s ideas are not scientifically testable. As discussed with repression, you can’t ask someone to report on something they don’t remember. The second criticism is that it works really well for looking at past events but cannot be used to make predictions.
Years from now, I will still remember the general ideas of the unconscious including repression and suppression. I am the type of person that when I try to not think about something my next thought will be, “I learned that suppressing a thought doesn’t do any good because it will just keep coming back more intensely.” I’ll then probably give in to the thought – especially if it is like the suppression example in the text about the chocolate candy bar. I will look at my unconscious thoughts from spacing out in class and write them down. The big reason for this is that I usually have a lot on my plate and that if it did make its way into my consciousness, it is important and I will be worrying about it later. So, if I write it down, I will be able to put it on my list of things to do. Then, I will be more apt to accomplish it and worry less. If they aren’t practical (like having to do an assignment), I will focus on coming up with a solution or way to deal with it so that the thought doesn’t keep occurring like with suppression. Repression and suppression have everyday applications that impact my life greatly because of the many things that life throws at a person. I find the other information fascinating and I will remember it. However, since suppression and repression are easily applicable, I will be more apt to remember them many years down the road and actually use them.
Terms Used: Psychodynamic Principles, Psychoanalysis, Unconscious, Freudian, Dual-Instinct Theory, Instincts, Eros, Thanatos, Ego, Wishes, Conscious, Preconscious, Unconscious, Adaptive Unconscious, Implicit Motivation, Subliminal Motivation, Counterwill, Repression, Suppression, Rebound Effect, Ego Psychology, Defense Mechanisms, Ego Effectance, Object Relations Theory
Chapter fourteen discussed unconscious motivation and how psychoanalysis offers a chance to talk about the content of our own private subjective experience and why unwanted desires and fears make their home there. The first point that the author wanted to make clear is the difference between psychoanalytic and psychodynamic. Though at one time thought to be the same thing, psychoanalytic and psychodynamic are now considered two different mental processes. Psychoanalytic now refers to those practitioners who remain committed to most traditional Freudian principles, whereas the term psychodynamic refers to the study of dynamic unconscious mental processes. Freud’s Dual-Instinct Theory viewed motivation as regulated by impulse-driven biological forces. Freud believed there were as many biological drives as there were different bodily demands. He divided them into two main categories. These categories were instincts for life and instincts for death. Also, as a substitute of motivational principle, sex and aggression are conceptualized as psychological wishes, rather than as psychological drives. Today there are four postulates that define psychodynamic theory. These postulates include the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory. The unconscious postulate depicts much of the mental life. Though this has been disputed over the last 100 years, the conclusion that much of mental life is unconscious is now largely accepted as true. The fundamental premise of psychoanalysis is the division of mental life into what is conscious and what is unconscious. Freud rejected the idea that consciousness was the essence of mental life and he therefore divided the mind into three components: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. It was also determined that Freud’s concept of the dream was too limited. In addition to a venting function, dreams serve as neurophysiologic activity, memory consolidating, a stress-buffering or coping function, and a problem- solving function. The adaptive consciousness was also discussed in the chapter. The adaptive consciousness appraises the environment, sets goals, makes judgments, and initiates action, all while we are consciously thinking about something else. Implicit motivation was described in the chapter as 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, and judgments. Subliminal motivation was also discussed as a stimulus that is presented at a very weak energy level to an unsuspecting research participant. This however, was determined to not be processed in a way that would affect thoughts or behavior. Under psychodynamics, repression and suppression were discussed as ways of guarding the mind (repressions). It is the process of forgetting information or an experience by ways that are unconscious, unintentional, and automatic. On the other hand, suppression is the process of removing a thought by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate. Ego development was described as a developmental progression toward what is possible in terms of psychological growth, maturity, adjustment, pro-social interdependence, competence, and autonomous functioning. Ego defense is necessary since the ego is always in a state of vulnerability. Defense mechanisms exist in a hierarchical ordering from least to most mature, from least to most adaptive. Ego effectance concerns the individual’s competence in dealing with environmental challenges, demands, and opportunities. Object Relations Theory focuses on the nature and the development of mental representations of the self and others and on the affective processes associated with these representations. According to this theory, the quality of any one’s mental representations of relationships can be characterized by three chief dimensions: unconscious tone, capacity for emotional involvement, and mutuality of autonomy with others.
