Question 1

 Which of the follow is not one of the three main parts of

Freud’s Structural Model?

 A) id
 B) ego
 C) superego
 D) object representation
 Question 2

 Evidence for the importance of mental events outside of

conscious awareness…

 A) Is still very controversial in mainstream psychology.

 B) Continues to be accepted only by the psychoanalytic
movement.
 C) Is now regarded as pervasive and compelling.
 D) Cannot be evaluated because the evidence is
actually very slim.
 Question 3

 What statement below adequately characterizes Freud

and the unconscious?

 A) Freud discovered the unconscious, which was not

previously known or discussed in scholarly circles.
 B) Other academics and philosophers were already
discussing the idea of the unconscious when Freud
advanced his ideas.
 C) The unconscious was not put forward as an
important idea until AFTER Studies on Hysteria (1895),
a decision Freud later regretted.
 D) The unconscious is more important to the Structural
model than the Topological mode.
 Question 4

 Which of the follow is the least important contributor to

psychopathology in contemporary conceptions of
psychodynamics?

 A) low ego strength

 B) defense mechanisms that excessively distort reality
 C) dysfunctional introjects
 D) displacement
 Question 5

 What was Freud before he devoted himself to

psychoanalysis?

 A) a philosopher
 B) a neurologist
 C) a philanthropist
 D) a pedophile
 Question 1
 According to Robert F. Bornstein, why is
psychoanalysis like cubism?
A) Like cubism, it’s influence is so
pervasive, every psychologist has to
respond to it.
B) Like cubism, it encourages us to see
things from multiple perspectives.
C) Like cubism, it rejects two dimensional
theories of the mind.
D) Both A and B
 Question 2
 Which is not one of the three core
assumptions of psychoanalysis according
to Bornstein?
A) Primacy of the Unconscious
B) Psychic Causality
C) Critical Importance of Early Learning
D) Centrality of Defense Mechanisms
 Question 3
 Which two schools of thought developed as
revisions of classical Freudian theory?
 A) drive theory and object relations theory.
 B) drive theory and self psychology
 C) self psychology and object relations
theory.
 D) drive theory and sociological analysis
 Question 4
 What theorist is associated with
Borderline personality organization?
A) Heinz Kohut
B) Anna Freud
C) Theodore Millon
D) Otto Kernberg
 Question 5
 What did Aaron Beck find when studying
the dreams of depressed patients?
A) that depressed patients had more anger,
as put forward by psychoanalytic theory.
B) that depressed patients had no dreams.
C) that depressed patients dreamed only
about the current concerns of the day.
D) that depressed patients actually had less
anger, counter to psychoanalytic theory.
 Roger D. Davis, PhD
rogerdavis@gmail.com
PSYCHODYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE
 Freud Understood Limitations of Psychoanalysis

 Freud was a research neurologist.

 Wanted to put the mind on a biological foundation.
 But recognized that biology was as yet too primitive to
understand the mind.
 Freud was well aware that subsequent scientific
findings would revise his thinking.
 He was elaborating structures for which there was as yet no
neurological foundation.
 The scientific program to understand the biological
basis of the mind is STILL not complete, and will take
another hundred years.
Freud as a Methodologist
Background: Two great research traditions in Personality

 Nomological research is construct-centered.

Data driven: We want to know how constructs
relate, so we gather large samples.
By averaging over persons, individuality is
subtracted from our analysis.
Natural variation is noise, to be excluded.
Example: How is anxiety associated with
introversion?
 Background: Two great research traditions in Personality

 Idiographic research is person-centered.

