Dynamic Psychology

Lecture Notes

Conscious and Unconscious Motives

• Motives as One of Three Major Determinants of Behavior
• Conscious Intents
Conflicts in Conscious Intents
Blocked Intent
Conscious Goal Setting
Is Conscious Intent Necessary for Learning?
Factors Underlying Conscious Intents
• Unconscious Intents
Forgetting a Proper Name Unintentionally
Unconscious Motives in Freud
Conclusions to Be Drawn from Freud’s Approach to Motivational Analysis
• Experimental Study of Unconscious Motives
• Are Unconscious Motives Important?

Motivation refers on one hand to conscious intents, to such inner thoughts as, I wish I
could play the piano, I want to be a doctor, and I am trying hard to solve this problem.

Motivation refers to inferences about conscious intents that

we make from observing behaviors. Thus, if we see a young girl perform a connected
series of acts such as walking into a room, drawing up the piano stool, getting out some
music, opening the piano, and starting to play, we infer that she wants to play the piano.
If she stops playing after a while, we infer that she no longer wants to play the piano.

Subject matter of motivation has to do with “how behavior gets started, is energized, is
sustained, is directed, is stopped.” Put another way, motivation has to do with the why
of behavior, as contrasted with the how or the what of behavior.

We can observe what the girl is doing, that is, playing the piano. Or we can observe how
she is doing it, that is, what motor skills she is using to play the piano. Or we can try to
determine why she is doing what she is doing.

When we make inferences from observing behavior about a person’s intent, we can
arrive at a conclusion about the intent that differs from what the person feels her or his
intent was. We refer to people’s perception of their wishes as conscious intents, and we
infer that their wishes were unconscious intents if they differ from the report of
conscious wishes or if people cannot report at all on their intents.
The inferences we make about interests from observing behavior can be wrong; for
example, we infer that the girl wants to play the piano, whereas the same acts would be
consistent with her feeling that she is being compelled to practice.

It is very important to recognize at the outset that there are several kinds of answers to
the question why, only some of which deal with the problem of motivation. A complete
answer to the question why must include all the determinants of behavior, not just the
motivational ones. To distinguish among the determinants of behavior, it is useful first
to realize that any behavioral outcome is a function of determinants in both the person
and the environment.

Fritz Heider (1958) uses the example of a man rowing a boat across a lake to get to the
other side. Getting to the other side (the behavioral outcome) may be determined partly
by the individual who is rowing or partly by wind currents blowing on the boat. If the
man did nothing and simply was blown across the lake, we ordinarily would make no
inferences about his motivation—about his desire to get to the other side. On the other
hand, if the day were perfectly calm and he rowed vigorously, we would attribute the
behavioral outcome to his intent to go across the lake.

A number of recent experimental studies have dealt with the problem of personal
causation. In general, we do not think of people as causing an outcome if we can find
sufficient reason for the outcome in the external environment, as in the example of the
wind blowing the boat across the lake (Deci, 1975). However, if there are no
environmental pushes or if such pushes would work against a particular outcome, and if
people have acted in ways that seem to produce the outcome, we are even more apt to
attribute the outcome to their actions.

For a concrete example of this principle, consider an autobiographical statement made

by Sigmund Freud (1910/1938), one of the most important contributors to the
psychology of motivation,” “For psychoanalysis is my creation; for 10 years I was the
only one occupied with it and all the annoyances which this new subject caused among
my contemporaries has been hurled upon my head in the form of criticism.” Freud is
saying that all the environmental forces were acting against the creation of
psychoanalysis. He got no help—only criticism —from his contemporaries. So it is proper
to infer that he personally caused the creation of psychoanalysis, since he persisted in
the face of criticism.
Personal causation is made up of cognitions, skills, and motivations or intents. Any
general theory of action or of personality must take into account
a person’s motives, skills or adaptive traits, and cognitions or schemas (McClelland,
1951).

CONSCIOUS INTENTS
Consciously wanting something is an everyday experience. It will be called a conscious
intent to have, to get, or to do something. What people tell themselves or others they
want to do is closely related to what they will do, provided the intent refers to the here
and now. If a man in a clothing store says he wants to buy a shirt, the chances are very
good he actually will go to the shirt department and buy a shirt. If a woman in an
automobile says she wants to get some gas, her statement of intent is excellent
evidence that she will in fact buy gas and not a shirt.

