Rorschach and Freudians: Crash Course Psychology #21

Summary

This Crash Course episode delves into the complexities of personality, exploring the psychoanalytic and humanistic perspectives. It covers Freud's theory of the unconscious mind, the id, ego, and superego, and defense mechanisms like repression and projection. The episode also introduces neo-Freudian thinkers who challenged or expanded on Freud's ideas. On the humanistic side, it discusses Maslow's hierarchy of needs and Rogers' person-centered approach, emphasizing personal growth and self-actualization.

Takeaways

• 🖼️ Hermann Rorschach developed the Rorschach inkblot test to explore personality by interpreting what subjects saw in inkblots.
• 🧠 Rorschach was inspired by Carl Jung's word association method and aimed to understand the unconscious mind through projections onto inkblots.
• 🤔 The Rorschach test's validity is debated; some see it as a useful diagnostic tool, while others criticize it as unscientific and unreliable.
• 👨‍🏫 Sigmund Freud introduced the psychoanalytic perspective, emphasizing the role of the unconscious mind in shaping personality.
• 🗻 Freud's theory of the mind includes the id, ego, and superego, representing the internal conflict between primal urges and societal controls.
• 🚼 Freud proposed psychosexual stages of development, suggesting unresolved conflicts in these stages could lead to fixations.
• 🛡️ Defense mechanisms like repression, projection, and denial are part of personality, according to Freud.
• 🌱 Neo-Freudians like Karen Horney and Carl Jung expanded on Freud's theories, with Horney focusing on non-sexual motivations and Jung on the collective unconscious.
• 🌟 Humanistic theory, represented by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, emphasizes human potential, self-actualization, and the importance of a growth-promoting environment.
• 📊 The shift towards empirical standards in psychology led to new methods for measuring personality, moving away from purely theoretical models.

Q & A

What was Hermann Rorschach's approach to understanding personality?

Hermann Rorschach used inkblots to prompt patients to project their personal associations onto the shapes, thereby revealing aspects of their personality.

How did Carl Jung's use of word association influence Rorschach?

Rorschach was inspired by Jung's word association method to access the unconscious mind and applied a similar concept using inkblots instead of words.

What is the controversy surrounding the Rorschach test?

The controversy lies in the test's reliability and scientific validity, with some clinicians finding it helpful and others deeming it unscientific and unreliable.

What are the two broad ways psychologists study personality?

Psychologists study personality by understanding differences in specific characteristics and by looking at how all the various parts of each person mesh together as a whole.

What is the psychoanalytic perspective of personality as introduced by Sigmund Freud?

The psychoanalytic perspective, as introduced by Freud, suggests that personality is largely shaped by the conflict between our impulses and our restraint to control those urges, involving the id, ego, and superego.

What are the three parts of the mind according to Freud's theory?

Freud's theory divides the mind into the id, ego, and superego, which interact to shape our personality.

What is the id according to Freud's psychoanalytic theory?

The id is the unconscious, primitive, and instinctive part of the personality that seeks immediate gratification of desires, primarily related to sex and aggression.

How does the superego function in Freud's theory?

The superego represents the moral component of the personality, acting as a conscience and striving for perfection while often being in conflict with the id.

What are some of the defense mechanisms Freud proposed, and how do they relate to personality?

Freud proposed defense mechanisms such as repression, regression, reaction formation, projection, rationalization, displacement, and denial, which individuals use to cope with anxiety and are indicative of their personality.

What is the significance of the psychosexual stages in Freud's theory of personality development?

Freud's psychosexual stages, including oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages, are significant as they represent the developmental phases where unresolved conflicts can lead to fixations and influence adult personality.

How do neo-Freudian theorists like Karen Horney and Carl Jung differ from Freud's original theories?

Neo-Freudian theorists like Horney and Jung diverged from Freud's emphasis on sex and aggression, focusing more on social tensions, the collective unconscious, and the potential for personal growth and self-actualization.

What is the humanistic perspective on personality, and how does it contrast with the psychoanalytic perspective?

The humanistic perspective, represented by theorists like Maslow and Rogers, emphasizes the inherent goodness of people and their potential for growth and self-actualization, contrasting with the psychoanalytic focus on unconscious conflicts and early childhood experiences.

What are the three conditions Carl Rogers believed were necessary for a healthy self-concept?

Carl Rogers believed that genuineness, acceptance, and empathy were the three conditions necessary for fostering a healthy self-concept and personal growth.