 We want to understand the person, particularly the
person’s development.
 Every fact about the person needs to be accounted
for.
○ Every peculiarity means something.
 Strength
 Confronts clinical reality head on: Ultimately we are
faced with real patients.
 How did the complaint develop?
 Incredibly strong in terms of hypothesis formation.
 Weakness
 Can be over-explanatory.
 Weak in terms of hypothesis testing.
 Case Study as a Foundation of Evidence
 All of classical psychoanalysis built on…
 Case study method.
 Freud’s inspection of his own mind.
 Can you build an entire science of psychopathology
by generalizing from such small samples?
 Freud had a habit of going way beyond the evidence.
Contemporary Opinion of Freud
 Modern Opinions of Freud Depend…
 Freud never believed that his ideas would survive
unmodified in all their details.
 Your opinion of Freud rests on whether you emphasize
the generalities or the details.
 Freud was quite often right in the generalities, but wrong in the
details.
 General thrust of models is often correct, but specific content of
model is wrong, or just misses the point somehow when
considered from a contemporary perspective.
 This theme is played out again and again in
psychoanalytic thought.
 Freud’s Worst Mistakes

 Aspects of Freud’s thought for which there is no real

saving grace.
 Female psychology and sexuality.
 “Deficit model” of female psychology
 Penis envy.
 Consider the tenor of the times and the rights of women
during Freud’s era
 UN does not introduce suffrage until 1948 in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights
 United States, 1920.
 Philippines, 1937.
 Freud dies in 1939.
 Consider the Times
 Consider the tenor of the times:
Victorian morality.
 Improper to say “leg” in mixed
company. Say “limb” instead.
 Skirts put on table legs.
 Women’s suffrage movement.
 United States, 1920.
 Philippines, 1937.
 UN does not introduce suffrage until US patent 745,264,
1948 in the Universal Declaration of Filed May 29, 1903
Human Rights.
 Prototypal Characteristics of the Psychodynamic
Perspective
 Importance of unconscious mental processes.
 Conflicting mental processes.
 Compromises among conflicting motives.
 Influence of sexual and aggressive urges.
 Influence of wishes and fears, often unconscious.
 Psychological determinism: Nothing happens by chance.
 Importance of an Autonomous Ego space
 Defense mechanisms and self-deception.
 Importance of Object Relations
 Influence of attachment patterns upon present relationships.
 The influence of the interpersonal patterns laid down in
childhood upon the present.
 Roger D. Davis, PhD
rogerdavis@gmail.com

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF FREUD

 Freud: Brief Biography
 Born May 6th, 1856 to Jewish parents in what is now
The Czech Republic.
 Father was 41, Mother was 21 and 3rd wife.
 Intellectually precocious
 He was the oldest of 8 children, and the only child to have his
own room.
 He was his mother’s favorite.
 Family was impoverished, but sacrificed everything for his
education.
 Heavy cigar smoker. More than 30 operations due to
oral cancer.
 Unable to tolerate intellectual autonomy among his
followers.
 Convinced his personal physician to euthanize him
with morphine in 1939.
 Starts Career as Research Neurologist
 Few professional careers open to Jewish boys at the
time, but you could become a doctor.
 First specialty was research neurology.
 Eventually made contributions to cerebral palsy.
 Spent four weeks dissecting hundreds of eels looking for the
location of the eel penis, but no luck.
 In 1885 he meets Jean Charcot, Europe’s most
eminent neurologist.
 Charcot specialized in treatment of hysteria with hypnosis.
 Freud eventually opened his own neurology clinic in
Vienna
 Marries Martha Bernays in 1886.
Freud’s Office
Freud’s Couch
 Freud and Cocaine
 Freud both used and promoted cocaine.
 Freud was looking for a way to make his medical reputation.
 Found that cocaine relieved his own depression.
 Wrote “On Coca” explaining its virtues.
 Recommended Cocaine to his friend Ernst von Fleischl-
Marxow due to morphine addiction.
 Fleischl-Marxow became addition to cocaine and died at age
45.
 Freud’s medical reputation was tarnished by cocaine.
 Freud published saying there was no potential for addiction.
 Quotes from “On Coca”
 “…Coca, if used protractedly but in
moderation, is not detrimental to the
body…Repeated doses of coca
produce no compulsive desire to use
the stimulant further; on the contrary,
one feels a certain unmotivated
aversion to the substance.”
 “Coca is a far more potent and far less
harmful stimulant than alcohol, and its
widespread utilization is hindered at
present only by its high cost.”
 Death of Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow
 Talented Austrian physiologist and
physician.
 Finger amputated following infection
during an autopsy, left with chronic pain.
 Developed an addiction to morphine.
 Freud prescribed cocaine, which he
believed effective for treatment of
morphine addiction.
 Fleischl-Marxow became more addicted
to cocaine than morphine.
 Died within a few years (age 45).
 Freud’s Personality
 Very self-confident (narcissistic) due to special
relationship with his mother.
 Intense intellectual curiosity and burning ambition.
 Ambivalent feelings toward his own father.
 Feelings of isolation even when surrounded by an
admiring inner circle.
 Repeated broken friendships.
 Breuer, Fleiss, Jung, Adler
 Dislike of America and Americans.
 Events on the 1909 trip to lecture at Clark University.
 Psychoanalysis as The Psychology of Freud

