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Transcript Provided by YouTube:
00:00
What do you see in this image?
00:01
A scary face?
00:02
A couple of squirrels fighting?
00:03
Or this one?
00:04
A squashed frog?
00:05
Or tumbling poodles?
00:07
A bleeding bat?
00:08
Hermann Rorschach wants to know.
00:09
Eh, he wanted to know–he’s dead now
00:11
He believed that your answers, what you saw in the ink, said something about your personality.
00:16
Rorschach was a Swiss psychoanalyst who, in his youth, was fascinated
00:20
by the childhood game of making pictures out of inkblots called klecksography
00:25
As an adult, Rorschach was intrigued with Carl Jung’s use of word association
00:29
in attempts to access patients’ unconscious minds.
00:32
Jung would ask patients to say the first thing that came to mind
00:34
when they saw words like
00:35
“dead”
00:36
or “window”
00:36
or “abuse”
00:37
and Rorschach thought,
00:39
“Why not do the same thing with amorphous blobs?”
00:41
So he’d show a patient a series of ink blots and record what they saw
00:45
to determine how people “projected” their personal associations onto random shapes.
00:49
Assuming there are important differences between those who saw
00:52
dancing bunnies versus those who saw severed, screaming heads,
00:55
he drew conclusions about a patient’s personality.
00:58
And yeah, this was controversial.
00:59
Some clinicians still do think that Rorschach test can be a helpful diagnostic tool
01:03
when used correctly and cautiously.
01:05
But others remain critical of the test, calling them unscientific and unreliable.
01:09
It’s even been called “the Dracula of psychological tests”
01:12
because no one has been able to drive a stake through its heart yet.
01:15
So I guess this is that part when I apologize for the set design.
01:19
Sorry.
01:19
But love it or hate it, the Rorschach test is one of the many methods
01:22
psychologists have used in an ongoing quest to understand personality.
01:26
And of all of the concepts we cover in this course, personality is one of the most complex,
01:30
and one of the most contested.
01:32
This is where we bring in the household names.
01:34
Not just Rorschach, but Freud, and Jung,
01:36
as well as other influential thinkers like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers.
01:40
It’s where some of the most familiar concepts in early psychology come into play,
01:43
ones that people with even passing knowledge of the field have heard of:
01:46
the ego, the Oedipus complex, penis envy, inferiority complexes, even the idea of self-help itself.
01:53
Whether you’ve heard of these as hard facts or simply as historical curiosities,
01:56
these notions represent the starting points for some of the biggest and most compelling questions in the field.
02:02
But they all come back to the same question:
02:04
What makes us who we are?
02:06
♪ [Crash Course intro] ♪
02:16
We always gotta start out with defining things. Personality. You think you know what that means,
02:20
but we’re gonna define it as your distinctive and enduring characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
02:26
And psychologists typically study personality in two broad ways:
02:29
1. By trying to understand differences in specific characteristics,
02:33
like introvertedness versus extrovertedness.
02:35
And 2. By looking at how all the various parts of each person mesh together as a whole.
02:40
Basically, what are our characteristics and how do they combine to make me me and you you?
02:45
And guess what?
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As you might expect, there are a number of competing perspectives on personality theory.
02:51
4 to be exact.
02:52
The first, and one of the most influential has been the psychoanalytic perspective,
02:56
first championed by our coke-loving, cigar-chewing friend, Sigmund Freud.
03:00
It was through his clinical observation of patients that
03:02
Freud came to theorize the existence of the unconscious.
03:05
For Freud, the unconscious represented a vast reservoir
03:08
of often unacceptable and frequently hard-to-tolerate thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories.
03:13
Usually involving a lots of weird sex stuff.
03:15
You gotta point out, by the way,
03:16
that the Freudian unconscious is a different thing
03:18
from the contemporary idea of non-conscious information processing
03:22
when we’re, like, processing information that we don’t know we’re processing.
03:25
Freud’s thing is, you know, a lot more titillating,
03:28
but, the non-conscious is like empirically validated a real thing that we study now.
03:33
Anyway, Freud believed that our personalities are largely shaped by the enduring conflict
03:37
between our impulses to do whatever we feel like, and our restraint to control those urges
03:42
between our pleasure-seeking aggressive urges and our inner social control over them.
03:46
He theorized our minds as being divided into three interacting parts—
03:50
the id, the ego, and the superego—
03:53
that provide the battleground for this internal conflict that shaped our personalities.
03:57
You can think of the classic Freudian mind like this iceberg.
04:00
It’s mostly hidden, and that big underwater chunk is your id:
04:03
your unconscious, primitive, and instinctive self.