Outlines

00:00

🖼️ The Rorschach Inkblot Test and Personality Theories

The paragraph introduces the Rorschach inkblot test, developed by Swiss psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach, which aimed to reveal personality traits through subjects' interpretations of inkblots. It discusses Rorschach's inspiration from Carl Jung's word association experiments and his belief in the projection of personal associations onto ambiguous shapes. The test's controversial nature is acknowledged, with some considering it a helpful diagnostic tool and others deeming it unscientific. The paragraph also delves into the complexity and contestability of personality as a concept, mentioning other influential psychologists like Freud, Jung, Maslow, and Rogers. It outlines two broad ways psychologists study personality: understanding differences in specific characteristics and examining how these characteristics combine to form an individual's unique identity. Freud's psychoanalytic perspective is introduced, emphasizing the role of the unconscious mind and the internal conflict between the id, ego, and superego in shaping personality.

05:02

🛡️ Defense Mechanisms and Psychosexual Development

This paragraph explores Sigmund Freud's concept of defense mechanisms, which the ego employs to protect itself from anxiety caused by internal conflicts. It describes various defense mechanisms such as repression, regression, reaction formation, projection, rationalization, displacement, and denial, illustrating how these mechanisms contribute to an individual's personality. Freud's theory of psychosexual development is also detailed, outlining the five stages—oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital—through which he believed personalities are formed. The paragraph further discusses how unresolved conflicts at each stage can lead to fixations and how some of Freud's ideas, like the Oedipus complex, have been controversial. It mentions neo-Freudian thinkers who built upon or diverged from Freud's theories, such as Karen Horney, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler, each offering different perspectives on personality development and the role of sex, aggression, social tensions, and the collective unconscious.

10:03

🌟 Humanistic Theory and Self-Actualization

The final paragraph shifts focus to humanistic theories of personality, which emphasize the inherent goodness of people and their potential for growth and self-actualization. Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs and his concepts of self-actualization and self-transcendence are highlighted, with Maslow's study of healthy, creative individuals revealing a common thread of striving to reach their full potential. Carl Rogers' person-centered approach is also discussed, emphasizing the importance of genuineness, acceptance, and empathy in fostering a healthy self-concept. The paragraph contrasts these positive, growth-oriented theories with the more conflict-focused psychoanalytic theories, noting the challenges in measuring personality traits and the evolution of empirical standards in psychology. It concludes with a teaser for the next episode, which will explore more modern approaches to understanding and measuring personality.

Keywords

💡Rorschach test

The Rorschach test is a psychological test in which subjects' perceptions of inkblots are used to gather insights about their personality characteristics. In the video, it is introduced as a method developed by Hermann Rorschach to understand personality by interpreting what people see in inkblots, suggesting that these perceptions 'project' personal associations.

💡Psychoanalytic perspective

This perspective, championed by Sigmund Freud, suggests that personality is largely shaped by unconscious mental processes. The video explains how Freud's theories, including the unconscious mind and defense mechanisms, form the basis for understanding personality development and its underlying conflicts.

💡Id, Ego, and Superego

Freud's structural model of the psyche divides it into three parts: the id (unconscious, instinctive), ego (reality-oriented, mediating), and superego (moral conscience). The video uses the iceberg analogy to illustrate how these components interact, with the ego serving as a referee between the id's primal urges and the superego's moral restrictions.

💡Defense mechanisms

Defense mechanisms are unconscious strategies used by the ego to protect itself from anxiety. The video lists several, such as repression, projection, and denial, explaining how they operate and how they contribute to an individual's unique personality.

💡Psychosexual stages

Freud proposed that personality development occurs through a series of psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. The video describes how unresolved conflicts at each stage can lead to fixations, impacting adult personality.

💡Neo-Freudians

Neo-Freudians are theorists who built upon or revised Freud's ideas. The video mentions how some, like Karen Horney and Carl Jung, disagreed with Freud's emphasis on sex and aggression, proposing alternative views on personality development.

💡Humanistic theory

Humanistic theory focuses on the inherent goodness of humans and their potential for self-actualization. The video contrasts this optimistic view with the psychoanalytic perspective, highlighting theorists like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers who emphasize personal growth and the fulfillment of potential.

💡Self-actualization

Self-actualization, a concept introduced by Maslow, refers to the drive to realize one's full potential and capabilities. The video explains how Maslow's hierarchy of needs posits self-actualization as the highest level of psychological development, achievable once basic and psychological needs are met.