 Freud clearly his mother’s favorite.

 Freud himself recalls his sexual fantasies about his mother.
 Strong pressures for Freud to achieve.
 Sexuality very important to Freud.
 Spent four weeks dissecting male eels in Trieste looking for
their reproductive organs.
 No success.
 Perhaps psychoanalysis is simply a psychology of
Sigmund Freud.
Freud smoked 20 cigars a day.
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
 Eysenck on Freud
 “[Freud]…set psychiatry back one
hundred years”
 Consistently misdiagnosed his patients
 Fraudulently misrepresented case
histories
 “What is true in Freud is not new and
what is new in Freud is not true.”
 Roger D. Davis, PhD
rogerdavis@gmail.com
ORIGINS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS:
THE TOPOLOGICAL MODEL
 Foundations: Josef Breuer

 Most people think Freud alone

invented psychoanalysis. Not true.
 Freud credits Josef Breuer, a
Viennese physician, as inventing
psychoanalysis.
Josef Breuer
 Anna O in Studies on Hysteria (1895)
 Symptoms: Severe cough, paralysis of right side of
body, disturbances of hearing and speech,
hallucinations, periods of confusion, and loss of
consciousness.
 In 1895 Breuer and Freud published her case in the
classic “Studies on Hysteria.”
 Anna O. was diagnosed as Hysterical (conversion
neurosis):
 Meaning that her symptoms had an insufficient physical
basis. Bertha Pappenheim
 Presumed to focus around some early conflict involving the
part of the body where the symptom occurs.
 Anxiety cannot be expressed directly, so it’s channeled into
the body where it appears as a symptom.
 Anna O. supposedly showed the powerful effects of
psychological forces outside conscious awareness.
 Hysteria has now been replaced by a variety of
DSM-IV disorders.
 Breuer and the Cathartic Method

 Breuer treated Anna O. with hypnosis.

 When Anna talked about her illness under hypnosis, she felt
better upon awakening, with diminished symptoms.
 He further noticed that symptoms abated for the longest time
when she talked about the events that brought about the physical
conflicts.
 Anna O. and Hysteria became a general model of illness
produced by unconscious represent.
 This became the general purpose of the cathartic
method:
 Relive the source of earlier traumas.
 And thereby release thereby release tension associated with these
forgotten experiences.
 Freud Takes Over Psychoanalysis
 Breuer and Freud ended their friendship.
 Breuer was ambivalent about the Cathartic
Method and the treatment of hysterics.
 Freud wanted to make a name for himself, and
resented Breuer’s ambivalence.
 Freud was something of a narcissist…if Freud did
it, then it must be wonderful.
 The actual break came in regard to the role of
memories of childhood seduction.
 Breuer regarded these memories as fantasies.
 Freud regarded them as real.
Sigmund Freud
 Freud would later admit that he was wrong.
 Conscious and Unconscious

 The structure of the mind follows

readily from experience with
hysterics.
 Called “conversion disorders” today
because a psychological issue is Conscious Unconscious

being converted into a physical

symptom.
 Patients would like to rid themselves
of these symptoms, but it is not within
Psychodynamics is
their will to do so. about the Conflict of
 Accordingly, there must be a counter- forces in the mind.
will of greater authority.
 The Conscious, Preconscious, and Unconscious

 First, some thoughts are conscious and

some are unconscious.
 Conscious thoughts are those currently in
awareness.
 Preconscious thoughts are those that are
accessible to consciousness.
 Unconscious thoughts are those which are
actively excluded from awareness.
○ Highly affect laden.
 The “Iceberg Analogy”
Like an iceberg, most of
 Consciousness is a very small part of the Human nature is simply outside
human mind. Conscious Awareness
 If you look at “where the action is,” most of
it is outside conscious awareness.
 Drive Theory: What’s in the Unconscious?
 Every theory of personality must postulate
some “force” that drives human motivation.
Before World War I, Freud thought this was
sexual energy, which he called libido.
After World War I, Freud put aggression on an
equal standing with sexuality.
 Unconscious: Privileged Role in Personality

 Unconscious is where, the action is.

