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| Chapter 11: The Workings of the Unconscious Mind: Defenses and Slips |
- Anxiety can originate in the real world or in inner psychic conflict, such as that produced by an impulse of the id that the ego and superego try to combat.
- The ego uses several defense mechanisms to protect against the conscious experience of excessive anxiety and associated emotions such as shame and guilt. These defense mechanisms include denial, repression, reaction formation, projection, rationalization, intellectualization, displacement, and sublimation. They can be useful for reducing anxiety in the short run, but in the long run can produce problems understanding and dealing with reality.
- Forbidden impulses of the id can be expressed in thought and behavior in two ways. Parapraxes involve accidentally venting forbidden impulses in accidents of speech or action commonly called Freudian slips. In wit or humor, a forbidden impulse is deeply disguised to permit its enjoyment without anxiety.
- A joke is not funny when the forbidden impulse it disguises is not shared, or the disguise is insufficient.
- Psychoanalytic theory has been criticized for its excessive complexity, its reliance on case studies rather than experimentation, its poor definitions of some of its concepts, its untestability, and its sexism.
- Nonetheless, psychoanalysis is important because of its contributions to psychotherapy (in the form of "talk therapy" for example), its effect on popular culture, the increasing amount of research it has generated in recent years, and because it is a complete theory of personality that raises questions other areas of psychology do not address.
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