Phenomenology: A movement in philosophy and psychology that emphasizes that what is most important is not an object or event in itself, but how it is perceived and interpreted by a person. ROGERS

Phenomenal Field: The sum total of the experiences that a person is capable of perceiving, and to which they are capable of responding (i.e. the person’s effective environment). ROGERS

Actualizing Tendency: The force within the individual for growth and development that is innate within all people to maintain and enhance themselves, and to grow as a person. ROGERS

Anxiety: a distinctly unpleasant feeling state, vague uneasiness or tension, as a result of a discrepancy between one’s “cognitive self” and experience. ROGERS

Awareness: Consciousness; that portions of one’s experience that he/she is aware of and is capable of expressing verbally (to self and others). ROGERS

Organism: The totality of the individual, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. ROGERS

Self: The “cognitive self” is totality of a person’s self awareness, self knowledge, and self understanding; being aware of one’s “real self” as well as the “ideal self”. ROGERS

Self-Actualization: The dynamic tendency within the “organism” (person) leading them toward fulfilling their potentialities, and becoming a “fully functioning person” by converting their potentialities into actualities. ROGERS

Congruence: a state of healthy adjustment in which a person’s symbolized self experience is compatible with their actual experience; an integrated self concept in which the real self and the ideal self interface. ROGERS

Incongruence: A condition in which there is a disparity (or conflict) between one’s real self and ideal self, causing internal tension, anxiety, or subjective discomfort. ROGERS

Conditions of Self Worth: The provisions or conditions under which a person will accept themselves based upon the values, or standards introjected from “significant others” in ones past. ROGERS

Emotions: Subjective feeling states (both “pleasant” and “unpleasant”) which accompany and usually facilitate goal directed behavior, and the processes of self-maintenance, self-enhancement, and self-actualization. ROGERS

Positive Regard: Being accepted, liked, and loved by another (others), engendering feeling of warmth, inner goodness, and “love-ability” with one’s self. ROGERS

Unconditional Positive Regard: The process of accepting one’s self or another, as they really are, without any conditions or reservations (i.e. loving a child regardless of their behavior). ROGERS

Self Regard: Liking and accepting one’s self, as we are (not as we which we were, or would like to be), without regard to the opinions of other people. ROGERS

Significant Others: Important people who helped make us who we are; the sources of our positive regard; those persons we hold in high esteem (respect, admire, lookup to, and love [i.e. parents]). ROGERS

Self-Actualization (MASLOW): Fulfilling oneself by doing the best that one is capable of doing; the development of a person’s full potential; the fulfillment of one’s own potentialities and capabilities; the most pleasurable of our human needs, but also the most difficult to satisfy; a growth motive.

B-Love: A non-possessive caring, and giving of love and affection to another person; the type of love that is characteristic of a self-actualizing person.

Basic Need: A fundamental need to reduce a drive such as hunger, thirst, or D-Love through appropriate external objects or individuals, thereby fulfilling something lacking within the organism; common to all human beings.

D-Love: A selfish love, characteristic of one who is not self-actualizes; the desire to receive love and affection from others.

Deficiency Need: Motivation at a lower level; reducing physiological tension by satisfying deficient states or lacking in the person.

Desacralization: A loss of the sense of the spiritual or sacred.

D-Cognition: A self preservative and rather routine form of thought which is evaluative and judgmental, and is oriented toward satisfying one’s own deficiency needs.

Eupsychia: A utopian society in which both individual and societal needs are met, and where the society support the individuals development and fulfillment.

Hierarchy of Needs: the ordered progression of human motivation, from basic physiological needs upward to the highest level of needs of the most developed human beings.

Instinctoid Needs: The weakly instinctive needs and motives that represent basic human nature; the satisfaction of these needs enables the person to move on to higher level of needs and achieve healthy psychological development and functioning, whereas frustration of these needs often leads to maladjustment and unhappiness.

Meta-Motivation: To be motivated by those needs near, or at the top of the hierarchy of human needs. These Meta-Needs would include love of knowledge and learning (cognitive), the love of beauty (aesthetic), truth, justice, and goodness.

Method Centered: An approach to science that emphasizes the procedure (process), over the content matter.

Problem Centered: An approach to science that emphasizes subject matter (content) over procedure.

Peak Experiences: A mystical, episodic, state of conscious experience that represents the highest form of human experience, characteristic of many, but not all self-actualizing people.

