PERSONALITY THEORIES: AN INTRODUCTION

DR. C. GEORGE BOEREE

Personality psychology, also known as personology, is the study of the person, that is, the whole human individual.
Most people, when they think of personality, are actually thinking of personality differences - types and traits and
the like. This is certainly an important part of personality psychology, since one of the characteristics of persons is
that they can differ from each other quite a bit. But the main part of personality psychology addresses the broader
issue of "what is it to be a person."

Personality psychologists view their field of study as being at the top (of course) of a pyramid of other fields in
psychology, each more detailed and precise than the ones above. Practically speaking, that means that personality
psychologists must take into consideration biology (especially neurology), evolution and genetics, sensation and
perception, motivation and emotion, learning and memory, developmental psychology, psychopathology,
psychotherapy, and whatever else might fall between the cracks.

Since this is quite an undertaking, personality psychology may also be seen as the least scientific (and most
philosophical) field in psychology. It is for this reason that most personality courses in colleges still teach the field
in terms of theories. We have dozens and dozens of theories, each emphasizing different aspects of personhood,
using different methods, sometimes agreeing with other theories, sometimes disagreeing.

Like all psychologists - and all scientists - personality psychologists yearn for a unified theory, one we can all agree
on, one that is firmly rooted in solid scientific evidence. Unfortunately, that is easier said then done. People are
very hard to study. We are looking at an enormously complicated organism (one with "mind," whatever that is),
embedded in not only a physical environment, but in a social one made up of more of these enormously complicated
organisms. Too much is going on for us to easily simplify the situation without making it totally meaningless by
doing so!

We need to take a look at the various research methods available to us as personality psychologists to understand
where we stand...

There are two broad classes of research methods: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative methods involve
measurements and qualitative methods don't. Measurement is very important to science because scientists want to
get beyond the purely subjective and to the more objective. If my dear wife and I are both looking at a man and I
say "he's short," she may say "no, he's not - he's quite tall!" we are stuck with two subjective opinions. If we take
out a tape measure, we can together measure the man to discover that he is, in fact, 5 foot 8 inches. Since I am 6
foot 2, I might think of him as short. My wife is 5 foot 2, and she might see him as tall. But there will be no
argument about what the measuring tape says!

(Actually, there won't be any arguing in any case, since my wife is clearly always correct.)

A patch of color may seem blue to me and green to you. A piece of music may seem fast to me and slow to you. A
person might seem shy to me and outgoing to you. But if we measure the wavelength of color, or the rhythm of the
music, or find a way to give a number to shyness-outgoingness, we can agree. We become "objective." Creating
personality tests to measure personality traits is a common activity of personality psychologists.

If you take two different forms of measurement - such as a measuring tape and a weight scale - and we measure the
height and weight of a few hundred of our nearest and dearest friends, we can examine whether the two measures
relate to each other somehow. This is called correlation. And, as you might expect, people's heights and weights do
tend to correlate: The taller you are, generally speaking the heavier you are. Of course, there will be some folks
who are tall but quite light and some who are short but quite heavy, and lots of variation in between, but there will
indeed be a modest, but significant, correlation.
You might be able to do the same thing with something involving personality. For example, you might want to see
if people who are shy are also more intelligent than people who are outgoing. So develop a way to measure
shyness-outgoingness and a way to measure intelligence (an IQ test!), and measure a few thousand people.
Compare the measures and see if they correlate. In the case of this example, you would likely find little correlation,
despite our stereotypes. Correlation is a popular technique in psychology, including personality.

What correlation can't help you with is finding what causes what. Does height somehow cause weight? Or is it the
other way around? Does being shy cause you to be smarter, or does being smarter cause you to be shy? You can't
say. It could be one way or the other, or in fact there could be some other variable that is the cause of both.

That's where experimentation comes in. Experiments are the "gold standard" of science, and all of us personality
psychologists wish we had an easier time doing them. In the prototypical experiment, we actually manipulate one of
the variables (the independent one) and then measure a second variable (the dependent one).

So, for example, you can measure the degree of rotation of the volume knob on your radio, and then measure the
actually volume of the music that comes out of the speakers. What you would find, obviously, is that the further you
turn the knob, the louder the volume. They correlate, but this time, because the knob was actually manipulated
(literally in this case) and the volume measured after, you know that the rotation of the knob is in some way a cause
of the volume.

Taking this idea into the world of personality, we could show people scary movies that have been rated as to how
scary they are. Then we could measure their anxiety (with an instrument that measures how sweaty our hands get,
for example, or with a simple test where we ask them to rate how frightened they are). Then we can see if they
correlate. And, of course, they would to some degree. Plus we now know that the scarier the movie, the more
scared we get. A breakthrough in psychological science!

