Chisom's Psychology Blog

Personality is an individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.

• The unconscious mind is filled with mostly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and emotions
• Can be retrieved through dream analysis or free association (saying whatever comes to mind)

• Oedipus complex: A boy's sexual desire for his mother and feelings of hatred towards his dad.
• Electra complex: A girl's desire for her father

Identification: Children cope with negative feelings by repressing them. Incorporate their parent values.

1. Repression: banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness. 
2. Regression: Person faced with anxiety retreats into a more infantile (childlike) psychosexual stage.
3. Reaction Formation: The ego switches unacceptable impulses to the opposite. Ex: People express purity because of anxiety feelings towards sex.
4. Projection: People disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.
5. Rationalization: People give self justifying explanations in place of the real reason for their actions.
6. Displacement: Shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person.