Anything that reveals unconscious contents
reveals the driving forces of personality.
○ Slips of the tongue.
○ Dreams.
○ Free association
 Conscious material is already processed, or
derivative.
 Just tip of the iceberg.
 Potential to misdirect the therapist.

Everything in the unconscious
is actively kept there by
repression.
Repression
 General mechanism of defense.
 Unconscious full of untoward
wishes, fears, impulses.
 Repression creates a barrier
between conscious and
unconscious and ensures that bad
stuff stays hidden.
 Transformation of Unacceptable Impulses

 Freud modeled the mind on physics.

 Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
 When unconscious impulses cannot be confined, they
can at least be transformed (by the Ego).
 Conversion symptoms of Hysterics
 Manifest versus latent content of dreams
 This was Freud’s first model of symptom production.
 However bizarre, symptoms follow some unconscious logic.
 Phobias, anxiety disorders, depression
 Sexual disorders

LIMITATION: Everything bizarre begins to be seen through the lens of

transformed drives.
 Every Single Behavior has a Meaning
 Called Psychic
Causality
 Fundamental tenet
of the idiographic
approach.
 Deterministic model
of the mind.
 There are no
random behaviors.
 Fox News Video
 The Return of the Repressed
 The mind is an “energy
machine” governed by
physical laws.
 Conservation of Energy:
Energy can be neither
created nor destroyed, only
transformed.
 Eliminate a surface
symptom and the underlying
motive will express another
symptom elsewhere.
 Different surface behavior,
same motive.
 Roger D. Davis, PhD
rogerdavis@gmail.com

THE STRUCTURAL MODEL

 The Id
 Present at birth.
 Considered the energy source
of the psyche.
 Contains all basic survival
energy.
 Hunger
 Thirst
 Sexual energy, called “Libido”
 Aggression
 When these biologically-based
urges are not satisfied, tension
is produced.
 The Ego
 Begins to develop from id at
about six months.
 Ego develops because
instinct gratification is not
immediate.
 “Reality principle:” The ego
The Ego must find the
“mediates” between the best balance between all
demands of the id and the sources of conflict. The
ego unifies and integrates
constraints of the outside the personality.
world.
 SuperEgo
 Arises from the ego.
 Consists of two parts,
conscience and ego
ideal.
 Consists of internalized
parental values.
 Personality Reflects Dominance of These Parts

 If the Id is dominates…
Impulsive, sensation-seeking.
 If the superego dominates…
Constrained, overcontrolled, hypermoralizing,
perfectionistic, dogmatic
 If the ego dominates…
Balance
Integration of Topological and Structural Models
 Roger D. Davis, PhD
rogerdavis@gmail.com

DEVELOPMENTAL MODEL
 Stages of Psychosexual Development
 Right in generalities.
Early childhood parenting experiences have long-
lasting and continuing consequences.
Neurotic disturbances can be traced back to early
childhood experiences, to disordered patterns of
child rearing.
 Stages of Psychosexual Development
 Psychosexual development.
Libido is instinctual.
Development unfolds through a series of stages.
Humans are “polymorphously perverse.”
○ Means that object of eroticism changes through development.
Each stage has its own “erogenous zone” where the
child receives instinctual gratification.
 Indulgence or Frustration leads to Fixation at a
particular stage, and to distinctive character
traits.
 Oral Stage
 Oral Stage.
Birth to 18 months.
Child gains pleasure by exploring
the world with its mouth.
○ Pleasure from feeding and nursing.
Oral biting (verbally sadistic)
Oral Passive (gullible, immature,
passive, overly dependent)
Fixation might result in later obesity,
or other eating disorders, smoking
a pipe, chewing a pencil, talking too
much.
 Anal Stage
 Anal Stage.
18 months to 3 years.
Pleasure in evacuating bowels.
Anal Retentive (preoccupied
with organization, neatness,
structure)
Anal Expulsive (reckless,
defiant, disorganized)
 “Anal Triad”
Parsimony, Orderliness,
Stubbornness.
 Phallic Stage
 Phallic Stage.
Erogenous zone moves to
genital region.
Sets up Oedipus complex
○ Little boy falls in love with mom.
○ But fears castration from dad.