There are several things that make measurement, correlation, and experiments difficult for personality psychologists.
First, it isn't always easy to measure the kinds of things we are interested in in any meaningful way. Even the
examples of shyness-easygoingness and intelligence and anxiety are iffy at best. How well do people recognize
their own anxiety? How well does a sweat-test relate to anxiety? Can a paper-and-pencil test really tell you if you
are smart or shy?

When we get to some of the most important ideas in personality - ideas like consciousness, anger, love, motivations,
neurosis - the problem looks at present to be insurmountable.

Another difficulty is the problem of control. In experiments, especially, you need to control all the irrelevant
variables in order to see whether the independent variable actually affects the dependent variable. But there are
millions of variables impacting us at every moment. Even our whole history as a person is right there, influencing
the outcome. No sterile lab will ever control those!

Even if you could control many of the variables - the psychological version of a sterile lab - could you now
generalize beyond that situation? People act differently in a lab than at home. They act differently when they are
being observed than when they do in private. Experiments are actually social situations, and they are different from
other social situations. Realism might be the answer, but how does one accomplish realism at the same time as one
keeps control?

Then there's the problem of samples. If a chemist works with a certain rock, he or she can be pretty confident that
other samples of the same rock will respond similarly to any chemicals applied. Even a biologist observing a rat can
feel pretty comfortable that this rat is similar to most rats (although that has been debated!). This is certainly not
true for people.

In psychology, we often use college freshmen as subjects for our research. They are convenient - easily available,
easy to coax into participation (with promises of "points"), passive, docile.... But whatever results you get with
college freshmen, can you generalize them to people in factories? to people on the other side of the world? to
people 100 years ago or 100 years in the future? Can you even generalize to college seniors? This problem
transcends the issues for quantitative methods to qualitative methods as well.

What about qualitative methods, then? Qualitative methods basically involve careful observation of people,
followed by careful description, followed by careful analysis. The problem with qualitative methods is clear: How
can we be certain that the researcher is indeed being careful? Or, indeed, that the researcher is even being honest?
Only by replicating the studies.

There are as many qualitative methods as there are quantitative methods. In some, the researcher actually
introspects - looks into his own experiences - for evidence. This sounds weak, but in fact it is ultimately the only
way for a researcher to directly access the kinds of things that go on in the privacy of his or her own mind! This
method is common among existential psychologists.

Other researchers observe people "in the wild," sort of like ethologists watch birds or chimps or lions, and describe
their behavior. The good thing here is that it is certainly easier to replicate observations than introspections.
Anthropologists typically rely on this method, as do many sociologists.

One of the most common qualitative method in personality is the interview. We ask questions, sometimes
prearranged ones, sometimes by the seat of our pants, of a variety of people who have had a certain experience (such
as being abducted by a UFO) or fall into a certain category (such as being diagnosed as having schizophrenia). The
case study is a version of this that focusses on gaining a rather complete understanding of a single individual, and is
the basis for a great deal of personality theory.

Ultimately, science is just careful observation plus careful thinking. So we personality psychologists do the best we
can with our research methods. That does leave us to consider the business of careful thinking, though, and there are
a couple of particulars there to consider as well.

First, we must always be on guard against ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is (for our purposes) the tendency we all
have to see things from the perspective of our own culture. We are born into our culture, and most of us never truly
leave it. We learn it so young and so thoroughly that it becomes "second nature."

Freud, for example, was born in 1856 in Moravia (part of what is now the Czech Republic). His culture - central
European, German speaking, Victorian era, Jewish... - was quite different from our own (whatever that might be).
One thing his culture taught was that sex was a very bad thing, an animal thing, a sinful thing. Masturbation was
thought to lead to criminality, retardation, and mental illness. Women who were capable of orgasms were assumed
to be nymphomaniacs, unlikely to make good wives and mothers, and possibly destined for prostitution.

Freud is to be respected in that he was able to rise above his cultural attitudes about sex and suggest that sexuality -
even female sexuality - was a natural (if animalistic) aspect of being human, and that repressing one's sexuality
could lead to debilitating psychological disorders. On the other hand, he didn't quite see the possibility of a new
western culture - our own - wherein sexuality was not only accepted as normal but as something we should all be
actively engaged in at every opportunity.

A second thing to be on guard against is egocentrism. Again, for our purposes, we are talking about the tendency to
see our experiences, our lives, as being the standard for all people. Freud was very close to his mother. She was 20
when she had him, while his father was 40. She stayed home to raise him, while his father was working the usual 16
hour days of the time. Little Freud was a child genius who could talk about adult matters by the time he was five.
He was, as his mother once put it, her "golden Siggy."

These circumstances are unusual, even for his time and place. Yet, as he developed his theory, he took it for granted
that the mother-son connection was at the center of psychology for one and all! That, of course, was a mistake:
egocentrism.

