Essay on Psych: Psychology and Projective Tests

Chapter 13:

2) Explain the psychoanalytic explanation of personality development?

Psychoanalytic theory holds that everyone has conflicting thoughts and emotions, which are repressed because they are painful. Although these thoughts may not be consciously experienced, they remain active and leak out into behaviors.

Freud believed that by being aware of these thoughts, people could consciously experience their emotions and relieve negative psychological symptoms. The goal of therapy, then, was to help people gain insight into repressed thoughts and emotions and begin to deal with them.

Personality Development in Psychoanalytic Theory

According to Freud, personality is includes the following three components:

Id- This primitive, puerile part of the personality seeks pleasure and instant gratification, ignoring possible consequences.
Ego- The rational part of personality, the ego guides a person through life and enables him or her to make good choices.
Super-ego- This is the opposite of the id; it is the moral aspect of personality, and it allows a person to experience guilt.

These three parts of the personality work together, but they can malfunction, according to Freud. Someone with an underdeveloped super-ego, for example, may engage in criminal activity.

4) Who is Gordon Allport ? Why are its theories studied today?

A brief introduction of Gordon Allport. He was born in 1897 and he died in 1967 and he is seen as a pioneer in the area of personality psychology. Some see him as creating this area of study. He also published widely both books and journal articles, and he taught at Harvard for the bulk of his life.

While his name is not as famous as Sigmund Freud, Allport's influence is every bit as important. It is not an exaggeration to say that his theories are deeply ingrained in all of us. For example, he is the one who emphasized the importance of the concept of "self esteem" and the notion that all people have different dispositions. He also emphasized the important truth that all people are unique in the world of psychology. In addition to all of these points, he also taught a generation of prominent younger scholars.

In view of all these points, people study Allport for several reasons. First, he was an original thinker, whose writings are important to study to understand people. In a word, there is intrinsic scholarly value in his work. Second, as a foundational figure, if anyone wants to understand the history of psychology, Allport is a must read.

6) What are projective tests and how do psychologists utilize them.

In psychology, projective tests presuppose that people have unconscious and implicit motivations and thoughts. Hence, the goal of projective tests is to get at this unconscious level of a person. In order to tap into this area, projective tests give ambiguous stimuli to see how people respond. The most famous of these projective tests is the Rorschach inkblot test.

The reason for the ambiguous stimuli is because patients do not know how to respond to things that are ambiguous. In other words, ambiguous stimuli get behind the socially accepted or learned ways to respond to known stimuli.

In theory, projective tests sound great, but there are a few criticisms. The chief criticism is that there is little control. All the data has to be interpreted and who is to say that this psychologist will interpret the data well? With the lack of objective controls, their charge is always open to radical subjectivity.

Chapter 16:

1) What is psychotherapy and how is it utilized?

Psychotherapy is the use of psychological techniques to change behaviors, feelings, thoughts, or habits. It is generally employed to relieve symptoms of emotional or behavioral dysfunction or distress, however it is also used to help people achieve greater levels of self awareness and to actualize latent potential.

There are a wide variety of psychotherapeutic modalities (e.g. individual,

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Essay on Psych: Psychology and Projective Tests

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