Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is a Psych Exam Review. In this video we're going to start looking
at the psychoanalytic approach to understanding personality. So we'll start with the founder of
psychoanalysis and this is Sigmund Freud, probably the most famous name in psychology. Freud lived
from 1856 to 1939 and he was a medical doctor who specialized in nerve disorders and he began
to think that maybe some of the problems that his patients had were related to psychological factors
rather than purely physiological factors. So this led him to come up with a number of theories about
how the mind might be operating and it's important to remember that these were mostly theoretical;
they were based on his own personal experience and the experiences of his patients, who mostly came
from the upper class in Vienna which is where Freud spent most of his life. So an important
part of psychoanalytic theory is the idea of the unconscious or the Freudian unconscious,
to separate it from sort of modern use of the term unconscious. So the Freudian
unconscious was the idea that we have this repository of desires, wishes, and fears,
and these are things that can cause us anxiety. So we keep them out of mind and keep them hidden away
in the unconscious. So the idea was if somebody was experiencing anxiety, this related to their
unconscious. That somehow they weren't managing the unconscious properly and so the goal of
psychoanalysis was to uncover what it was that was causing the anxiety in the unconscious and
resolve any of these conflicts in order to reduce anxiety. So the three main approaches that would
be used by a psychoanalyst to uncover the contents of the unconscious were dream interpretation,
so this is the idea that the unconscious reveals itself in dreams and it does this in sort of a
coded manner. So we have this idea I mentioned in a previous video on manifest content and latent
content. So the manifest content is what you actually dream about, but the latent content
is the hidden message of the dream and what it really means and what in your unconscious was
causing you to have that particular dream. So a psychoanalyst would analyze and interpret the
dreams of patients and they would also use free association. And this is probably what most people
think of when they think of psychiatry or they think about sort of a psychoanalyst doing work;
they imagine somebody laying on a couch and sort of talking about all sorts of things. So the idea
of free association was that the patient just talks freely and the patterns of their speech
and the way that they move from one topic to another might reveal something about their
unconscious. So the psychoanalyst's job was to sit and listen carefully and take notes
and look for these clues to what was hidden away in the patient's unconscious. And lastly,
we have the idea of a parapraxis. So Freud thought that these revealed contents of the
unconscious. So what a parapraxis is, this comes from the Greek for contrary action,
it's the idea that you intend to say one thing and you accidentally say something similar and
that the mistake that you've made somehow reveals something about your unconscious.
So you probably know this better as a "Freudian slip". So the old joke is a Freudian slip is when
you mean to say one thing and you accidentally say your mother. Ok, so let's take a look at
Freud's structure of personality. He thought of personality as having three main parts; the id,
the ego and the super-ego. So the idea of each of these parts is the id referred to the animal
drives of personality, right? So these are sort of the raw emotional forces that are driving
your personality and that these are driven by this psychic energy which he called libido. And
the id operates on what Freud called the pleasure principle. So it's quite simple
it's just that if something is pleasurable then the id is pushing you to want to do it.
Now of course we can't just do things that are pleasurable whenever we want. We can't just eat
or mate or do anything we want just because it might be pleasurable, right? There's constraints
on our behavior and so this brings us to the next part of our personality which is the ego. And the
ego's job is to constrain the id. So what the ego does is it tries to integrate us into society. It
says well, we can't just do whatever we want, we have to get along with other people. We have
to maintain relationships and integrate into a functioning society and that necessarily means
restraining the id sometimes. So the idea of the ego is that we want to maintain relationships,
we want to get along with other people, and we have to live in a society. If everybody's
just driven by their id then society will fall apart. So we need to integrate ourselves into
some form of society and get along with others and so this means that rather than operating on
the pleasure principle, what the ego does is it operates on the reality principle.
It sort of considers the consequences of things and how you can manage to maintain
your relationship with other people rather than just doing what's pleasurable. And then lastly
we have the idea of the superego and the superego is sort of exerting itself upon the ego. And the
superego is like the ideal version of you that you could be, right? It's all the lessons that
you learned from teachers and parents telling you about what a perfect or ideal person is and
how that person would behave. So the superego is the ideal and the idea, it's sort of the ideal
of morality and virtue, right? It's the perfect person that unfortunately you can never really
be. You're certain to fail in terms of reaching this ideal and your failure could provoke anxiety.