 Boy realizes he cannot

possess mom literally.
So, he identifies with dad to
possess mom vicariously.
The phallic character is
reckless, resolute, self-
assured, vain, proud, and
narcissistic.
 Oedipus Complex

 Again, Freud generalizes from his own experience.

 “I found in myself a constant love for my mother, and jealousy of
my father. I now consider this to be a universal event in
childhood.”
 Mother is first sexual object.
 But she belongs to daddy.
 Desire to kill your father and possess your mother.
 But daddy is so powerful: Castration anxiety.
 Identifies with father and rejects mother, acquires new sexual
object.
 Identification with father becomes foundation of superego
development.
 Modern Verdict on Developmental Model

 Correct in generalities
Early development is important for the
personality.
Experiences with caretakers are of
fundamental importance to personality
development.
 Wrong in the specifics
Personality is more than just a response to
sexual conflicts.
Movement of psychosexual energy across
erogenous zones.
 Roger D. Davis, PhD
rogerdavis@gmail.com
EGO PSYCHOLOGY AND THE
DEFENSE MECHANISMS
 Anna Freud
 Sixth and last child of Sigmund Freud.
 Suffered depression and eating disorders possibly due
to rivalry with Sophie.
 Started analysis with S. Freud in 1918, finishing in
1922.
 Taught at Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.
 Interested in child development and child
psychoanalysis.
 The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1935)
became the foundation of the school of ego
psychology.
 Defense Mechanisms
 Used by ego to deal with conflict with the id,
conflict with the superego, and with external
reality.
 Use of defense mechanisms is healthy and
normal.
 The defense mechanism typically also
fulfills an unconscious urge in some way.

Proposition: Self deception is a normative part of human

existence, practiced by every individual.
 Examples of Defense Mechanisms
 Reaction Formation: An individual with deviant sexual urges
leads a campaign against pornography.
 Displacement: A manager angry at the store owner takes his
aggression out on his employees.
 Projection: A racist person believes members of that race actually
hate him.
 Regression: A businessman overwhelmed by stress slips away to
an amusement park for the afternoon.
 Isolation: Details of an autopsy on a gruesome corpse is
described by the doctor with great clinical detail and no emotion.
 Rationalization: A student tells his friends, “It’s actually best that I
failed my classes.”
 Undoing: Being extra nice to someone you’ve just been gossiping
about.
 Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart
 Reaction formation most interesting…
Supports motives: Transformation into opposite.
You get to witness human hypocrisy in action.
 Homophobia as Reaction Formation
 Is Homophobia Associated With
Homosexual Arousal?
 Henry E. Adams, Lester W. Wright,
Jr., and Bethany A. Lohr (1996).
 University of Georgia
 Investigated the homosexual arousal
in exclusively heterosexual men who
admitted negative affect toward
homosexual individuals.
 Participants consisted of a group of
homophobic men (n = 35) and a
group of nonhomophobic men (n = Penile Plethysmograph
29); they were assigned to groups on
the basis of their scores on the Index
of Homophobia.
 Homophobia as Reaction Formation

 The men were exposed to sexually explicit Heterosexual video

erotic stimuli consisting of heterosexual,
male homosexual, and lesbian videotapes,
and changes in penile circumference were
monitored.
 Both groups exhibited increases in penile
circumference to the heterosexual and
female homosexual videos. Lesbian video
 Only the homophobic men showed an
increase in penile erection to male
homosexual stimuli.
 CONCLUSION: Homophobia is apparently
associated with homosexual arousal that the
homophobic individual is either unaware of
or denies. Male video
 Defense Mechanisms Video