One of the most memorable things from the chapter that I will likely remember years from now is the story about the man who had his hippocampus removed because of the bad seizures he was having. As a result he had amnesia, and every time he went to the laboratory to practice his motor skills it was as if it was the first day he had ever been there every time he went. All the people were new and the place seemed new to him, however despite his memory lapses he still showed marked improvement of the motor skills each day. This showed the existence of an adaptive unconscious. I found this story to be so interesting. I try to picture myself in that mans condition and it seems so strange. I know I will remember this because I was really intrigued by the story, I find that I remember stories much better than facts. Ego defense mechanisms were also very interesting in that they describe how and why people act a certain way. The illustration in the book gave some very good examples and allowed me to examine myself to see the areas that I have a mature or immature defense mechanism.
Terms: unconscious motivation, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, Dual-Instinct Theory, motivation, instincts for life, instincts for death, wish, drive, unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, object relations theory, conscious, preconscious, unconscious, neurophysiologic activity, memory consolidating, adaptive consciousness, implicit motivation, subliminal motivation, repression, suppression, ego development, ego defense, ego effectance, Object Relations Theory
Chapter 14 talked about unconscious motivation. The first approach is the psychodynamic perspective. Psychoanalysis say the cause of motivation and behavior is from biology and social impulses that determine our desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Psychoanalysis think that personality changes little after puberty and motivational impulses of adults are from childhood events. Psychoanalysis focus on sexual and aggressive urges, conflict, anxiety, repression, and defense mechanisms. In the dual-instinct theory, there are two instincts, Eros and Thanatos. Eros is the life instinct, the instinct for water, food, air, and sleep. Thanatos is the death instinct, the instinct towards rest, inactivity, and energy conservation. Physiological drives are depicted as the homeostasis is disturbed and causes the need. The need leads to the drive, which causes goal-directed behavior. The goal-directed behavior leads to consummatory behavior and the return of homeostasis. Sex and aggression are psychological wishes.
Freud thought the unconscious is the mental storehouse of inaccessible instinctual impulses, repressed experiences, childhood memories, and strong unfulfilled wishes and desires. Freud also said that dreams vent unconscious tensions. Psychodynamics are metal processes that operate in parallel with one another. Freud thought that the mind was in conflict; idea versus counteridea, will versus counterwill, ad desire versus repression. Repression is forgetting information or an experience by ways of the unconscious, unintentional, and automatic. Suppression is removing a thought by ways that are conscious, intentional, and deliberate.
Freud said that the psychical energy originated in the id and the ego was the personality. Neo-Freudians said the ego developed through learning and experience. The ego has stages of development. In the symbiotic stage, the ego is extremely immature and is overwhelmed with impulses. The ego is taken care of by its caretaker not by itself. In the impulsive stage, external forces curb the ego's impulses not themselves. I the self-protective stage, self control happens when the child anticipates consequences and understands that rules exist. In the conformist stage, the ego internalizes group accepted rule and anxiety of group disapproval. The conscientious ego has a conscience, an internalized set of internal standards. In the autonomous ego, thoughts, plans. goals, and behaviors originated from the ego. The ego defends against anxiety and the ego develops to empower the person to interact more effectively and more proactively with its surroundings. The ego is vulnerable and so it has defense mechanism to protect it. There are denial, fantasy, projection, displacement, identification, regression, reaction formation, rationalization, anticipation, humor, and sublimation.
The object relations theory focuses on the nature and the development of mental representation of the self and others and the affective processes associated with these representation. Like how childhood metal representation of their caretakers and shown in their personality and into adulthood. The quality of one's mental representations of relationships are characterized under, unconscious tone (benevolent vs. malevolent), capacity for emotional involvement (selfishness/narcissism vs. mutual concern), and mutuality of autonomy with others. Research on the object relations theory are fundamental for the psychological need for relatedness.
The thing that I will remember about this chapter even years from now are the defense mechanisms. Even before this class, I have always been interested in them. At some point in our lives, or many times, we have all used defense mechanisms. Some knowing they are, and some unaware that they are. It is something we all do when we do bad on a test, loss of a loved one, a horrific accident, or some upsetting situation at work. We use them almost every day to protect ourselves.
TERMS: psychodynamic, dual-instinct theory, drive, wish, unconscious, repression, suppression, id, ego, ego development, defense mechanisms, object relations theory
Chapter 14 explained all the different aspects of unconscious motivation. The first key player in the discussion of unconscious motivation was Sigmund Freud. Freud proposed the idea of a dual-instinct theory. This theory stated that biological drive is what motivates us. He defined two classes of instincts, Eros, the life instincts, and Thanatos, the death instincts. Eros can be defined as what drives us to seek food, water, and other things necessary to life. Thanatos, are the instincts that make us rest.