💡Inferiority complex

Alfred Adler, a neo-Freudian, is known for his concept of the inferiority complex, which suggests that feelings of inferiority can significantly influence personality and behavior. The video touches on how Adler's focus on social factors and the striving for superiority differ from Freud's sexual and aggressive drives.

💡Empirical standards

Empirical standards emphasize the importance of measurable and observable evidence in psychological research. The video suggests that as these standards gained prominence, they challenged some of the earlier, more speculative theories of personality, leading to new approaches in the field.

Highlights

Hermann Rorschach developed a test based on inkblots to understand personality.

Rorschach was inspired by childhood games and Carl Jung's word association method.

The Rorschach test measures how individuals project their associations onto inkblots.

The test's validity is debated, with some considering it unscientific and others a helpful diagnostic tool.

Personality is defined as enduring patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

Psychologists study personality through differences in characteristics and how they combine.

Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory posits the existence of the unconscious mind.

Freud's theory includes the id, ego, and superego as key components of personality.

Defense mechanisms like repression, projection, and denial are part of Freud's theory.

Freud's psychosexual stages include oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages.

Neo-Freudians like Karen Horney and Carl Jung expanded on Freud's theories with different emphases.

Alfred Adler focused on social tensions and the inferiority complex in personality development.

Humanistic theory, represented by Abraham Maslow, emphasizes personal growth and self-actualization.

Carl Rogers' person-centered perspective requires genuineness, acceptance, and empathy for personality growth.

Empirical standards in psychology led to new ways of measuring personality.

Transcripts

What do you see in this image?

A scary face?

A couple of squirrels fighting?

Or this one?

A squashed frog?

Or tumbling poodles?

A bleeding bat?

Hermann Rorschach wants to know.

Eh, he wanted to know–he's dead now

He believed that your answers, what you saw in the ink, said something about your personality.

Rorschach was a Swiss psychoanalyst who, in his youth, was fascinated

by the childhood game of making pictures out of inkblots called klecksography

As an adult, Rorschach was intrigued with Carl Jung's use of word association

in attempts to access patients' unconscious minds.

Jung would ask patients to say the first thing that came to mind

when they saw words like

"dead"

or "window"

or "abuse"

and Rorschach thought,

"Why not do the same thing with amorphous blobs?"

So he'd show a patient a series of ink blots and record what they saw

to determine how people "projected" their personal associations onto random shapes.

Assuming there are important differences between those who saw

dancing bunnies versus those who saw severed, screaming heads,

he drew conclusions about a patient's personality.

And yeah, this was controversial.

Some clinicians still do think that Rorschach test can be a helpful diagnostic tool

when used correctly and cautiously.

But others remain critical of the test, calling them unscientific and unreliable.

It's even been called "the Dracula of psychological tests"

because no one has been able to drive a stake through its heart yet.

So I guess this is that part when I apologize for the set design.

Sorry.

But love it or hate it, the Rorschach test is one of the many methods

psychologists have used in an ongoing quest to understand personality.

And of all of the concepts we cover in this course, personality is one of the most complex,

and one of the most contested.

This is where we bring in the household names.

Not just Rorschach, but Freud, and Jung,

as well as other influential thinkers like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers.

It's where some of the most familiar concepts in early psychology come into play,

ones that people with even passing knowledge of the field have heard of:

the ego, the Oedipus complex, penis envy, inferiority complexes, even the idea of self-help itself.

Whether you've heard of these as hard facts or simply as historical curiosities,

these notions represent the starting points for some of the biggest and most compelling questions in the field.

But they all come back to the same question:

What makes us who we are?

♪ [Crash Course intro] ♪

We always gotta start out with defining things. Personality. You think you know what that means,

but we're gonna define it as your distinctive and enduring characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

And psychologists typically study personality in two broad ways:

1. By trying to understand differences in specific characteristics,

like introvertedness versus extrovertedness.

And 2. By looking at how all the various parts of each person mesh together as a whole.

Basically, what are our characteristics and how do they combine to make me me and you you?

And guess what?

As you might expect, there are a number of competing perspectives on personality theory.

4 to be exact.

The first, and one of the most influential has been the psychoanalytic perspective,

first championed by our coke-loving, cigar-chewing friend, Sigmund Freud.

It was through his clinical observation of patients that

Freud came to theorize the existence of the unconscious.

For Freud, the unconscious represented a vast reservoir

of often unacceptable and frequently hard-to-tolerate thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories.