Last, we need to be on guard against dogmatism. A dogma is a set of ideas that the person who holds those ideas
will not permit to be criticized. Do you have evidence against my beliefs? I don't want to hear them. Do you notice
some logical flaws in my arguments? They are irrelevant. Dogmas are common in the worlds of religion and
politics, but they have absolutely no place in science! Science should always be open to new evidence and criticism.
Science isn't "Truth;" it is just a movement in that general direction. When someone claims they have "Truth,"
science comes to a grinding halt.

Well, sadly, Freud was guilty of dogmatism. He became so attached to his ideas that he refused to accept
disagreement from his "disciples." (Notice the religious term here!) Some, like Jung and Adler, would eventually
go on to develop their own theories. If only Freud had not been dogmatic, if only he had been open to new ideas
and new evidence and allowed his theory to evolve openly, we might all be "Freudians" today - and "Freudian"
would mean something quite different and much grander.

Enough of this beating around the bush. Let's get started. Where should we start? At the beginning, of course.
And that would be the great master himself, Sigmund Freud.

SIGMUND FREUD

1856 - 1939

Dr. C. George Boeree

It is a mistake to believe that a science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to
demand that it should. It is a demand only made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form and a need
to replace the religious catechism by something else, even if it be a scientific one. Science in its catechism has but
few apodictic precepts; it consists mainly of statements which it has developed to varying degrees of probability.
The capacity to be content with these approximations to certainty and the ability to carry on constructive work
despite the lack of final confirmation are actually a mark of the scientific habit of mind. -- Freud

Freud's story, like most people's stories, begins with others. In his case those others were his mentor and friend, Dr.
Joseph Breuer, and Breuer's patient, called Anna O.

Anna O. was Joseph Breuer's patient from 1880 through 1882. Twenty one years old, Anna spent most of her time
nursing her ailing father. She developed a bad cough that proved to have no physical basis. She developed some
speech difficulties, then became mute, and then began speaking only in English, rather than her usual German.

When her father died she began to refuse food, and developed an unusual set of problems. She lost the feeling in her
hands and feet, developed some paralysis, and began to have involuntary spasms. She also had visual hallucinations
and tunnel vision. But when specialists were consulted, no physical causes for these problems could be found.

If all this weren't enough, she had fairy-tale fantasies, dramatic mood swings, and made several suicide attempts.
Breuer's diagnosis was that she was suffering from what was then called hysteria (now called conversion disorder),
which meant she had symptoms that appeared to be physical, but were not.

In the evenings, Anna would sink into states of what Breuer called "spontaneous hypnosis," or what Anna herself
called "clouds." Breuer found that, during these trance-like states, she could explain her day-time fantasies and other
experiences, and she felt better afterwards. Anna called these episodes "chimney sweeping" and "the talking cure."

Sometimes during "chimney sweeping," some emotional event was recalled that gave meaning to some particular
symptom. The first example came soon after she had refused to drink for a while: She recalled seeing a woman drink
from a glass that a dog had just drunk from. While recalling this, she experienced strong feelings of disgust...and
then had a drink of water! In other words, her symptom -- an avoidance of water -- disappeared as soon as she
remembered its root event, and experienced the strong emotion that would be appropriate to that event. Breuer called
this catharsis, from the Greek word for cleansing.
It was eleven years later that Breuer and his assistant, Sigmund Freud, wrote a book on hysteria. In it they explained
their theory: Every hysteria is the result of a traumatic experience, one that cannot be integrated into the person's
understanding of the world. The emotions appropriate to the trauma are not expressed in any direct fashion, but do
not simply evaporate: They express themselves in behaviors that in a weak, vague way offer a response to the
trauma. These symptoms are, in other words, meaningful. When the client can be made aware of the meanings of his
or her symptoms (through hypnosis, for example) then the unexpressed emotions are released and so no longer need
to express themselves as symptoms. It is analogous to lancing a boil or draining an infection.

In this way, Anna got rid of symptom after symptom. But it must be noted that she needed Breuer to do this:
Whenever she was in one of her hypnotic states, she had to feel his hands to make sure it was him before talking!
And sadly, new problems continued to arise.

According to Freud, Breuer recognized that she had fallen in love with him, and that he was falling in love with her.
Plus, she was telling everyone she was pregnant with his child. You might say she wanted it so badly that her mind
told her body it was true, and she developed an hysterical pregnancy. Breuer, a married man in a Victorian era,
abruptly ended their sessions together, and lost all interest in hysteria.

It was Freud who would later add what Breuer did not acknowledge publicly -- that secret sexual desires lay at the
bottom of all these hysterical neuroses.

To finish her story, Anna spent time in a sanatorium. Later, she became a well-respected and active figure -- the first
social worker in Germany -- under her true name, Bertha Pappenheim. She died in 1936. She will be remembered,
not only for her own accomplishments, but as the inspiration for the most influential personality theory we have ever
had.

BIOGRAPHY

Sigmund Freud was born May 6, 1856, in a small town -- Freiberg -- in Moravia. His father was a wool merchant
with a keen mind and a good sense of humor. His mother was a lively woman, her husband's second wife and 20
years younger. She was 21 years old when she gave birth to her first son, her darling, Sigmund. Sigmund had two
older half-brothers and six younger siblings. When he was four or five -- he wasn't sure -- the family moved to
Vienna, where he lived most of his life.