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Freud thought the id was all about sex and agression,
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the so-called pleasure principle of immediate gratification.
04:12
To him, infants were all id.
04:14
That’s in part why babies freak out when they don’t get a snack like “Right now!”,
04:18
instead of just taking a deep breath for a second.
04:21
For that matter, a lot of the off-the-wall celebrities and dictators are big ids.
04:25
The id’s like a honey badger—they don’t care.
04:27
Eventually kids develop the ego part of their personality,
04:29
that largely conscious component that’s charged with dealing with reality.
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The ego works on getting the id what it wants in a reasonable, timely, and realistic way
04:38
without, you know, getting arrested or beaten up.
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The final aspect to form in Freud’s personality trifecta is the superego,
04:44
the Jiminy Cricket of voice of our conscience that represents not just the real, but also the ideal.
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As you can imagine, the superego and the id don’t much like each other,
04:53
and it’s up the the Referee Ego to sort everything out.
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And it’s hard to be the ego.
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Freud believed that anxiety comes in part from the ego getting all stressed out about losing control
05:01
over the id and superego.
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So he proposed that our egos use a series of indirect and unconscious defense mechanisms
05:07
to protect themselves from this fear.
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And each person’s particular configuration of defense mechanisms, in turn,
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makes up part of what we’re referring to here as personality.
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You might already have heard of repression,
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the defense that’s thought to work by banishing any thoughts, feelings, or memories
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that cause anxiety to the unconscious.
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And repression, Freud thought, allows our many other defense mechanisms to do their work.
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Regression, for example, involves a retreat to a more infantile psychosexual stage,
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like, when a second-grader sucks their thumb when they’re nervous.
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Reaction formation is kinda like passive-aggression.
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It involves flipping unacceptable impulses like desire to punch someone in the face
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with their opposites, like offering them cookies with a fake smile.
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Projection is when you disguise your own impulses by calling them out in other people,
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and rationalization is just what it sounds like, when we offer explanations and excuses for our behaviors
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instead of getting to the real unconscious reasons.
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Like, “Yeah, well, I ate six hot pockets at the party just ’cause I was being social!”
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Displacement is the typical you got yelled at by your boss, and then came home and yelled at your roommate.
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It’s when you shift your impulses toward a less threatening victim.
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And then there’s denial,
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which is when you refuse to believe or sometimes even perceive some kind of painful reality.
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Like, “No, my boyfriend isn’t cheating on me.”
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and “I’m not gonna fail that class,”
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and “These pants TOTALLY STILL FIT!”
06:21
Our defense mechanisms, as theorized by Freud, are pretty tied in with our personalities.
06:24
Someone who engages in a lot of denial and not as much projection would probably look and act
06:29
a lot differently from someone who chronically does the reverse.
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Still, Freud was convince our personalities form in our first few years as we pass
06:36
through a series of five psychosexual stages,
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essentially during which the id seeks to get its rocks off in different pleasure-sensitive areas.
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Infants start out in the oral stage because they get pleasure from eating.
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From there, a child enters the anal stage, focused on peeing and pooping;
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then on to the phallic stage, as they discover their boy and girl bits.
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It was during this stage that Freud believed the infamous Oedipus complex reared up,
06:57
characterized by a boy experiencing a form of sexual desire toward his mother
07:01
and a parallel jealousy or hatred of his father.
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Freud called from about age 6 to puberty the latency stage, marked by dormant sexual feelings
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which eventually evolved into the fifth and final, adult, genital stage of mature sexual interests.
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Now, he believed if certain conflicts weren’t resolved in any of these given stages,
07:17
a person could develop a fixation, or a lingering focus on a younger stage.
07:21
Like if a baby was overfed or neglected and underfed, they might be fixate in the oral stage;
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an orally fixated adult might seek oral gratification through excessive eating or chain smoking
07:31
and may develop issues with dependency or aggression.
07:34
Now of course, not everyone was on board with Freud’s model of personality development.
07:37
Many of his ideas were controversial and remain so to this day;
07:41
even most modern psychoanalysts now dispute the whole Oedipal thing.
07:44
In fact, while many pioneering psychoanalysts built on Freud’s theories — these are so-called neo-Freudians —
07:49
many disagree with lots of his ideas, and instead either emphasize the role of the conscious mind
07:55
or focus on non-sexual motivations.
07:57
Take Karen Horney, for instance,
07:59
a German-born psychoanalyst credited with founding feminist psychology.
08:02
She wasn’t down with the idea that our personalities are primarily shaped by sex and aggression.
08:07
She especially rejected the notion of penis envy,
08:09
which she thought was more than a little insulting to women.