Today, there are now four postulates in psychodynamic theory. The unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory. The unconscious postulate states that many of our thoughts and desires exist at an unconscious level. Following this theory, this explains why people do things for reasons they do not know or understand. Psychodynamics states that everyone has conflicting feelings that motivate them in two different directions. The study of how we develop and change from babies into responsible people is called ego development. The final postulate in the object relations theory which states that personality begins to develop very early in life and guides the choices we make as adults.
This chapter also discussed the differences between repression and suppression. Repression is more or less the process of forgetting. Because repression is all about not knowing, it is very hard to study. Suppression is easier to study, and doesn’t really work. In order to suppress something, you need to tell yourself not to think about it. By not telling yourself to think about it, you are in fact thinking about it.
Freud divided the unconscious into three parts, the id, ego and super ego. The id was where all physical energy originated. While a child is born with the id intact, the ego slowly develops throughout infancy.
Chapter 14 is about the hidden thoughts of the mind. We have many thoughts, feelings, and wants, but how do we know where they come from and what’s real or not? Chapter 14 is about the unconscious and the motivations that we have coming from biological and social impulses and not necessarily a matter of our choosing. The unconscious has negative thoughts or feelings such as repression, aggression, defense mechanisms, and anxiety that seem to be reflex in our actions and motivations. The chapter looks at (what I believe to be one of Freud’s actually reasonable ideas) psychoanalysis of the unconscious mind and the importance of psychodynamics.
Freud’s dual-Instinct Theory is also mentioned in the chapter. This theory states that the body controls energy levels through its natural instincts or biological drives. The instincts may be survival or life based behaviors or death based (depression).
Psychodynamics:
The constructs of Psychodynamics include 4 principles: the unconscious, ego development, object-relations theory, and psychodynamics. The unconscious is the majority of our mental life. Most of what we do, is not consciously thought about (indirect perception/shadow phenomena. The ego development is all about our basic impulses. Object-relations theory is the idea that who we are now or in the future is based on the care that we received as children. Our childhood essentially shapes our personality. It also helps to explain our future relationships and how we work to satisfy our social needs. Our unconscious is based on our experiences and those unconscious thoughts and past experiences effect our actions now and in the future. Though it is clear that our past/unconscious effects our future, it is difficult to actually test and truly know exactly how and how much it effects us. Finally, psychodynamics is the struggle that we have between our id and ego or conscious and unconscious thoughts.
Through psychosocial development, or the development of one’s personality through natural experiences in one’s surroundings, individuals may also learn about drives and how to manage sexual or aggression drives. However, when looking at the psychodynamic therapies sex and aggression are not really included as they are now excluding biological forces more and including cognitive factors in addition to interpersonal factors.
When it comes to the idea from this chapter that will stick with me most, it is safe to say that I am a big picture person. I will remember to intro that set the stage and had a fun story. It talked about the hypnotist and the newspaper. I will remember that we all have unconscious thoughts, feelings, and wants. I will further remember that our unconscious plays a HUGE role in our life! I was unaware (or unconscious-ha ha punny) or how big of a role it played. In reality, the ego it the giant, submerged base or the tiny floating iceberg we are able to see or conscious/aware of.
Terms: thoughts, feelings, wants, impulses, biological, social, motivations, unconscious, repression, aggression, defense mechanisms, anxiety, psychodynamics, psychoanalytic, Freud, mind, dual-instinct theory, depression, biological drives, instincts, life/survival behaviors, death behaviors, psychosocial development, sexual drives, personality development, interpersonal, cognitive factors, ego object-relations theory, conscious, hypnotist, indirect perception, shadow phenomena,id
Chapter 14 discusses the different aspects of unconscious motivation.
Unlike other motivations, we are unaware of unconscious emotion.
Psychodynamic perspective the first topic discussed, which presents human nature in a deterministic and pessimistic way. Whether we like it or not psychoanalysis is deterministic in that it holds ultimate case for motivation that motivation and behavior derive from biologically. Psychodynamics makes it possible to study topics such as repressed memories, fantasies, suicidal thoughts etc.
freud suggested that two classes of instincts that drive towards life and death- sex and aggression. The individual learns how to control and direct their behavior to manage their sexual and aggressive behavior.
The dual-instinct theory of motivation is representive of psychoanalysis, this focuses on psychological wishes and cognitive information processing.
There are four postulates that make up the contemporary psychodynamic theory. The first is that much of our mental life is unconscious. For example our thoughts and feelings and desires occur at an unconscious level.