Basic Anxiety: Infants and young children are highly independent upon their parents not just for survival, but for a sense of psychological security. If the infant (child) senses that they are loved, and protected, their safely needs are met. Under less than desirable circumstances, children feel intensely vulnerable and helpless, especially in the absences of adequate parenting, and such circumstances produce “basic anxiety”…which Horney describes as “the feeling of being isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile world”. Includes three major components: Helplessness, Aggressiveness, and Detachment resulting from pathogenic family influences during childhood. HORNEY

Basic Hostility: Feelings of anger in young children toward their parents, which must be repressed. HORNEY

Real Self: the vital center of the individual as they really are, with both shortcomings and potential for personal growth. HORNEY

Ideal Self: That which a person wishes they could be, and thinks they should be. In healthy individuals, the real self and the ideal self more or less coincide, but in the maladjusted or maladaptive individual, they are separated with a significant disparity between the two. In extreme cases, alienation may occur in which the person may abandon their real self for the sake of the ideal self. HORNEY

Collectivism: In some cultures, the predominant values of social cooperation and group goals. HORNEY

Individualism: In many Western cultures, the predominant values of individual goals and individual achievement (as contrasted with those cultures with shared goals and cooperation). HORNEY

Idealized (Self) Image: A misconception about one’s personality that is often used to conceal a despised real self or avoid difficult and painful inner conflicts (between “incompatible” orientations of one’s personality). HORNEY

Compartmentalization: A mechanism of adjustment in which incompatible behaviors are not simultaneously recognized; HORNEY

Cynicism: A mechanisms of adjustment in which the moral values of a culture or society are rejected. HORNEY

Elusiveness: A mechanism of adjustment in which a person refuses to make commitments to anyone or anything, avoids close personal relationships, and/or refuses to commit to an opinion, an action, a group, or a relationship (thus avoiding responsibilities). HORNEY

Excessive Self-Control: A mechanisms of adjustment in which employed as a technique for avoiding one’s own emotions. HORNEY

Externalization: Experiencing Intrapsychic processes as occurring outside oneself: a mechanism of adjustment in which conflicts are “projected” outside. HORNEY

Rationalization: A mechanism of adjustment by which a persons behavior are explained in a socially acceptable way. HORNEY

Tyranny of the Shoulds: A set of inner “demands” to live up to (i.e. the idealized self-image). HORNEY

Womb Envy: A set man’s jealousy and envy regarding a woman’s reproductive capacity (i.e. her ability to bear and nurse children) HORNEY

Claims: Unrealistic demands and expectations that the neurotic imposes on other people. HORNEY

Glory: Grandiose feelings of triumph because one appears to have fulfilled the demands of the idealized image. However, the neurotic quest for glory is compulsive and insatiable. HORNEY

Neurotic Conflict: An unconscious Intrapsychic clash between healthy and neurotic drives, or between opposing neurotic drives. HORNEY

Self-contempt (self hate): Hating one’s true abilities, feelings, and wishes because they differ from (and seem much worse than) the glorious idealized image. HORNEY

Self realization: Developing one’s healthy innate potentials and abilities. HORNEY

Tricotomy of Social Movement:

Three characteristics interpersonal “orientations of personality”

• • Movement Away from Others: Resignation Solution (The Detached Personality): Always tries to be self-sufficient; development of considerable resourcefulness and independence; to protect privacy, prefers to be alone but often creative; rebellious against constraints or influences with tremendous need for freedom; detached from emotional experiences and wishes (an onlooker); an aversion to enforced change (or demands for effort); need for privacy, “keep others outside the circle of the self” and remain uninvolved with people ( may express feeling, but with a certain detachment); being free of social obligations.

• • Movement Against Others: Self Expansive Solutions (The Aggressive Personality):Narcissistic and in love with one’s “idealized self image”; very high standards and a “perfectionist”; a need to be socially recognized and admired; arrogant with great admiration for strength in self and others; and essential “disrespect” for others and contempt for the weak; the need to be right, the need to win a competition, or fight (can be vindictive); the need for personal admiration with great personal ambition; exert personal power over others and may be domineering (an “Authoritarian” personality); “power” and “mastery” seem to offer protection from being weak and vulnerable (love may well be seen as an unnecessary weakness)

Defense Mechanism

A method used by the EGO to ward off threats from the id, superego, or external world, and to reduce the corresponding anxiety. Most defense mechanisms operated unconsciously, making possible the primary goal of self-deception.

Denial of reality

Refusing to believe, or even perceive, some threat in the external world; a defense mechanism.

Displacement

Transferring behaviors or emotions, often unconsciously , from one object to another that is less threatening: a defense mechanism.

Fantasy (daydreaming)

Gratifying unfulfilled needs by imagining situations in which they are satisfied; a defense mechanism.

Identification

(1) Reducing painful feelings of self-contempt by becoming like objects that are illustrious and admired, such as idols, aggressors, or lost loves; a defense mechanism.