A brilliant child, always at the head of his class, he went to medical school, one of the few viable options for a bright
Jewish boy in Vienna those days. There, he became involved in research under the direction of a physiology
professor named Ernst Brücke. Brücke believed in what was then a popular, if radical, notion, which we now call
reductionism: "No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism." Freud
would spend many years trying to "reduce" personality to neurology, a cause he later gave up on.

Freud was very good at his research, concentrating on neurophysiology, even inventing a special cell-staining
technique. But only a limited number of positions were available, and there were others ahead of him. Brücke helped
him to get a grant to study, first with the great psychiatrist Charcot in Paris, then with his rival Bernheim in Nancy.
Both these gentlemen were investigating the use of hypnosis with hysterics.

After spending a short time as a resident in neurology and director of a children's ward in Berlin, he came back to
Vienna, married his fiancée of many years Martha Bernays, and set up a practice in neuropsychiatry, with the help
of Joseph Breuer.

Freud's books and lectures brought him both fame and ostracism from the mainstream of the medical community.
He drew around him a number of very bright sympathizers who became the core of the psychoanalytic movement.
Unfortunately, Freud had a penchant for rejecting people who did not totally agree with him. Some separated from
him on friendly terms; others did not, and went on to found competing schools of thought.

Freud emigrated to England just before World War II when Vienna became an increasing dangerous place for Jews,
especially ones as famous as Freud. Not long afterward, he died of the cancer of the mouth and jaw that he had
suffered from for the last 20 years of his life.
 THEORY

Freud didn't exactly invent the idea of the conscious versus unconscious mind, but he certainly was responsible for
making it popular. The conscious mind is what you are aware of at any particular moment, your present perceptions,
memories, thoughts, fantasies, feelings, what have you. Working closely with the conscious mind is what Freud
called the preconscious, what we might today call "available memory:" anything that can easily be made conscious,
the memories you are not at the moment thinking about but can readily bring to mind. Now no-one has a problem
with these two layers of mind. But Freud suggested that these are the smallest parts!

The largest part by far is the unconscious. It includes all the things that are not easily available to awareness,
including many things that have their origins there, such as our drives or instincts, and things that are put there
because we can't bear to look at them, such as the memories and emotions associated with trauma.

According to Freud, the unconscious is the source of our motivations, whether they be simple desires for food or
sex, neurotic compulsions, or the motives of an artist or scientist. And yet, we are often driven to deny or resist
becoming conscious of these motives, and they are often available to us only in disguised form. We will come back
to this.

The id, the ego, and the superego

Freudian psychological reality begins with the world, full of objects. Among them is a very special object, the
organism. The organism is special in that it acts to survive and reproduce, and it is guided toward those ends by its
needs -- hunger, thirst, the avoidance of pain, and sex.

A part -- a very important part -- of the organism is the nervous system, which has as one of its characteristics a
sensitivity to the organism's needs. At birth, that nervous system is little more than that of any other animal, an "it"
or id. The nervous system, as id, translates the organism's needs into motivational forces called, in German, Triebe,
which has been translated as instincts or drives. Freud also called them wishes. This translation from need to wish is
called the primary process.

The id works in keeping with the pleasure principle, which can be understood as a demand to take care of needs
immediately. Just picture the hungry infant, screaming itself blue. It doesn't "know" what it wants in any adult sense;
it just knows that it wants it and it wants it now. The infant, in the Freudian view, is pure, or nearly pure id. And the
id is nothing if not the psychic representative of biology.

Unfortunately, although a wish for food, such as the image of a juicy steak, might be enough to satisfy the id, it isn't
enough to satisfy the organism. The need only gets stronger, and the wishes just keep coming. You may have
noticed that, when you haven't satisfied some need, such as the need for food, it begins to demand more and more of
your attention, until there comes a point where you can't think of anything else. This is the wish or drive breaking
into consciousness.

Luckily for the organism, there is that small portion of the mind we discussed before, the conscious, that is hooked
up to the world through the senses. Around this little bit of consciousness, during the first year of a child's life, some
of the "it" becomes "I," some of the id becomes ego. The ego relates the organism to reality by means of its
consciousness, and it searches for objects to satisfy the wishes that id creates to represent the organisms needs. This
problem-solving activity is called the secondary process.

The ego, unlike the id, functions according to the reality principle, which says "take care of a need as soon as an
appropriate object is found." It represents reality and, to a considerable extent, reason.