Conflicts in Conscious Intents

Lewin’s interest in the conflict of intents led him and his students to do a number of
studies on motivational conflicts. He introduced a very elaborate system of notation for
describing motivational forces in a psychological field, only a little of which is relevant
here.
 LEWIN’S MODEL OF MOTIVATIONAL CONFLICTS (after Lewin, 1935)
An approach-approach conflict is unstable and easily solved. The traditional example of
a donkey who starved because he was standing equidistant from two equally attractive
piles of hay is incorrect. As a further example, suppose Freud is trying to decide whether
to stay home and work on his book or go to an opera for the evening; both alternatives
hold some attraction for him. If we assign appropriate weights to the variables in Lewin’s
formula, we can equalize the attractiveness of the two alternatives. On the one hand, he
is an ambitious man who needs fame (let us assign that a value of 10) and knows that he
will get some fame from publishing this book (3); however, there is considerable
difficulty involved in writing (6), which somewhat reduces the overall attractiveness of
this alternative. The formula determines the attractiveness of Freud’s staying home and
writing as (10 X 3)/6 = 5.
On the other hand, Freud may need music (2) less than fame and enjoy the opera (5)
somewhat more than writing, but the difficulty in going out to the opera (2) is much less
than the difficulty in writing. This increases the attractiveness of this alternative, making
its overall attractiveness the same as staying home and writing, or (2 X 5)/2 = 5.

Note, however, that moving in one direction or the other toward either alternative
immediately reduces the psychological distance, making that alternative more attractive
and solving the conflict. If Freud puts on his coat in preparing to go out, he has reduced
the psychological distance to the goal of going to the opera and is likely to continue in
that direction. If he starts writing, however, the difficulty associated with that alternative
is reduced, making it the likely choice for the evening. All the donkey has to do is
accidentally move toward one pile of hay or the other for that choice to be more
attractive.

An avoidance-avoidance conflict tends to be very stable. Early in the history of the

psychoanalytic movement Freud was pleased to gain the support of an energetic young
Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung. Freud was very sensitive to the scientific world’s rejection of
his sexual theories and felt some of the criticism was motivated by anti-Semitism, since
all the early psychoanalysts were Viennese Jews. He felt that Jung, who was not Jewish,
was a very important ally and arranged for him to be president of the Psychoanalytic
Association. However, Jung soon began to differ with Freud and introduce ideas of his
own. This put Freud into an avoidance-avoidance conflict. On the one hand, he was very
upset by Jung’s new ideas, which he felt were wrong and would undermine or dilute his
most basic insights.

As Lewin pointed out, avoidance-avoidance conflicts are serious only if a person cannot
escape simply by going out of the field and avoiding both. In this case Freud could not
escape, because the action to be taken involved either correcting or accepting Jung.

An approach-avoidance conflict also has special characteristics. Consider the case of

Freud’s deciding whether to tell what he thought to be the truth about the sexual cause
for Dora’s neurosis or to avoid the disapproval of his mentor, Josef Breuer, which he was
certain would follow if he published his findings. Again, such a conflict is serious only if
the same act or goal has both approach and avoidance aspects. If two different goals
are involved, the person simply avoids the negative one and approaches the positive
one.
However, here the same act—writing up the Dora case for publication— would satisfy
Freud’s scientific needs (approach) but earn Breuer’s disapproval, which in the end had
less negative valence than his positive push to tell the truth about Dora’s sexuality.
Other investigators have shown that as a conflicting goal in a situation like this is
approached, the tendency to avoid its negative aspect grows stronger more rapidly than
the tendency to approach its positive aspect.

If the approach tendency is very strong, it will get a person very near the goal before he
or she recoils in fear; this is not true if the approach tendency is weak. Thus, if a man is
still strongly attached to a woman who has rejected him, he will do everything he can to
get near her; just as he gets in her presence, however, he will pull back in fear. His fear
reaction will be much stronger than it would be if he were not so attached to her,
because in that case the fear would have blocked him from approaching her much
sooner.

Blocked Intent
Lewin and his students also were interested in what happened to an intent when it was
interrupted, for it seemed to continue to influence behavior. For instance, Lewin had
observed that if he intended to mail a letter, it would continue to “stay in his mind” even
while he did other things until he actually had mailed the letter. One of his students,
Zeigarnik (1927), showed that tasks that were interrupted tended to be better
remembered than tasks that had been completed.

Two possibilities are that the person either finds a substitute way of satisfying the intent
or, if none is available, becomes frustrated and engages in disorganized or regressive
behavior. For instance, in one study children were shown an attractive toy that was then
covered up by a heavy shield with a handle on top. The children showed their intent to
get at the toy by trying to lift the heavy cover off. If they could not succeed, they often
complained or sat down, cried, and did nothing, showing signs of regression to
maladaptive forms of behavior. If they were offered other toys, they might be satisfied
with those as substitutes. Much work has been done on the conditions under which
children will accept substitutes, regress, or show other forms of maladaptive behavior
such as aggression when an intent is interrupted.