Usually involving a lots of weird sex stuff.

You gotta point out, by the way,

that the Freudian unconscious is a different thing

from the contemporary idea of non-conscious information processing

when we're, like, processing information that we don't know we're processing.

Freud's thing is, you know, a lot more titillating,

but, the non-conscious is like empirically validated a real thing that we study now.

Anyway, Freud believed that our personalities are largely shaped by the enduring conflict

between our impulses to do whatever we feel like, and our restraint to control those urges

between our pleasure-seeking aggressive urges and our inner social control over them.

He theorized our minds as being divided into three interacting parts—

the id, the ego, and the superego—

that provide the battleground for this internal conflict that shaped our personalities.

You can think of the classic Freudian mind like this iceberg.

It's mostly hidden, and that big underwater chunk is your id:

your unconscious, primitive, and instinctive self.

Freud thought the id was all about sex and agression,

the so-called pleasure principle of immediate gratification.

To him, infants were all id.

That's in part why babies freak out when they don't get a snack like "Right now!",

instead of just taking a deep breath for a second.

For that matter, a lot of the off-the-wall celebrities and dictators are big ids.

The id's like a honey badger—they don't care.

Eventually kids develop the ego part of their personality,

that largely conscious component that's charged with dealing with reality.

The ego works on getting the id what it wants in a reasonable, timely, and realistic way

without, you know, getting arrested or beaten up.

The final aspect to form in Freud's personality trifecta is the superego,

the Jiminy Cricket of voice of our conscience that represents not just the real, but also the ideal.

As you can imagine, the superego and the id don't much like each other,

and it's up the the Referee Ego to sort everything out.

And it's hard to be the ego.

Freud believed that anxiety comes in part from the ego getting all stressed out about losing control

over the id and superego.

So he proposed that our egos use a series of indirect and unconscious defense mechanisms

to protect themselves from this fear.

And each person's particular configuration of defense mechanisms, in turn,

makes up part of what we're referring to here as personality.

You might already have heard of repression,

the defense that's thought to work by banishing any thoughts, feelings, or memories

that cause anxiety to the unconscious.

And repression, Freud thought, allows our many other defense mechanisms to do their work.

Regression, for example, involves a retreat to a more infantile psychosexual stage,

like, when a second-grader sucks their thumb when they're nervous.

Reaction formation is kinda like passive-aggression.

It involves flipping unacceptable impulses like desire to punch someone in the face

with their opposites, like offering them cookies with a fake smile.

Projection is when you disguise your own impulses by calling them out in other people,

and rationalization is just what it sounds like, when we offer explanations and excuses for our behaviors

instead of getting to the real unconscious reasons.

Like, "Yeah, well, I ate six hot pockets at the party just 'cause I was being social!"

Displacement is the typical you got yelled at by your boss, and then came home and yelled at your roommate.

It's when you shift your impulses toward a less threatening victim.

And then there's denial,

which is when you refuse to believe or sometimes even perceive some kind of painful reality.

Like, "No, my boyfriend isn't cheating on me."

and "I'm not gonna fail that class,"

and "These pants TOTALLY STILL FIT!"

Our defense mechanisms, as theorized by Freud, are pretty tied in with our personalities.

Someone who engages in a lot of denial and not as much projection would probably look and act

a lot differently from someone who chronically does the reverse.

Still, Freud was convince our personalities form in our first few years as we pass

through a series of five psychosexual stages,

essentially during which the id seeks to get its rocks off in different pleasure-sensitive areas.

Infants start out in the oral stage because they get pleasure from eating.

From there, a child enters the anal stage, focused on peeing and pooping;

then on to the phallic stage, as they discover their boy and girl bits.

It was during this stage that Freud believed the infamous Oedipus complex reared up,

characterized by a boy experiencing a form of sexual desire toward his mother

and a parallel jealousy or hatred of his father.

Freud called from about age 6 to puberty the latency stage, marked by dormant sexual feelings

which eventually evolved into the fifth and final, adult, genital stage of mature sexual interests.

Now, he believed if certain conflicts weren't resolved in any of these given stages,

a person could develop a fixation, or a lingering focus on a younger stage.

Like if a baby was overfed or neglected and underfed, they might be fixate in the oral stage;

an orally fixated adult might seek oral gratification through excessive eating or chain smoking

and may develop issues with dependency or aggression.

Now of course, not everyone was on board with Freud's model of personality development.

Many of his ideas were controversial and remain so to this day;

even most modern psychoanalysts now dispute the whole Oedipal thing.