However, as the ego struggles to keep the id (and, ultimately, the organism) happy, it meets with obstacles in the
world. It occasionally meets with objects that actually assist it in attaining its goals. And it keeps a record of these
obstacles and aides. In particular, it keeps track of the rewards and punishments meted out by two of the most
influential objects in the world of the child -- mom and dad. This record of things to avoid and strategies to take
becomes the superego. It is not completed until about seven years of age. In some people, it never is completed.
There are two aspects to the superego: One is the conscience, which is an internalization of punishments and
warnings. The other is called the ego ideal. It derives from rewards and positive models presented to the child. The
conscience and ego ideal communicate their requirements to the ego with feelings like pride, shame, and guilt.

It is as if we acquired, in childhood, a new set of needs and accompanying wishes, this time of social rather than
biological origins. Unfortunately, these new wishes can easily conflict with the ones from the id. You see, the
superego represents society, and society often wants nothing better than to have you never satisfy your needs at all!

Life instincts and the death instinct

Freud saw all human behavior as motivated by the drives or instincts, which in turn are the neurological
representations of physical needs. At first, he referred to them as the life instincts. These instincts perpetuate (a) the
life of the individual, by motivating him or her to seek food and water, and (b) the life of the species, by motivating
him or her to have sex. The motivational energy of these life instincts, the "oomph" that powers our psyches, he
called libido, from the Latin word for "I desire."

Freud's clinical experience led him to view sex as much more important in the dynamics of the psyche than other
needs. We are, after all, social creatures, and sex is the most social of needs. Plus, we have to remember that Freud
included much more than intercourse in the term sex! Anyway, libido has come to mean, not any old drive, but the
sex drive.

Later in his life, Freud began to believe that the life instincts didn't tell the whole story. Libido is a lively thing; the
pleasure principle keeps us in perpetual motion. And yet the goal of all this motion is to be still, to be satisfied, to be
at peace, to have no more needs. The goal of life, you might say, is death! Freud began to believe that "under" and
"beside" the life instincts there was a death instinct. He began to believe that every person has an unconscious wish
to die.

This seems like a strange idea at first, and it was rejected by many of his students, but I think it has some basis in
experience: Life can be a painful and exhausting process. There is easily, for the great majority of people in the
world, more pain than pleasure in life -- something we are extremely reluctant to admit! Death promises release
from the struggle.

Freud referred to a nirvana principle. Nirvana is a Buddhist idea, often translated as heaven, but actually meaning
"blowing out," as in the blowing out of a candle. It refers to nonexistence, nothingness, the void, which is the goal of
all life in Buddhist philosophy.

The day-to-day evidence of the death instinct and its nirvana principle is in our desire for peace, for escape from
stimulation, our attraction to alcohol and narcotics, our penchant for escapist activity, such as losing ourselves in
books or movies, our craving for rest and sleep. Sometimes it presents itself openly as suicide and suicidal wishes.
And, Freud theorized, sometimes we direct it out away from ourselves, in the form of aggression, cruelty, murder,
and destructiveness.

Anxiety

Freud once said "life is not easy!"

The ego -- the "I" -- sits at the center of some pretty powerful forces: reality; society, as represented by the superego;
biology, as represented by the id. When these make conflicting demands upon the poor ego, it is understandable if it
-- if you -- feel threatened, feel overwhelmed, feel as if it were about to collapse under the weight of it all. This
feeling is called anxiety, and it serves as a signal to the ego that its survival, and with it the survival of the whole
organism, is in jeopardy.

Freud mentions three different kind of anxieties: The first is realistic anxiety, which you and I would call fear.
Actually Freud did, too, in German. But his translators thought "fear" too mundane! Nevertheless, if I throw you
into a pit of poisonous snakes, you might experience realistic anxiety.
The second is moral anxiety. This is what we feel when the threat comes not from the outer, physical world, but
from the internalized social world of the superego. It is, in fact, just another word for feelings like shame and guilt
and the fear of punishment.

The last is neurotic anxiety. This is the fear of being overwhelmed by impulses from the id. If you have ever felt
like you were about to "lose it," lose control, your temper, your rationality, or even your mind, you have felt neurotic
anxiety. Neurotic is actually the Latin word for nervous, so this is nervous anxiety. It is this kind of anxiety that
intrigued Freud most, and we usually just call it anxiety, plain and simple.

THE DEFENSE MECHANISMS

The ego deals with the demands of reality, the id, and the superego as best as it can. But when the anxiety becomes
overwhelming, the ego must defend itself. It does so by unconsciously blocking the impulses or distorting them into
a more acceptable, less threatening form. The techniques are called the ego defense mechanisms, and Freud, his
daughter Anna, and other disciples have discovered quite a few.

Denial involves blocking external events from awareness. If some situation is just too much to handle, the person
just refuses to experience it. As you might imagine, this is a primitive and dangerous defense -- no one disregards
reality and gets away with it for long! It can operate by itself or, more commonly, in combination with other, more
subtle mechanisms that support it.