The second is understanding that the motivation and emotion process are parallel to one another. They function and rely on one another.
People have feelings that motivate them to act and behave in a certain way.
The third postulate is who development. the ego must gain resources and strengths by being submerged in environments that allow them to progress and mature.
The ego thrives off of component
Healthy environments.
The 4th postulate is reliant on the understanding of mental representations of the self and others. This is what personality and life long life beliefs derive from. Being around positive mental models produces great results while being around negative mental models produces dysfunctional results and relationships.
The topic I found most interesting and that I feel will be most useful for the future is
Subliminal messaging, I think it's interesting how our minds are capable of reacting without us being aware.
Key terms: motivation, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic dual-instinct theory of motivation perspective, Cognitive information processing, ego development
Chapter 14 focuses on the mysterious unconscious mind, more specifically, Unconscious Motivation. The chapter covers the whole realm of unconscious motivation which includes but is not limited to The Psychodynamic Perspective, The Unconscious, Psychodynamics, and Ego Psychology. It’s also important to note that the author mentions Freud several times throughout the chapter along with many of his ideas.
The chapter kicks off with the Psychodynamic perspective and more specifically, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory or psychoanalysis. This particular approach is very traditional, as one might say. Psychoanalysis is quoted in the book as being able to retrieve the “secrets of the mind”. It’s based off the notion that all motivations and behaviors are caused from underlying biological coding as well as traits or wants that have been socially acquired by someone throughout their life. These biological and social factors are said to determine what our different desires, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors may be. These innate desires that we possess are not subject to change throughout the course of life, according to psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalysis tends to focus on the negative emotions or the negative individual traits one may possess. Psychodynamic is directly related to psychoanalysis. One could say that psychodynamic theory is the modern day version of psychoanalysis. They are basically the same thing, however, psychodynamic theory studies the dynamics of unconscious processes. Both theories study the unconscious, but those who choose to practice psychoanalysis are following strict Freudian guidelines. Psychodynamics does not embrace Freudian views.
Freud’s infamous dual-instinct theory devotes attention to various impulse-driven biological traits. These traits seem to ignite certain instincts within the human body. The instincts are separated into two different groups. The first group has been termed Eros, and is supposedly responsible for the life instincts. These instincts are concerned with keeping the organism (human) alive, driving the body to seek various resources that are necessary for survival. The next and last group of instincts is Thanatos. Thanatos has been coined by Freud as the death instincts. These instincts seemingly create discreet desires to rest and conserve energy. These behaviors are necessary if an injury is prevalent or if the organism has entered starvation mode.
Importantly, we must not forget that the psychodynamic theory is defined by four different postulates. These four postulates are the unconscious, psychodynamics, ego development, and object relations theory. The unconscious postulate is just that, the unconscious. It focuses on describing that the majority of our daily mental processes are made “unconsciously”. This is a hard concept to put into layman’s terms. I’ll try my best though. It’s as if the unconscious makes decisions for us automatically and then has an influence on our behavior, even though we have no idea it’s doing it. The psychodynamic postulate has already been discussed, so, we will move to the Ego development and Object relations theory. Ego development regards the process of someone moving from an immature state (younger person) to a mature state (older person). Lastly, object relations theory. Object relations theory states that mental representations of the individual and their acquaintances are created during childhood, thus influencing later social groups and types of relationships the individual is involved in.
The most interesting thing to me in this chapter was the section on the unconscious. I will remember most of this section forever, in part because it has been a previous interest of mine and another part because I have just revisited this interest by reading this chapter, solidifying it further in my memory banks. There seem to be many different views on the unconscious, which get touched on in this chapter. The major views are the Freudian unconscious, adaptive unconscious, and implicit motivation. Once again, it’s noted that most of our mental processes take place unconsciously. This is very odd to me. As I’m sitting here, writing this blog assignment, I feel very conscious and very unaware of my unconscious, but I’m being told that there is many things going on behind the scenes, in my unconsciousness. It’s a weird concept to get a grasp on. The adaptive unconscious supposedly reacts directly to the environment, setting various goals and starting different behaviors that are invisible to us. Implicit motivations are determined by emotional factors that are buried deep within our minds and are put in motion by various environmental stimuli. This is why this stuff will stick with me forever, because it’s incredible just how complex and mysterious our mind is… consciously and subconsciously.
Terms: Psychoanalysis, Psychodynamics, Dual-instinct theory, Instinctual behavior, The unconscious, ego-development, object relations theory, Eros and Thanatos, Adaptive unconscious, Implicit motivation, Conscious, Freudian perspectives