Conscious Goal Setting

Subjects typically are given a task to perform in a limited period, for example, a page of
arithmetic problems to solve in five minutes. At the end of five minutes the subjects
observe or are told how many they have correctly solved and then are asked to state
how many they are going to try to correctly solve in the next trial. The goal can be stated
in terms of what they will “try for,” the number they hope to solve, the minimum number
they would be satisfied with, and so on. Then they work at the next page of problems,
compare their performance with their goal, and set a new goal for the next trial
Conscious goals people set for themselves influence their level of performance,
Example: shows the effect on people’s work output of trying to do their best versus
trying to surpass a specific standard for performance set each day. Clearly the intent to
do better improves performance, but intents that are tied to specific goals for
improvement over past performance, as shown in the level of aspiration experiment, are
even more effective in improving performance.

Is Conscious Intent Necessary for Learning?

If conscious goal setting facilitates performance, can it be inferred that it is always

necessary to produce performance? Must people always be motivated to some degree
to do something before they will do it?
For a time, association theorists argued that simple conditioned responses were obvious
examples of learning without intent to learn. Suppose an experimenter sounds a tone
just before delivering an air puff to the eye that elicits a blink. After a few trials the blink
is conditioned to, or occurs in response to, the tone without the subject’s “wanting” to
blink. Other theorists pointed out that the blink avoids the unpleasant puff to the eye, so
it seems reasonable to infer that it occurs in response to an intent—perhaps not very
conscious—to avoid unpleasantness.

Early research on what was called incidental learning illustrates the complexity of this
type of analysis.
Incidental learning research was designed to answer the question of whether learning
could occur without any intent to learn. Conscious goal setting or processing of material
clearly facilitates performance, as has just been shown, if only because it gets people
organized around doing things that will help them remember the material (Kintsch,
1977). But can learning occur incidentally when there is no conscious intent to learn? A
typical experiment designed to investigate this problem was conducted by Jenkins
(1933). He asked subjects to memorize a list of words read to them by an experimenter.
After a number of repetitions he asked not only the subjects, but also the experimenter,
to recall as many words as possible. The subjects who intended to learn the words
recalled more than the experimenters, but the experimenters also recalled some words,
apparently without any intent to remember them.

Answering the question of whether learning could occur without any intent, however,
was difficult, if not impossible, for it was not possible to prove there were no intents of
any kind present in instances of incidental learning. When experimenters were asked to
report what went on in their minds at the time, they often came up with intents that
were not part of their instructions but that were sufficient to explain the learning that
occurred. For example, the experimenters in the Jenkins study might have wanted to
give meaning to the boring task they were involved in by forming the words into groups
to make them easier to say, much as people group telephone numbers to remember
them better.

Factors Underlying Conscious Intents

Intents, whether conscious or unconscious, are themselves the outcome of other

motivational and non-motivational variables, as was noted earlier. To focus on the
outcome of these variables (the resultant intent) without even considering these
variables is to engage in a kind of misplaced concreteness.

In performing a laboratory task, the subjects’ motives may not be at all obvious. The
experimenter asks the subjects to do something, and they set to work with a conscious
intent to perform the task. Yet why do they comply and try hard? Some may want to
please the experimenter. Some may want to prove to themselves that they are good
learners. Some may fear looking foolish by not being able to perform at all. When the
subjects are asked to set a goal (that is, to state their intent), they will be influenced by
these:
(1) motive dispositions,
(2) by the extent to which they perceive that doing well and performing the task
satisfies these and other dispositions (the value of the task to them),
(3) by the perceived difficulty of performing the task (or the skill they have shown
in performing), and
(4) by the fact that the task is there to be done (the environmental determinant).

The intent that results from such variables should not be confused with the most
distinctively motivational aspect of the process, namely, the motive dispositions aroused
in the situation. Intent as the outcome of all the determinants of behavior predicts
choices in the here and now when the determinants are known and specifiable, but it
has much less value for predicting long-range behavioral outcomes when the
determinants are not so easy to specify. Thus, a student’s statement that he or she
intends to study right now will predict behavior fairly well; the same type of statement
applied to “studying hard next year,” however, should be greeted with some skepticism,
because it is not known what attractive alternative courses of action the student will
face, whether or not the courses taken will be interesting or not, and so on.
Understanding such long-range trends requires paying more attention to stable motive
dispositions, which lead to persisting in certain kinds of behavior (such as studying) in
spite of a wide variation in the other determinants of action. The psychology of
conscious intents in its early form now is largely of historical interest only.

• UNCONSCIOUS INTENTS

If we move out of the laboratory into the clinic and listen to people talking about
themselves, the role of stable motive dispositions as determinants of immediate choices
or intents becomes more obvious. At the same time, however, some of the motives
reflected when people talk about themselves may be more obvious to others than to the
people themselves; that is, they appear to be unconscious of them.