 Defense Mechanisms Video
 Compensation: “it’s always been just me, and that’s the way I like it, and I’m not ready to
change that…I like it, who wouldn’t…I get to do whatever I want to do whenever I want
to do it….I like it, I don’t have any complaints.”
 Denial: “…it’s not me, the class is really hard.” “I don’t want to have to think about all
this stuff…it’s not fair and it’s not cool.”
 Minimizing: “a lot of people are failing this class…it’s a class…there’s nothing wrong
with me…I’m not hurting myself or doing drugs…it’s a class. If my mom’s not going to
make me go to class.”
 Escapism: Wants to hang out with boyfriend instead.
 Idealization: “he’s the only person who gets me, who enjoys being with the real me, not
the person I’m supposed to be.”
 Rationalization: “my mom works really hard for us, she has to go out of town for us.” “it
would probably be cool having your parents work in the same city all the time, but at the
same time, I would get really annoyed having my mom home all the time.”
 Regression: Angry criticism of therapist.
 Projection: “Because…she’s just annoying…she’s always like ‘do this do that,’ not really
nagging, but stay out of the way kind of thing…I don’t need someone to tell me what I’m
supposed to do, because I know what I’m supposed to do.”
 Incorporation: Sees self as self-sufficient, which is the way her mom wants her to
behave in order to neglect her.
Ego Psychology: Fundamental Proposition

 The ego is more than a negotiator.

 The ego develops into “its own agency.”
Does not merely respond to the id and
superego.
Setting goals.
Actualizing potential.
 Anticipates human potential movement
within psychoanalysis.
 George Viallant (1977): Levels of Defenses

 Psychoanalytical developmental level.

Level I: Psychotic defenses (i.e. psychotic
denial, delusional projection)
Level II: Immature Defenses (i.e. fantasy,
projection, passive aggression, acting out)
Level III: Neurotic Defenses (i.e.
intellectualization, reaction formation,
dissociation, displacement, repression)
Level IV: Mature Defenses (i.e. humor,
sublimation, suppression, altruism, anticipation)
 Roger D. Davis, PhD
rogerdavis@gmail.com

OBJECT RELATIONS
 Object Relations

 Most recent stage in development of

Psychoanalysis.
 Concerned not only with interpersonal world, but
also involves a cognitive theory of the
interpersonal.
Concerned with internal mental representations of
self and others.
Object representations are essentially schemas
formed during early experiences of caretakers.
Internalized schemas of others are called “introjects.”
 Nature of Introjects

 Introjects are the internal mental

representations of others.
 Interpersonal expectations are mediated by
introjects.
 Introjects can be admiring, soothing, calming,
or harshly critical.
 Psychosexual Stages Revisited

 Oral stage
Nurturance with first caretaker.
Weaning: First experience with frustration.
 Anal stage
Experience of external control and discipline.
Parents may be overly concerned or too harsh, or
try to train youngster too soon.
Internalized experience of self-control =
compulsive.
Frustration of overcontrol = passive-aggressive
 Development of Object Representations

 The nurturing breast is all-good.

 Mouth is primary means of attachment.
 Fusion between self and the nurturing breast,
the breast is all-good.
 Cognitively, infants not ready to integrate
all-good and all-bad aspects of others.
 All-good and all-bad remain independent
constructs
 Associated with love and rage.
 Mature object relations requires that
people be seen as complex, neither all-
good nor all-bad.
 Role of parents is neither all-good nor all-bad,
just complex.
 Splitting: What is Borderline Level?

 Not to be confused with Borderline PD.

