PSYCHOANALITIC PERSPECTIVE

psychoanalytic perspective.

Psychoanalytic Perspective

Personality dynamics refer to the nature of people as defined by the underlying needs, attitudes, conflicts, and concerns that influence them to think, feel, and act in certain ways in certain circumstances. These underlying dynamic influences on behaviour interact with structural aspects of personality functioning to determine what people actually say and do in their daily lives. In this interaction, however, the nature and adequacy of people's coping style is usually more directly apparent from their behaviour than from their inner life, which is often expressed indirectly in derivative manifestations of underlying psychic phenomena (Westen, 2007). For this reason, psychoanalytic perspectives have been singularly significant in psychodiagnostic assessment for fostering the utilization of psychological tests to illuminate underlying personality dynamics that by their nature are less obvious and less easily detectable than aspects of personality structure.

Individuals are dependent upon a social world that makes possible instinctual gratification. Nonetheless, they find themselves in a struggle against social power that requires of them excessive restriction both of libidinal or erotic and aggressive impulses (Masling, 2008). The result is the internalization of external authority in the form of moral conscience, generating often an overly repressive form of self-discipline and restraint. Because of these contending sentiments and imperatives, the lived experience of individuals is defined by the production of ambivalence and dominated by the experience of guilt. Love and hate coexist, directed at times at oneself, at others, and at the social world that enables those feelings. While the victory of a reality principle over pleasure alone is the aim, the result often is pathology (Chodorow, 2009).

The individual drive to satisfaction with socially imposed restrictions on gratification defines the dialectical relationship that, for Freud, is a permanent feature of the world in which we live and is always fraught with the ...