Second lesson

This week, since some of the students in our class (including me) wanted to learn some more about the theories, we talked a little more about them and I thought that it was very helpful. I got to learn more about Freud, some of his books, thoughts. We learned the five stages in more detail. We talked about Freudian slips where unconscious motives, desires become conscious. It was really interesting to learn that the things we see in our dreams are also our unconscious desires, wishes which come up in a different format. Another interesting thing I learned is that the early experiences shape adult personality.


Then we went through Freud’s five stages again and said that each of these stages involve a crisis. It is so unbelievable to see all the stages that a human has to develop through. I can not recall so much from back in the days but now it is so crazy to see that I’ve also been through most of Freud’s stages.

The lesson was going pretty fun but when we started talking about personality, it became more interesting. First we talked about the id stage where there is the pleasure principle. As the child develops, he has an ego which means conscious. Now he has control over the pleasure principle, he has control over his wishes, desires, wants. Later there is the superego which is developed from the parents and people around us. In this stage, there are rules and restrictions.

We shouldn’t forget that there is a conflict between pleasure principle and superego and this conflict is not just for the children but it is for everybody and due to these conflicts, we have defense mechanisms. I think the part that I enjoyed the most in this lesson was the time we got to this subject. This is because when we started talking about defense mechanisms, I started seeing some elements from my own personality.

In class we said that someone can believe he is a peaceful person but if someone bumps into him on the street, he will get angry. The thing which prevents him from experiencing this anger will be the defense mechanism. For example this person will be so angry but he won’t admit it so he would do something else, maybe start exercising to discharge the energy. Well this sounds familiar because most of the time when I’m upset with something, I either go to the gym or start jogging in the nearest park. In this lesson, I learned that this thing I was doing was called sublimation.

Another type of defense mechanism is called projection where rather than dealing with anger, you make others angry, projecting your anger to others. By doing this you are hiding from what you are feeling. Just like anger, we said that sexuality can also be a problem.

Rationalization is another defense mechanism where we disassociate from the feeling that we have.

Lastly we mentioned that repression is also another type where something has happened to you in your childhood but unconsciously you have repressed your memory.

Then we continued with Freud’s stages. I don’t want to give so much detail about it in this entry but I have to say that something really caught my attention. I found it really interesting that in the phallic stage, the boy has sexual feelings for his mother and sees his father as a big threat. Also we said that girls have a different identification of the mother and consequently they have a less developed superego. I didn’t really understand the reason behind this but learning about it was both impressive and upsetting.

Later in the lesson, we studied Erikson in more detail. We said that his stages are developing all the way through death and at each stage of life, there is a crisis. We talked about the importance of early experiences and that social relationships are key. Then we started discussing the stages.

Stage 1: Trust vs. Mistrust
Baby comes to the environment with some reflexes.
(I didn’t know that if you touch a baby’s cheek, he/she will turn to that side thinking that it is the nipple. This is called rooting.)
If the baby’s basic needs are met consistently (most of the time or all the time) it will lead to trust. But for example the child is hungry and you never feed him this will lead to mistrust.

Stage 2: Autonomy vs. Shame, Doubt

We didn’t go into detail in the other stages but talked about the significance of the outcomes of the stages. If there is a negative outcome from one stage, it will affect the next stage and there will be problems in every other stage.

In a part of our lesson, we talked about some baby reflexes and I found it very interesting if you pretend like you are dropping a baby, their arms will go out to the sides and if you ut your finger inside their palms, they hold your fingers so tight that you can lift them up. I’m sure it would be very funny doing that to a little baby.

At the last part of the lesson, we got a chance to start learning the cognitive theories. We talked a little about Piaget and information processing.



Piaget
We talked about adaptation. The child is developing so that his/her cognition matches up with the environment which means that he/she is adapting to the environment. When we say environment it’s not just the physical environment but it is everything that a child experiences. We said that the child is active, he/she interacts with his/her world and over time child adapts better and better. Also there is discontinuous stage progression.

Information Processing
The mind is compared to the computer. The stimuli comes to our five senses, goes to the sensory memory (if not processed gets lost very easy) and then to short term memory and long term memory. However if we don’t process the information which also comes to STM it will get lost and won’t be processed in LTM. We also said that there are some memory stores where the information is kept in your memory. At the end, we said that this development was continuous, universal and quantitative.