So well in sort of modern approaches to psychiatry we don't really use terms like id,
and ego, and superego very much anymore but the underlying concept is that there's different
drives to people's personalities. There's sort of these sub-personalities that are pushing and
pulling and they conflict with one another. Your id wants one thing and your ego wants another and
your superego is this ideal that you'll never really live up to and that's going to cause
you some anxiety. So you have to learn how to manage that and that's something that, you know,
people are often very dismissive of Freud now, not scientific and there are a number of problems with
Freud's theories. But a lot of these underlying ideas here that, that you're not one person with,
you know, sort of single-minded goals that you just go out and achieve. But rather you're you're
this push and pull of multiple forces and you experience that and it does cause anxiety is
very relatable and I think most people can understand where this theory comes from
and how it feels. We can imagine ourselves in situations where we can say "oh that feels like,
you know, that would be my id and this would be my superego". So we could imagine something like;
here's a scenario for remembering these different parts. You could say, let's imagine that you were
throwing a surprise birthday party for one of your closest friends. And so your other friends
have all gathered at somebody's house and you're preparing for this party. Now let's say you've
been really busy that day and, you know, you've been running around trying to get things ready
for this party and you haven't had a chance to eat anything and your stomach is growling. You're
really hungry and you're setting things up and you realize; there you are alone in the kitchen with
this amazing chocolate cake just sitting in front of you. And in this situation you can imagine
your id is saying you know "eat it", you know, pleasure principle "that's going to taste amazing,
there's nobody here, just, you know, grab some of that cake and eat it right now while you can". But
of course, hopefully you don't actually do this because you have your ego stepping in
and saying "you know what, that's going to ruin your friendships. That's a really bad idea. Yeah,
sure it will be pleasurable and, you know, you're hungry, it's chocolate cake, you know,
that seems perfect. The more important thing is that you maintain your relationship. You don't
want to get, you'll be shunned by your friends if you do this. They come in and there's just,
you know, a piece of cake the size of your hand missing. They're gonna know that was you. You're
going to lose your friendship. You're going to be an outcast from this group and it's not worth it,
right? Think about the reality of the situation." And then thirdly you can imagine your superego is
sort of like, you know, thinking about all the problems in the world and the fact that
there are people who are starving and should you really be having this frivolous birthday party
to celebrate? None of you really need this cake anyway. Maybe you should donate to people who
are truly starving and you should be, you know, rather than celebrating somebody's birthday you
should be out helping others or doing some sort of ideal and virtuous behaviors, right? So that's the
way you can think about these three forces in, you know, a sort of silly example but you can probably
find other examples in your life and that's a good way to review these concepts. Ok, and this
brings me to a final point which is about Freud's terminology. So as I said, people don't really use
the terms id, ego, superego anymore and it sort of feels like you're learning a new language
when you have to talk about psychoanalysis. And many students complains "why do we have
to learn all these new terms?" Why do I have to keep track of which one is the id and the ego,
I mean nobody even talks about this anymore?". It's like it's stupid, it's a waste of time,
and this brings us to the point that Freud didn't intend this. He wasn't trying to create this whole
separate vocabulary for describing life, right? And so this is based on some writings of Bruno
Bettelheim and Bettelheim wrote that Freud's legacy has been misinterpreted in many ways
because of this separate vocabulary. Because it separates the emotional connections that people
would have had reading the original writings of Freud and this is because Freud wrote in
German. He didn't write with these terms the ego, superego, id, these come from Greek and Latin and
they're sort of an intellectual language that's used to talk about psychoanalysis. But they're
not how Freud actually described them himself. So when Freud was writing in German he didn't write
about the "ego", he wrote about the "ich", right? And this is just German for "I". And it's sort of
the sense that your ego is the part of you that sort of feels most like you, right? And then you
have your superego which again he didn't use that term "superego" he wrote about the "uber Ich".
And this was simply the "over I", right? And it's sort of that virtuous ideal that's always above
you, right? That you can never reach, right? And you know if you read that in German as
"uber Ich" just it makes more sense. And lastly the id again he didn't use the term "id" he used
"Es" and this is a neuter pronoun for it, right? And it's often used to refer to children and so
the idea is it's sort of this childlike simple "it", right? This thing that's pushing your
behavior it's these animal drives, right? They don't really feel like you or I, right? And so I
think it's important to think about the emotional connections that people who are reading Freud's
writings originally in German would have felt with this terminology. And I know now it feels
like a separate language but it really shouldn't be. It's supposed to be a simple way of thinking
about how the mind works and it supposed to be relatable to everyday life experience. And I think
we'll see more of that when I talk about some of other theories in the future. So in the next video
we'll take a look at Freud's psychosexual stages of development. I hope you found this helpful,
if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!