I was once reading while my five year old daughter was watching a cartoon (The Smurfs, I think). She was, as was
her habit, quite close to the television, when a commercial came on. Apparently, no-one at the television station was
paying much attention, because this was a commercial for a horror movie, complete with bloody knife, hockey
mask, and screams of terror. Now I wasn't able to save my child from this horror, so I did what any good
psychologist father would do: I talked about it. I said to her "Boy, that was a scary commercial, wasn't it?" She said
"Huh?" I said "That commercial...it sure was scary wasn't it?" She said "What commercial?" I said "The commercial
that was just on, with the blood and the mask and the screaming...!" She had apparently shut out the whole thing.

Since then, I've noticed little kids sort of glazing over when confronted by things they'd rather not be confronted by.
I've also seen people faint at autopsies, people deny the reality of the death of a loved one, and students fail to pick
up their test results. That's denial.

Anna Freud also mentions denial in fantasy: This is when children, in their imaginations, transform an "evil" father
into a loving teddy bear, or a helpless child into a powerful superhero.

Repression, which Anna Freud also called "motivated forgetting," is just that: not being able to recall a threatening
situation, person, or event. This, too, is dangerous, and is a part of most other defenses.

As an adolescent, I developed a rather strong fear of spiders, especially long-legged ones. I didn't know where it
came from, but it was starting to get rather embarrassing by the time I entered college. At college, a counselor
helped me to get over it (with a technique called systematic desensitization), but I still had no idea where it came
from. Years later, I had a dream, a particularly clear one, that involved getting locked up by my cousin in a shed
behind my grandparents' house when I was very young. The shed was small, dark, and had a dirt floor covered with
-- you guessed it! -- long-legged spiders.

The Freudian understanding of this phobia is pretty simple: I repressed a traumatic event -- the shed incident -- but
seeing spiders aroused the anxiety of the event without arousing the memory.

Other examples abound. Anna Freud provides one that now strikes us as quaint: A young girl, guilty about her rather
strong sexual desires, tends to forget her boy-friend's name, even when trying to introduce him to her relations! Or
an alcoholic can't remember his suicide attempt, claiming he must have "blacked out." Or when someone almost
drowns as a child, but can't remember the event even when people try to remind him -- but he does have this fear of
open water!
Note that, to be a true example of a defense, it should function unconsciously. My brother had a fear of dogs as a
child, but there was no defense involved: He had been bitten by one, and wanted very badly never to repeat the
experience! Usually, it is the irrational fears we call phobias that derive from repression of traumas.

Asceticism, or the renunciation of needs, is one most people haven't heard of, but it has become relevant again today
with the emergence of the disorder called anorexia. Preadolescents, when they feel threatened by their emerging
sexual desires, may unconsciously try to protect themselves by denying, not only their sexual desires, but all desires.
They get involved in some kind of ascetic (monk-like) lifestyle wherein they renounce their interest in what other
people enjoy.

In boys nowadays, there is a great deal of interest in the self-discipline of the martial arts. Fortunately, the martial
arts not only don't hurt you (much), they may actually help you. Unfortunately, girls in our society often develop a
great deal of interest in attaining an excessively and artificially thin standard of beauty. In Freudian theory, their
denial of their need for food is actually a cover for their denial of their sexual development. Our society conspires
with them: After all, what most societies consider a normal figure for a mature woman is in ours considered 20
pounds overweight!

Anna Freud also discusses a milder version of this called restriction of ego. Here, a person loses interest in some
aspect of life and focuses it elsewhere, in order to avoid facing reality. A young girl who has been rejected by the
object of her affections may turn away from feminine things and become a "sex-less intellectual," or a boy who is
afraid that he may be humiliated on the football team may unaccountably become deeply interested in poetry.

Isolation (sometimes called intellectualization) involves stripping the emotion from a difficult memory or
threatening impulse. A person may, in a very cavalier manner, acknowledge that they had been abused as a child, or
may show a purely intellectual curiosity in their newly discovered sexual orientation. Something that should be a big
deal is treated as if it were not.

In emergency situations, many people find themselves completely calm and collected until the emergency is over, at
which point they fall to pieces. Something tells you that, during the emergency, you can't afford to fall apart. It is
common to find someone totally immersed in the social obligations surrounding the death of a loved one. Doctors
and nurses must learn to separate their natural reactions to blood, wounds, needles, and scalpels, and treat the
patient, temporarily, as something less than a warm, wonderful human being with friends and family. Adolescents
often go through a stage where they are obsessed with horror movies, perhaps to come to grips with their own fears.
Nothing demonstrates isolation more clearly than a theater full of people laughing hysterically while someone is
shown being dismembered.

Displacement is the redirection of an impulse onto a substitute target. If the impulse, the desire, is okay with you,
but the person you direct that desire towards is too threatening, you can displace to someone or something that can
serve as a symbolic substitute.

Someone who hates his or her mother may repress that hatred, but direct it instead towards, say, women in general.
Someone who has not had the chance to love someone may substitute cats or dogs for human beings. Someone who
feels uncomfortable with their sexual desire for a real person may substitute a fetish. Someone who is frustrated by
his or her superiors may go home and kick the dog, beat up a family member, or engage in cross-burnings.