08:12
She actually proposed that womb envy may occur as much in men who were envious they can’t give birth.
08:17
She encouraged patients to take charge of their own mental health and engage in self-help and analysis,
08:22
believing people were often able to sorta be their own therapists.
08:25
We mentioned Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychoanalyst.
08:28
Jung was a friend and disciple of Freud, but eventually, theoretical differences took them in different directions.
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He agreed that the unconscious was a powerful force,
08:35
but he believed it was more than just a holding cell for repressed sexual thoughts and feelings and memories.
08:40
Jung believed sexual drive was only part of the equation,
08:42
and that we’re also driven by a need to achieve a full knowledge of self.
08:46
He also suggested that we have a collective unconscious,
08:49
a group of shared images or archetypes that are universal to all humans,
08:53
and this was why different cultures share similar myths and imagery.
08:56
Vienna-born Alfred Adler was another former collaborator of Freud who struck out on his own.
09:00
Adler agreed with Freud that childhood was important,
09:03
but he emphasized ongoing social tensions, not sexual ones, as most crucial to the formation of personality.
09:08
He coined the term “inferiority complex”
09:10
and believed that much of our adult behavior is linked to childhood struggles with feeling inferior.
09:14
In the end, not all of their their theories have endured,
09:16
but Freud and his contemporaries were key to the evolution of psychoanalytic theory
09:21
because they explored ways in which our mental life and personality
09:24
may be submerged beneath the veil of consciousness.
09:27
But the psychoanalytical approach
09:28
is only one perspective on what makes us who we are.
09:31
Rather than focuseing on how messed up we can be,
09:33
humanistic theorists focus on the basic goodness of people and how they strive to achieve their full potential.
09:39
In other words, they believe in the potential for personal growth.
09:42
Abraham Maslow is one of these guys;
09:44
he believed we’re motivated by that pyramid-shaped hierarchy of needs
09:47
and that once basic needs are met, like food and shelter and whatnot, we’re able to achieve higher goals.
09:53
Maslow believed the top two rungs of that pyramid are where the real growth in personality takes place.
09:58
First, with self-actualization, or the need to live up to our full, unique potential,
10:02
and then with self-transcendence, or finding meaning and purpose and identity beyond ourselves.
10:07
Rather than study only troubled patients,
10:09
Maslow look at healthy, creative types
10:12
with whom he discovered this common thread of self-actualization.
10:15
Bolstered by a secure sense of self,
10:17
these people were more sure of themselves, more compassionate, caring, driven,
10:21
and uneasy around cruelty and pettiness.
10:24
American psychologist, Carl Rogers, was another pioneer of humanistic theory,
10:27
who proposed a person-centered perspective on personality.
10:30
Like Maslow, Rogers believed we’re all basically good eggs
10:33
so long as we’re nurtured in a growth-promoting environment that he thought required three conditions.
10:38
The first is genuineness.
10:40
Just the idea that parents and teachers should be transparent and open with their feelings.
10:44
Then, there’s acceptance; when folks are accepting,
10:46
people around them won’t be afraid to be themselves or make mistakes.
10:49
And the third requirement, according to Rogers,
10:51
is empathy, or the ability to share others’ feelings and reflect their meanings.
10:56
Rogers thought of these traits as the nutrients required to make a personality grow into a healthy self-concept,
11:01
that mix of thoughts and feelings that answer the fundamental question, who am I?
11:06
So, psychoanalytic and humanistic theories of personality were and are incredibly influential,
11:11
even if one was a little sorted, and the other, a little sunshine and rainbows.
11:15
But they didn’t always lend themselves to clear measurement,
11:17
and as empirical standards began to take hold in the mid-20th century, this became a major concern.
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How did we deal with that? Well, tune in next week when we explore some of the newer ways
11:26
of looking at personality and how we started measuring it.
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Today, you learned about personality theory and two of its early schools of thought:
11:34
the psychoanalytic theory, including Freud’s three-part model of the mind and defense mechanisms,
11:39
along with the neo-Freudians.
11:41
You also learned about the humanistic theory,
11:42
including Maslow’s model of self-actualization and Roger’s person-centered perspective.
11:47
Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course,
11:49
especially to all of our Subbable subscribers
11:51
who make Crash Course possible for all people to love and enjoy for free.
11:56
To find out how you can become a supporter, just go to subbable.com/crashcourse.
12:00
This episode was written by Kathleen Yale and edited by Blake de Pastino,
12:03
and our consultant is Dr. Ranjit Bhagwat.
12:06
Our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins.
12:08
The script supervisor is Michael Aranda, who is also our sound designer,
12:11
and the graphics team is Thought Cafe.
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video.