The major contributions of Freud’s early work involved showing how the motives that
influence what people do in everyday life are often unconscious. He was particularly
ingenious in demonstrating that even the wildest thought sequences in dreams really
were motivated by unconscious desires, which he could expose by the technique of
psychoanalysis. Here is a simple example:

“You are always saying that a dream is a wish fulfilled,” begins an intelligent lady patient.
“Now I shall tell you a dream in which the content is quite the opposite, in which a wish
of mine is not fulfilled. How do you reconcile that with your theory? The dream was as
follows: I want to give a supper, but I have nothing available except some smoked
salmon. I think I will go shopping, but I remember it is Sunday afternoon, when all the
shops are closed. I then try to ring up a few caterers, but the telephone is out of order.
Accordingly, I have to renounce my desire to give a supper. (Freud, 1900/1938)

Freud explains that only she can find the explanation for the dream and that to do so,
she should relax and say whatever comes into her mind about the dream. Her first
associations have to do with the fact that her husband, who is a capable meat salesman,
is growing too fat. He said he should undergo treatment for obesity, rise early, keep to a
diet, and “above all, accept no more invitations to supper,” which Freud points out
contains the idea that her husband gets fat at other people’s dinners. The woman then
blocks a little in her associations and gives some irrelevant comments, which Freud
attributes to unconscious suppression of what is about to come next. She then recalls a
visit the day before to a thin female friend her husband admires greatly. “Fortunately
this friend is very thin and lanky, and her husband likes full figures.” But the friend has
spoken to her about her desire to gain weight and asks Freud’s patient, “When are you
going to invite us again? You always have such good food.”

Now the meaning of the dream is clear. The thought that runs in the patient’s mind and
determines the nature of the dream may be summarized as follows: “Of course I am to
invite you to dinner so that you will get fat and be more pleasing to my husband! I
would rather give no more dinners!” Why is the dream about smoked salmon? Smoked
salmon is her friend’s favorite dish. The dream is a simple expression of her wish not to
make her friend plumper and more pleasing to her husband. The important point to
note is that the patient was quite unaware of this intent when she related the dream,
since she thought it disproved Freud’s theory of dreams as wish fulfillments.

Forgetting a Proper Name Unintentionally

Unconscious Motives in Freud

Manifest content -person can penetrate beyond the outer meaning of a word of
scripture
Latent Content - to its inner meaning

Conclusions to Be Drawn from Freud’s Approach to Motivational Analysis

1. What people say about their motives should not be taken at face value.
Even in ordinary life, but particularly in dreams and symptomatic acts,
people often do not know what their motives are. When they do assign
motives to their acts, these motives, on further analysis, may turn out to be
incorrect. Even Freud’s motivational analyses should not be taken at face
value: by examining his life a little further, we found a motivational
explanation for his forgetting a name that was somewhat different from
the explanation he was satisfied with.
2. Associative thought is extraordinarily fluid and easily influenced by
conscious or unconscious motivational forces. What is striking about
many of Freud’s analyses is how quickly and automatically a thought or
associative chain is deflected by a motivational influence, whether it leads
the dreamer to imagine the telephone is out of order or leads Freud to
forget the name of a famous painter. As Freud himself noted on another
 occasion, the overall impression that these observations create is that we
are not complete masters in our own household. The mind functions quite
easily and efficiently without our being in conscious control of it. And
fantasy or free association, over which we exercise little control, reveals
most obviously and easily motivational forces of which we may be
unaware.
3. The ultimate motivation is not necessarily sexual, as Freud argued,
although it is understandable why sexual motives were so important to him
if he was drawing on Kabbalistic, mystical insights into the ultimate nature
of man. Many others who associated with him early, like Carl Jung and
Alfred Adler, insisted on the importance of other nonsexual motives. In
analyzing Freud’s own life, we had to resort to power rather than sexual
motivational dispositions. On the one hand, he showed a strong need for
power in his dreams of fame and in his break with orthodox scientific and
religious tradition; on the other hand, he clearly feared the power of others,
from Moses to his scientific peers.
4. The method of uncovering unconscious intents by analyzing free
associations is not completely convincing. Whereas it often yields
interesting explanations of otherwise puzzling behaviors, the chance exists
that the explanation has been invented through free associations to please
the psychoanalyst. What criteria are there for deciding whether an
interpretation is correct? The ordinary ones are that the interpretation
account for a number of otherwise inexplicable facts and that it satisfy the
person who arrives at the interpretation. Thus, Freud was satisfied with his
account of forgetting the name Signorelli, but we were not and pursued
the matter further to locate a somewhat different explanation. We need a
less-questionable method of establishing the truth about the influence of
unconscious intents.