History of Theories in Psychology (PSYC 493)

Psychoanalysis has had a synergistic momentum in the past few decades in my opinion. Through movies, advertising, art, music, fashion, the treatment of human bodies with piercings and tattoos and several other areas where something has been created because of something “unconscious” was inspiring. Luckily for unconscious (if it were a person) he is in luck because today’s culture is much more accepting of him. Why hide him when he can lead to the next best thing? Also even if it isn’t the next great thing it can at least be chalked up as artful, unique, or brave for allowing him to come out and entertain us. There is much more use of unconscious today then there ever has been, and people do not realize it. because of that there is the hope, or nightmare, that people who do not know that they are getting manipulated without knowing it, by someone else who knows how to tap into the mass majority of unconscious desires, gets taken advantage of. Am I saying that psychologist are going to rule the world? No (even though who knows if they aren’t already…ha, but seriously…) but the knowledge and study of psychoanalysis is a very powerful weapon.

This is an anti-smoking poster, which applies the classic conditioning of behavioral learning theory. As we known, classic conditioning is a form of learning by temporal association. When two events repeatedly occur close together in time, they become fused in a person’s mind and produce the same response. The ash skull in the poster is an unconditioned stimulus. It elicits the unconditioned response of fear. Fear of death is a natural feeling with which human being is born. The cigarette is a conditioned stimulus, a previous neutral stimulus that comes to be linked with ash skull in people’s mind. As such, it too produces a fear response. The fearful feeling people experience when they think of the cigarette represent a conditioned response. Since people fear of the cigarette, they will quit or avoid the behavior of smoking. In this way, the poster achieves its goal.

Psychoanalytical thinking appears in everyday life. Take Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality for example. According to Freud, he believed three central forces shape the personality, the id, the ego and the superego. As a college student, it may happen to you that your friend asks you to hang out but you have a paper due by midnight and you haven’t finished it. At that time, the id produces instinctual impulse to go out and have fun. The ego then employs the reason and operates in accordance with the reality principle, so even though you really want to go out with your fiends, you decide to decline the invitation and work on the paper because you do not want to miss the deadline and get a low grade. Based on the superego, you know it is wrong to hang out with friends while leaving your work unfinished. Therefor you stay at home and continue with your paper instead of going out. However, sometimes the id impulse is so strong. You have to use ego defense mechanism to control unacceptable id drive and to reduce the anxiety it arouses. Thus you may use denial, telling yourself that it’s not actually an important assignment and will not lower much of your grade even if you do not done it, and that there’s no good reason not to go out with old friends.

Psychoanalysis is used to explore the unconscious and learn more about why that individual acts the way they do. There are many examples of this found in everyday life. The biggest one would be simply talking to a psychiatrist. They know what questions to ask that will provoke you to explore certain parts of your mind. Psychiatrists use many different techniques that allow them to see how your brain functions. Some of those include ink blots, free association, dream analysis, and even hypnosis.  Another example of this would be interrogations given by the police/FBI. They have to ask certain question to figure out if the person did it, or was even capable of doing it. One of my favorite TV shows is Criminal Minds. In this show, they have to look at the murders and figure out a suspect by narrowing down what type of person would be capable of such a crime.  They go over every little detail in order to find the killer(s) responsible. I have included a clip from one of the episodes that shows the team looking over the murder scene to find clues that will lead them to the killer (unsub).

Psychoanalysis is one of my favorite branches of psychology. I agree with most of its critics, but the impact it had on psychology as a whole is unquestionable. Psychoanalysis has slowly crept into our lives over the last century and has had both positive and negative effects. The main way that I see psychoanalytic concepts at work today is in advertising. I watched a british documentary series called The Century of the Self that showed how many of Freud’s ideas came to shape modern advertising. An obvious way we can see this is through the sexualization of almost all advertising. You couldn’t possibly count how many commercials today rely on our primal urges, or the Id we’ll call it, to get awaken our desires. Another favorite tactic used is to play on ideas we have about ourselves and that we identify with. In America especially, this means marketing to our sense of individuality. I believe its Dr. Pepper who is running “Be You” and “Always One of a Kind” slogans right now. Just a perfect examples of marketing to an individualistic culture. This being my favorite area, I just think it’s a bit of a shame to see what the theories are being used for these days.