In fact, while many pioneering psychoanalysts built on Freud's theories -- these are so-called neo-Freudians --

many disagree with lots of his ideas, and instead either emphasize the role of the conscious mind

or focus on non-sexual motivations.

Take Karen Horney, for instance,

a German-born psychoanalyst credited with founding feminist psychology.

She wasn't down with the idea that our personalities are primarily shaped by sex and aggression.

She especially rejected the notion of penis envy,

which she thought was more than a little insulting to women.

She actually proposed that womb envy may occur as much in men who were envious they can't give birth.

She encouraged patients to take charge of their own mental health and engage in self-help and analysis,

believing people were often able to sorta be their own therapists.

We mentioned Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychoanalyst.

Jung was a friend and disciple of Freud, but eventually, theoretical differences took them in different directions.

He agreed that the unconscious was a powerful force,

but he believed it was more than just a holding cell for repressed sexual thoughts and feelings and memories.

Jung believed sexual drive was only part of the equation,

and that we're also driven by a need to achieve a full knowledge of self.

He also suggested that we have a collective unconscious,

a group of shared images or archetypes that are universal to all humans,

and this was why different cultures share similar myths and imagery.

Vienna-born Alfred Adler was another former collaborator of Freud who struck out on his own.

Adler agreed with Freud that childhood was important,

but he emphasized ongoing social tensions, not sexual ones, as most crucial to the formation of personality.

He coined the term "inferiority complex"

and believed that much of our adult behavior is linked to childhood struggles with feeling inferior.

In the end, not all of their their theories have endured,

but Freud and his contemporaries were key to the evolution of psychoanalytic theory

because they explored ways in which our mental life and personality

may be submerged beneath the veil of consciousness.

But the psychoanalytical approach

is only one perspective on what makes us who we are.

Rather than focuseing on how messed up we can be,

humanistic theorists focus on the basic goodness of people and how they strive to achieve their full potential.

In other words, they believe in the potential for personal growth.

Abraham Maslow is one of these guys;

he believed we're motivated by that pyramid-shaped hierarchy of needs

and that once basic needs are met, like food and shelter and whatnot, we're able to achieve higher goals.

Maslow believed the top two rungs of that pyramid are where the real growth in personality takes place.

First, with self-actualization, or the need to live up to our full, unique potential,

and then with self-transcendence, or finding meaning and purpose and identity beyond ourselves.

Rather than study only troubled patients,

Maslow look at healthy, creative types

with whom he discovered this common thread of self-actualization.

Bolstered by a secure sense of self,

these people were more sure of themselves, more compassionate, caring, driven,

and uneasy around cruelty and pettiness.

American psychologist, Carl Rogers, was another pioneer of humanistic theory,

who proposed a person-centered perspective on personality.

Like Maslow, Rogers believed we're all basically good eggs

so long as we're nurtured in a growth-promoting environment that he thought required three conditions.

The first is genuineness.

Just the idea that parents and teachers should be transparent and open with their feelings.

Then, there's acceptance; when folks are accepting,

people around them won't be afraid to be themselves or make mistakes.

And the third requirement, according to Rogers,

is empathy, or the ability to share others' feelings and reflect their meanings.

Rogers thought of these traits as the nutrients required to make a personality grow into a healthy self-concept,

that mix of thoughts and feelings that answer the fundamental question, who am I?

So, psychoanalytic and humanistic theories of personality were and are incredibly influential,

even if one was a little sorted, and the other, a little sunshine and rainbows.

But they didn't always lend themselves to clear measurement,

and as empirical standards began to take hold in the mid-20th century, this became a major concern.

How did we deal with that? Well, tune in next week when we explore some of the newer ways

of looking at personality and how we started measuring it.

Today, you learned about personality theory and two of its early schools of thought:

the psychoanalytic theory, including Freud's three-part model of the mind and defense mechanisms,

along with the neo-Freudians.

You also learned about the humanistic theory,

including Maslow's model of self-actualization and Roger's person-centered perspective.

Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course,

especially to all of our Subbable subscribers

who make Crash Course possible for all people to love and enjoy for free.

To find out how you can become a supporter, just go to subbable.com/crashcourse.

This episode was written by Kathleen Yale and edited by Blake de Pastino,

and our consultant is Dr. Ranjit Bhagwat.

Our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins.

The script supervisor is Michael Aranda, who is also our sound designer,

and the graphics team is Thought Cafe.