Psychoanalysis

A detailed Summary of Psychoanalysis

As I sit in my apartment, waiting for my friend Heather to pick me up, I begin to feel very frustrated. It is neither the first nor the second time, for that matter, that she has been late. In fact, she has been late so many times that I have lost count. She used to make external attributions for her constant inability to be punctual, such as telling me that her alarm clock broke or that her mother called her just as she was about to leave. Once she even externally attributed her tardiness on a dog attacking her right before she left to come and pick me up, but she looked fine and had no wounds on her, so I started to wonder. I slowly began to realize that all of the external attributions that she had been making as excuses were not truly valid, and so I began to make an internal attribution for her behavior. In other words, I stopped attributing her behavior to external factors and realized that that is just the way that she is. Thus, I was able to distinguish between external and internal attributions in order to accurately judge the character of my friend.

As I am sitting there waiting for her to pick me up, my mind wanders, and I start to think back to the ti

After we had been shopping for a couple of hours, we decided that it was time that we leave because Heather and I had a big project that we had to work on for one of our classes. Heather drove us back to school and dropped Julie back at her dorm, and then we went to Heather's apartment to work on our projects. As we began working on them, Heather became frustrated with her project and said that she did very well on the last project because she has a natural talent for art, which is the class we were doing the project for, but that she was probably not going to be able to receive as good of a grade on this project because it was a peculiar project that she thought was a ridiculous waste of time. Heather was demonstrating a self-serving bias because she was giving herself as much credit as she could for her success on her last project while she was attempting to reduce her responsibility for her possible failure on this project. In fact, it later turned out that she did not receive a very good grade on the project. I concluded that it was due to the fact that Heather did not think that she was going to do very well on the project, and so she did not work as hard as she could have. I suspected that she was utilizing a self-handicapping strategy by not working as hard on the project so that she had an excuse for not receiving a good grade on it.

The sound of Heather's horn outside interrupted my thoughts; she had finally arrived at my apartment to pick me up. We had to pick up another one of our friends, and then we were all going to go shopping together at the local mall. We arrived at Julie's dorm building, parked in the parking lot, and walked over to Julie's room. We were somewhat rudely greeted at the door by her roommate, Becky, who we had not met before. She did not say much to us; she barely said hi and did not even seem to attempt to smile. Heather and I exchanged glances of disapproval; we both thought that Becky was rude. We stayed in their dorm room for a while, talking and gossiping as we were waiting for Julie to get ready. As we were all talking, Becky started being nice and friendly, and she apologized for acting rudely when we first got there; she explained that she had gotten in a fight with her boyfriend and, as a result, was not in a good mood earlier. We all continued to talk together, and I began to like Becky, gradually disregarding the rudeness she displayed when we first met her. Heather, however, still disliked Becky because she was still more influenced by her first impression of Becky than she was by Becky's later actions. Thus, Julie being more influenced by the first information that she received from Becky is an example of the primacy

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1820
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

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