Turning against the self is a very special form of displacement, where the person becomes their own substitute
target. It is normally used in reference to hatred, anger, and aggression, rather than more positive impulses, and it is
the Freudian explanation for many of our feelings of inferiority, guilt, and depression. The idea that depression is
often the result of the anger we refuse to acknowledge is accepted by many people, Freudians and non-Freudians
alike.

Once upon a time, at a time when I was not feeling my best, my daughter, five years old, spilled an entire glass of
chocolate milk in the living room. I lashed out at her verbally, telling her she was clumsy and had to learn to be
more careful and how often hadn't I told her and...well, you know. She stood there stiffly with a sort of smoldering
look in her eyes, and, of all things, pounded herself on her own head several times! Obviously, she would rather
have pounded my head, but, well, you just don't do that, do you? Needless to say, I've felt guilty ever since.

Projection, which Anna Freud also called displacement outward, is almost the complete opposite of turning against
the self. It involves the tendency to see your own unacceptable desires in other people. In other words, the desires
are still there, but they're not your desires anymore. I confess that whenever I hear someone going on and on about
how aggressive everybody is, or how perverted they all are, I tend to wonder if this person doesn't have an
aggressive or sexual streak in themselves that they'd rather not acknowledge.

Let me give you a couple of examples: A husband, a good and faithful one, finds himself terribly attracted to the
charming and flirtatious lady next door. But rather than acknowledge his own, hardly abnormal, lusts, he becomes
increasingly jealous of his wife, constantly worried about her faithfulness, and so on. Or a woman finds herself
having vaguely sexual feelings about her girlfriends. Instead of acknowledging those feelings as quite normal, she
becomes increasingly concerned with the presence of lesbians in her community.

Altruistic surrender is a form of projection that at first glance looks like its opposite: Here, the person attempts to
fulfill his or her own needs vicariously, through other people.

A common example of this is the friend (we've all had one) who, while not seeking any relationship himself, is
constantly pushing other people into them, and is particularly curious as to "what happened last night" and "how are
things going?" The extreme example of altruistic surrender is the person who lives their whole life for and through
another.

Reaction formation, which Anna Freud called "believing the opposite," is changing an unacceptable impulse into
its opposite. So a child, angry at his or her mother, may become overly concerned with her and rather dramatically
shower her with affection. An abused child may run to the abusing parent. Or someone who can't accept a
homosexual impulse may claim to despise homosexuals.

Perhaps the most common and clearest example of reaction formation is found in children between seven and eleven
or so: Most boys will tell you in no uncertain terms how disgusting girls are, and girls will tell you with equal vigor
how gross boys are. Adults watching their interactions, however, can tell quite easily what their true feelings are!

Undoing involves "magical" gestures or rituals that are meant to cancel out unpleasant thoughts or feelings after
they've already occurred. Anna Freud mentions, for example, a boy who would recite the alphabet backwards
whenever he had a sexual thought, or turn around and spit whenever meeting another boy who shared his passion for
masturbation.

In "normal" people, the undoing is, of course, more conscious, and we might engage in an act of atonement for some
behavior, or formally ask for forgiveness. But in some people, the act of atonement isn't conscious at all. Consider
the alcoholic father who, after a year of verbal and perhaps physical abuse, puts on the best and biggest Christmas
ever for his kids. When the season is over, and the kids haven't quite been fooled by his magical gesture, he returns
to his bartender with complaints about how ungrateful his family is, and how they drive him to drink.

One of the classic examples of undoing concerns personal hygiene following sex: It is perfectly reasonable to wash
up after sex. After all, it can get messy! But if you feel the need to take three or four complete showers using gritty
soap -- perhaps sex doesn't quite agree with you.

Introjection, sometimes called identification, involves taking into your own personality characteristics of someone
else, because doing so solves some emotional difficulty. For example, a child who is left alone frequently, may in
some way try to become "mom" in order to lessen his or her fears. You can sometimes catch them telling their dolls
or animals not to be afraid. And we find the older child or teenager imitating his or her favorite star, musician, or
sports hero in an effort to establish an identity.

A more unusual example is a woman who lived next to my grandparents. Her husband had died and she began to
dress in his clothes, albeit neatly tailored to her figure. She began to take up various of his habits, such as smoking a
pipe. Although the neighbors found it strange and referred to her as "the man-woman," she was not suffering from
any confusion about her sexual identity. In fact, she later remarried, retaining to the end her men's suits and pipe!

I must add here that identification is very important to Freudian theory as the mechanism by which we develop our
superegos.