 At borderline levels of organization, the integration of
good and bad aspects of others is fragile.
During periods of stress, this integration breaks
down, a process called splitting.
Reality testing breaks down, leading to micro-
psychotic episodes.
Affect becomes dysregulated as frustration leads to
anger and rage.
 Kernberg’s Levels of Personality Organization

 Foremost object relations theorist alive

today.
 Borderline level of personality organization.
Psychotic level
Low Borderline Recall that the ego
High Borderline unifies and integrates
the personality.
Neurotic
Normal
 Borderline Level of Personality
Organization
 Borderline is historically a psychodynamic construct.
 Border with schizophrenia is now occupied by Schizotypal
personality Disorder

Behaviorally: Impulsive
Affectively: Unstable
Reversible “Micropsychotic” Episodes
 Stress-Induced Hallucinations
 Paranoid Trends
 Depersonalization
 Ambulatory schizophrenia
 Preschizophrenia
 Latent schizophrenia
 Pseudoneurotic schizophrenia
 Schizotypal disorder
 Borderline state

Normal
Integrated
Personality Neurotic Borderline Psychotic

Level of Intrapsychic Cohesion

 DSM-IV Borderline Diagnostic Criteria
 (1) frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.
 (2) a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships
characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and
devaluation
 (3) identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self image or
sense of self
 (4) impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging
(e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating).
 (5) recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating
behavior
 (6) affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense
episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and
only rarely more than a few days)
 (7) chronic feelings of emptiness
 (8) inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g.,
frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights)
 (9) transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative
symptoms
 Kernberg’s Levels of Personality Organization
Obsessive-
Normality
Compulsive

Depressive- Hysterical
Masochistic Neurotic

Dependent
Sado-Masochistic Cyclothymic Histrionic
High
Borderline
Narcissistic

Paranoid Hypomanic Malignant

Narcissistic Low
Hypochondriacal Borderline
Schizoid Borderline
Schizotypal Antisocial

Psychotic

Introversion Extraversion
 Appraisal of Kernberg

 The levels of organization concept is

obviously useful.
 Theoretically, it reminds us that…
The PDs are not all on the same level
Some are more severe than others
 Level of Personality Organization is not a
taxonomy.
Does not generate any taxonomic constructs.
Only allows constructs given to it to be placed
along a continuum.
Self-Psychology
 Special Role of the “Self” Object

 Kohut: Pathologies of internal representations of

self and others.
Early interactions lay foundation for development of a
cohesive self.
Bad interactions damage the structure of the self-
construct
○ Structure may be merged, undifferentiated, or distorted.
○ Cohesiveness of the self cannot be maintained except
when recapturing development pathology.
○ Example: Grandiose self prevents collapse of narcissism.
 Pathologies of self called narcissistic pathologies.
 Roger D. Davis, PhD
rogerdavis@gmail.com

THERAPY
 Methods of Psychotherapy
 If the determinants of personality are unconscious,
then how do you get to them?
 Free Association.
 Analysis of Dreams.
 Analysis of Transference.
 Patient may act toward the therapist in the same way they
acted toward important persons in their past.
 Not contributing much to therapy encourages patients to
project unconscious desires onto the therapist.
 Interpretation of Defenses.
 Function of behavior is brought to the patient’s attention.
 Insight
 Goals of Therapy
 Improve level of ego strength
Reduce use of primitive, highly distorting defenses.
Identify areas of anxiety and impulsivity.
Promote insight (making the unconscious conscious)
 Re-parent patient through healthy transference
Identify pathological introjects
Dispute effects of introjects in present time
Re-parent patient through healthy transference
Reduce emotionally intense dysregulation
 Roger D. Davis, PhD
rogerdavis@gmail.com
THE TOPOLOGICAL MODEL AS A
COGNITIVE MODEL
 Beck and Cognitive Therapy
 Beck started out to empirically validate
anger-in theory of depression.
Sought to compare the dream content of
depressives to normals.
Depressives found not to be angry, instead they
are “losers.”
 Discovers that by focusing on these
schemas, the depression can be cured.
 Cognitive Therapy is a Therapy of the Preconscious

 In cognitive therapy, patients are taught

methods to identify automatic thoughts.
 Systematic method of elucidating the
contents of the preconscious.
 Refuting the consequences of early patterns
of development in the present.
 Works because psyche is a deterministic
system.
 Roger D. Davis, PhD
rogerdavis@gmail.com
OFFSHOOTS FROM
PSYCHOANALYSIS
 NeoAnalytic Theories

 The neo-analytic
theorists all
rejected some
core aspect of
Psychoanalysis.
 Problem is
theoretical
eclectism, or
lack of internal
consistency.
Lecture 1

END