(2) The healthy desire to become like one’s parents.

Intellectulization

Unconsciously separating threatening emotions from the associated thoughts or events and reacting on only an intellectual level; a defense mechanism.

Introjection

Unconsciously incorporating someone else’s values or personal qualities into one’s own personality.

Projection

Unconsciously attributing one’s own threatening impulse, emotions, or beliefs to other people or things; a defense mechanism.

Rationalization

Using and believing superficially plausible explanations in order to justify illicit behavior and reduce feelings of guilt; a defense mechanism.

Reaction formation

Repressing threatening beliefs, emotions, or impulses and unconsciously replacing them with their opposites: a defense mechanism.

Regression

(1) Unconsciously adopting behavior typical of an earlier and safer time in one’s life; a defense mechanism.

(2) A reverse flow of libido to an object previously abandoned, or to an earlier psychosexual stage.

Repression

Unconsciously eliminated threatening material from consciousness and using anticathexes to prevent it from regaining consciousness, thus being unable to recall it; a defense mechanism.

Sublimination

Unconsciously channeling illicit instinctual impulses into socially acceptable behavior. A form of displacement, but one that represents ideal behavior.

Undoing

Unconsciously adopting ritualistic behaviors that symbolically negate previous actions or thoughts that cause feelings of guilt; a defense mechanism.

PSY102: Psychology of Personality, Prof. T.R. Tharney

Ewen, Robert B. An Introduction to Theories of Personality: Sixth Edition. Mahawah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc., 2003.

Anticathexis (counter-cathexis)

Psychic energy that is used by the ego to oppose a dangerous or immoral cathexis.

Anxiety

A highly unpleasant emotion similar to intense nervousness. The three types are:

• Realistic or objective anxiety: (related to threats in the external world)
• Neurotic anxiety: (related to powerful id impulses)
• and Moral anxiety: (related to the superego’s standards of right and wrong)

Castration anxiety

The boy’s fear that his sexual organ will be removed as punishment for his Oedipal wishes.

Cathexis

Psychic energy that is invested in a mental representation of an object. The stronger the cathexis, the greater the amount of psychic energy and the more the object is desired.

Conscious

The part of personality that includes material of which one is aware.

Drive

(1) A psychological state of tension and discomfort that is caused by a physiological state of tension and discomfort that is caused by a physiological (bodily) need.

(2) Sometimes use as an synonym for instinct.

Drive Reduction

Eliminating or decreasing the discomfort and tension of a drive, which satisfies the underlying physiological need. To Freud, the major source of pleasure.

Eros

A synonym for the sexual instinct.

Erotogenic zone

An area of the body that is capable of producing erotic gratification when stimulated.

Instinct

An innate motivating force that is activated by a need. The two types are sexual and destructive (aggressive).

Libido

The psychic energy associated with the sexual instinct; sometimes used to refer to both sexual and destructive energy.

Narcissism

Self-love; the investment of one’s own self with libido.

Object

Whatever will satisfy an activated instinct. May be an inanimate entity, a person, or even something fanciful and irrational.

Oedipus complex

Powerful feelings of love for the parent of the opposite sex and hostile jealousy for the parent of the same sex,

TOGETHER with powerful feelings of love for the parent of the same sex and hostile jealousy for the parent of the opposite sex.

The former set of attitudes is usually, but not always, the stronger.

Over-determination

A term referring to the numerous, complicated causes of most behavior.

Parapraxis

An apparent accident that is caused by unconscious mental processes, and therefore indicates one’s real feelings and beliefs; a “Freudian slip”

Penis envy

The girl’s jealousy of the boy’s protruding sexual organ.

Pleasure principle

The goal underlying all human behavior, to achieve pleasure and avoid unpleasure (pain).

Preconscious

The part of personality that includes material that is not within one’s awareness, but can be readily be brought to mind.

Primal scene

Observing one’s parents’ sexual intercourse.

Primary process

The chaotic, irrational mode of thought representative of the ID.

Psychic determinism

The principle that nothing in the psyche happens by chance; all mental activity has a prior cause.

Psychic energy

The “fuel” that powers all mental activity; an unobservable, abstract construct.

Psycho-analysis

(1) The name Freud gave to his theory of personality.

(2) The method of psychotherapy devised by Freud.

Reality principle

Delaying the discharge of tension until a suitable object has been found; a function of the EGO.

Secondary process

The logical, self-preservative, problem-solving mode of thought representative of the EGO.

Unconscious

The part of personality that includes materials that is not within one’s awareness and cannot readily be brought to mind. To Freud, most of personality is unconscious.

Wish-fulfillment

Forming a mental image of an object that will satisfy a need; a function of the id.