With the main premise behind psychoanalysis being to make the unconscious conscious, there are many techniques that therapist may use in hopes of achieving this goal. Ink blots, dream analysis, and free association are just a few of the techniques that may be used. What really intrigues me most is dream analysis. When I think of dream analysis, the first thing I think about is this clip from Space Jam that I always enjoyed growing up. In the movie, aliens from outer space have come down and stolen the talent from NBA players in order to play bugs bunny and the Looney Toons, but that’ a different story for a different post. Anyways, in this clip the basketball players are having all sorts of  medical tests run on them as well as seeing therapists to try and find out what is wrong with them. In the scene, the therapist is having them, individually, lie down on a couch and is having them talk about their lives as he analyzes them. He is working with dream analysis as well as free association in hopes of bringing something from the unconscious out into the open in order to better understand what is wrong with the basketball players psychologically. Although this is a more humorous clip and analogy, I still think that it is relevant in terms of what psychoanalysis looks like, and what the main objective of it is.

An example of Psychoanalysis in every day life is seeing a psychiatrist. Their job is to analyze the patients situation based on what is said. By asking the right questions the psychiatrist is able to find out what is the root cause of the problem. This can be done both consciously and unconsciously. Some psychiatrist even use hypnosis, but not all of them use that procedure. Through this it can be discovered that the patient has deep seated issues with his/her father or mother, or even that a grandparent is the cause of the now present trauma. Psychiatrists find out the present problems by searching into and analyzing the patients past experiences.

Mean Girls Cafeteria Tribes

In this video clip from Mean Girls, the character named Janis introduces the new girl, Cady (Lindsay Lohan), to the different groups of people that sit in the cafeteria. While thinking about this movie and the archetypes used to categorize the different characters, I decided to see if anyone else had ever considered this movie from the Carl Jung psychoanalytic perspective. I found a blog post that discusses the different archetypes of the main characters, calling Regina George (the leader of the “mean girls”) the “Popular Queen Bee” and Ms. Norbury, the character of Tina Fey, the “trying to be hip and funny while trying to be a mentor teacher.”

Although these archetypes are made up, the characters also fit into the archetypes that Jung describes in his theory. For example, Lindsay Lohan’s character, Cady, represents “the self” and “the shadow.” “The shadow” part of her character and psyche becomes apparent when she gets caught up in her scheming against Regina George and begins to turn into an actual “mean girl.” In our everyday lives, we encounter this kind of psychoanalytical thinking when we categorize and view people as archetypes. It is not necessarily a bad thing because as rational beings, we are constantly trying to find patterns and to organize people into different categories in our minds – it is our way of making sense of out things. From my experience, when we follow this process of thought, we should take caution so that we do not put boundaries around someone that limit their ability to connect with us.

WordPress now welcomes me with a “Howdy, Kelsey Hilton”.

What they obviously do not know is that this greeting comes with offense and irritation.

What I love about psychoanalytic theory is that I feel like I have the ability to apply it to whatever I please. Its complexity and abstractness makes it nearly impossible to prove wrong; but, let’s keep in mind that it is also impossible to prove right.

I must experience some reality anxiety at the thought of being stuck in Texas forever. The anxiety is so great that I employ several defense mechanisms to cope with it. Let us talk about denial for a minute. Texas is no longer a temporary address. Several years after I left for school, my parents moved from Colorado to Texas, leaving me with a permanent address ending with the zip code 76248. (I cannot even bring myself to say that my existence in Texas extends beyond Abilene) I have a Texas driver’s license now, but only because my parents moved. I refuse to believe that I am a true Texas resident, despite all of the evidence that points to the contrary. If denial does not work out for me, there is always identification with the aggressor. Even though I am a proud native of Colorado I have already developed a “Don’t mess with Texas” attitude. But that is really just a persona I still worry about getting sucked into the “West Texas Vortex”.

I really meant this post to be a critical analysis of some of my favorite literature (in particular: A Thousand Splendid Suns, A Million Little Pieces, and A Summer to Die), but I could not resist ragging on Texas. As displacement would have it: WordPress made me do it.

One example of psychoanalytical thinking in everyday life can be found in the popular television show Criminal Minds.  This show follows a team of FBI profilers who travel from state to state in search of serial killers.  The team collects the details of each unique case.  After identifying the killer’s pattern, the team predicts what kind of life the individual is most likely living, with the hope that it will lead them to the killer more quickly.  Their search for the truth often leads them to investigate the dark pasts of suspects.  The show often links childhood trauma and abuse to the psychotic behavior of criminals.  Additionally, nearly every episode presents a criminal going through a stressor.  This stressor is the extra push that sends the criminal over the edge of reality.  In a way, the show is rationalizing the criminal behavior that takes place.  This is just one of the many reminders of psychoanalysis in modern society.