1. Psychodynamic Approaches Cont.
Psychology

2. Anxiety How to deal with anxiety? Brainstorm with your partner...
danger signal to the ego
can occur as neurotic anxiety (irrational impulses from the id)
How to deal with anxiety?
Brainstorm with your partner...

3. Defense Mechanisms
Anxiety is UNPLEASANT, so we develop defense mechanisms.
*Defense Mechanisms*: Unconscious strategies that people use to reduce anxiety by concealing its source from themselves or others.

4. Repression
*Repression: The primary defense mechanism in which unacceptable or unpleasant id impulses are pushed back into the unconscious.
Most direct method
Repressed memories may affect later behavior, be revealed through dreams

5. Defense Mechanisms
Regression: People behave as if they were at an earlier stage of development.
Ex: Boss has a temper tantrum when employee makes mistake.
Displacement: Expression of an unwanted feeling or thought is redirected from a more threatening powerful person to a weaker person.
Ex: Brother yells at younger sister after a teacher gives him a bad grade.

6. Defense Mechanisms
Rationalization: People provide self-justifying explanations in place of the actual, but threatening, reason for their behavior.
Ex: A college student who goes out drinking the night before a big test rationalizes his behavior by saying the test isn’t important.
Denial: People refuse to accept or acknowledge an anxiety-producing piece of information.
Ex: A student refuses to believe that he has failed a class.

7. Defense Mechanisms
Projection: People attribute unwanted impulses and feelings to someone else.
Ex: A man who is unfaithful to his wife feels guilty and suspects that his wife is unfaithful.
Sublimation: People divert unwanted impulses into socially approved thoughts, feelings, or behaviors.
Ex: A person with strong feelings of aggression becomes a soldier.

8. Defense Mechanisms
Reaction formation: Unconscious impulses are expressed as their opposite in consciousness.
Ex: A mother who unconsciously resents her child acts in an overly loving way toward the child.

9. Use of defense mechanisms
According to Freud....
We ALL use defense mechanisms to some degree
Some people use them so much that everyday living becomes difficult and it results in a mental disorder.

10. Evaluating Freud Many people accept these ideas: the unconscious
defense mechanisms
childhood roots of adult psychological difficulties
Criticisms against psychoanalytic theory:
Lack of scientific data
Lack of evidence
Now we know that changes in personality can occur in adolescence/adulthood
Freud seemed to view women as inferior to men
Freud observed a limited population