Psychology 169; UCSC; Tonay; Fall, 2009
There is more than one correct answer for each question. Although you could write a thesis on many of them (and some are very challenging; meant to make you think, rather than trip you up), your task is to consider what is most important in your response, and include only that. Each of these questions could be answered with a long paragraph, and each should be responded to with complete sentences. Several of the questions ask the same thing in slightly different ways. (You will be asked to respond to a smaller number of these questions; questions may be combined or the wording changed slightly for clarity.) Have fun with them! :)
1) Drug abuse, battering, child abuse and other forms of violence (in certain ages and in certain populations), and suicide have all been on the rise in the US over the past 25 years.You get to travel back in time and interview Freud (psychoanalysis) and Loevinger (ego development) about why that might be. What do they each say?
2) Drug abuse, battering, child abuse and other forms of violence (in certain ages and in certain populations), and suicide have all been on the rise in the US over the past 25 years.You get to travel back in time and interview Freud (psychoanalysis) and Loevinger (ego development) about one thing you could do in community mental health to prevent these problems from developing (or getting worse). What do they say?
3) How would Freud's concept of the Oedipus complex explain adult male violence against women? How, therefore, can violence against women be prevented from this point of view?
4) Imagine you are a running a Community Mental Health agency and are called upon to advise a large governmental agency whose goals are to prevent racism within the Bay Area. Before developing and proposing a plan, you think back to your humble beginnings as a UCSC Community Mental Health student in 2009. You remember learning about how the psychodynamic viewpoint can be, and was originally intended to be, applied to the larger society. You think about how each view would explain the development of racism. You remember that in order to prevent something, you have to understand how it develops. You pull out a sheet of paper, and describe how Freud/psychoanalysis and Loevinger/ego development would explain how racism develops.
5) Given your answer to #4, how would each model advise you to go about preventing racism (you may address this issue from either an individual or community level)?
6) How do Schopenhauer's concept of the Will and Freud's concept of the Id compare with one another (compare/contrast)?
7) Compare/contrast psychodynamic model and the social-learning model. (There is no written answer to this anywhere; just use what you've learned about the two of them to speculate on: similarities and differences between the models' main goals, conception of human behavior, focus, strengths and weaknesses.)
8) Describe an adult who has developed a superego and has a weak ego. Describe an adult who never developed a superego and has a weak ego. What is the best thing you can do for a young person with a weak ego to prevent any kind of emotional problem later in life, and why?
9) You run a secondary prevention program for teenagers at risk for gang membership. It has two, quite different, target populations. One population is children who have never been arrested for assault. The other population is children who have been arrested for assault three or more times. (Neither population are gang members, yet.) In order to increase ego development in both populations, according to Loevinger's model, how should your interventions for each population differ?
10) "Psychotherapy is, in essence, a cure through love." What might Freud have meant by this?
11) From a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective, why do people emotionally neglect their children?
12) In Civilization and Its Discontents, (p. 58), Freud writes of humans: "...their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him." Given this bleak observation, what makes humans considerate toward one another at all--again, according to (a) Freud and (b) Loevinger?
13) Although such cases are very unusual, last year, in south Santa Cruz County, a woman was arrested for murdering her very young daughter. The mother had been hospitalized in an inpatient mental health unit for schizophrenia in the past, and was a drug abuser, having regained custody of her daughter the year before from Child Protective Services. The mother said she killed her daughter because she was"trying to protect my daughter from this world." From a psychoanalytic perspective, what did she really mean?
14) You are working at a Community Mental Health agency to prevent those with serious mental illness from having repeat psychotic breaks (i.e., getting worse). You run a 16-week group for those with paranoia. What defense mechanism are they likely using, according to psychoanalysis? Describe how the defense operates, using the energy model described in class.
15) You are working at an agency to prevent gang membership amongst pre-adolescent girls. You run a 12-week secondary prevention group within the public school system. Thinking broadly, you want to include interventions from the psychoanalytic (Freud) and ego development (Loevinger) perspectives. Give one thing you might do from each perspective (two things in all) to help prevent these young female students from becoming gang members.
16) Let's imagine that Freud was correct about what most motivates human beings. What belief would, then, ultimately underlie all possible expectancies (Rotter expectancy, that is)?
17) How might ego development affect stress and coping?
18) List, briefly define, and give a brief example of three of the following psychoanalytic defense mechanisms: regression, denial, projection, reaction formation, displacement, intellectualization, sublimation.
19) In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud asks and answers two important questions for Community Mental Health: how does society inhibit individuals' inherent aggressiveness, and from where does guilt originate? How could you use this formulation in an agency working to prevent violence?
20) How does psychoanalysis explain conflict between communities, and what can be done about it, broadly?