Identification with the aggressor is a version of introjection that focuses on the adoption, not of general or positive
traits, but of negative or feared traits. If you are afraid of someone, you can partially conquer that fear by becoming
more like them. Two of my daughters, growing up with a particularly moody cat, could often be seen meowing,
hissing, spitting, and arching their backs in an effort to keep that cat from springing out of a closet or dark corner
and trying to eat their ankles.

A more dramatic example is one called the Stockholm Syndrome. After a hostage crisis in Stockholm, psychologists
were surprised to find that the hostages were not only not terribly angry at their captors, but often downright
sympathetic. A more recent case involved a young woman named Patty Hearst, of the wealthy and influential Hearst
family. She was captured by a very small group of self-proclaimed revolutionaries called the Symbionese Liberation
Army. She was kept in closets, raped, and otherwise mistreated. Yet she apparently decided to join them, making
little propaganda videos for them and even waving a machine gun around during a bank robbery. When she was
later tried, psychologists strongly suggested she was a victim, not a criminal. She was nevertheless convicted of
bank robbery and sentenced to 7 years in prison. Her sentence was commuted by President Carter after 2 years.

Regression is a movement back in psychological time when one is faced with stress. When we are troubled or
frightened, our behaviors often become more childish or primitive. A child may begin to suck their thumb again or
wet the bed when they need to spend some time in the hospital. Teenagers may giggle uncontrollably when
introduced into a social situation involving the opposite sex. A freshman college student may need to bring an old
toy from home. A gathering of civilized people may become a violent mob when they are led to believe their
livelihoods are at stake. Or an older man, after spending twenty years at a company and now finding himself laid off,
may retire to his recliner and become childishly dependent on his wife.

Where do we retreat when faced with stress? To the last time in life when we felt safe and secure, according to
Freudian theory.

Rationalization is the cognitive distortion of "the facts" to make an event or an impulse less threatening. We do it
often enough on a fairly conscious level when we provide ourselves with excuses. But for many people, with
sensitive egos, making excuses comes so easy that they never are truly aware of it. In other words, many of us are
quite prepared to believe our lies.

A useful way of understanding the defenses is to see them as a combination of denial or repression with various
kinds of rationalizations.

All defenses are, of course, lies, even if we are not conscious of making them. But that doesn't make them less
dangerous -- in fact it makes them more so. As your grandma may have told you, "Oh what a tangled web we
weave..." Lies breed lies, and take us further and further from the truth, from reality. After a while, the ego can no
longer take care of the id's demands, or pay attention to the superego's. The anxieties come rushing back, and you
break down.

And yet Freud saw defenses as necessary. You can hardly expect a person, especially a child, to take the pain and
sorrow of life full on! While some of his followers suggested that all of the defenses could be used positively, Freud
himself suggested that there was one positive defense, which he called sublimation.

Sublimation is the transforming of an unacceptable impulse, whether it be sex, anger, fear, or whatever, into a
socially acceptable, even productive form. So someone with a great deal of hostility may become a hunter, a
butcher, a football player, or a mercenary. Someone suffering from a great deal of anxiety in a confusing world may
become an organizer, a businessperson, or a scientist. Someone with powerful sexual desires may become an artist, a
photographer, or a novelist, and so on. For Freud, in fact, all positive, creative activities were sublimations, and
predominantly of the sex drive.

THE STAGES

As I said earlier, for Freud, the sex drive is the most important motivating force. In fact, Freud felt it was the
primary motivating force not only for adults but for children and even infants. When he introduced his ideas about
infantile sexuality to the Viennese public of his day, they were hardly prepared to talk about sexuality in adults,
much less in infants!

It is true that the capacity for orgasm is there neurologically from birth. But Freud was not just talking about orgasm.
Sexuality meant not only intercourse, but all pleasurable sensation from the skin. It is clear even to the most prudish
among us that babies, children, and, of course, adults, enjoy tactile experiences such as caresses, kisses, and so on.

Freud noted that, at different times in our lives, different parts of our skin give us greatest pleasure. Later theorists
would call these areas erogenous zones. It appeared to Freud that the infant found its greatest pleasure in sucking,
especially at the breast. In fact, babies have a penchant for bringing nearly everything in their environment into
contact with their mouths. A bit later in life, the child focuses on the anal pleasures of holding it in and letting go.
By three or four, the child may have discovered the pleasure of touching or rubbing against his or her genitalia. Only
later, in our sexual maturity, do we find our greatest pleasure in sexual intercourse. In these observations, Freud had
the makings of a psychosexual stage theory.

The oral stage lasts from birth to about 18 months. The focus of pleasure is, of course, the mouth. Sucking and
biting are favorite activities.

The anal stage lasts from about 18 months to three or four years old. The focus of pleasure is the anus. Holding it in
and letting it go are greatly enjoyed.

The phallic stage lasts from three or four to five, six, or seven years old. The focus of pleasure is the genitalia.
Masturbation is common.

The latent stage lasts from five, six, or seven to puberty, that is, somewhere around 12 years old. During this stage,
Freud believed that the sexual impulse was suppressed in the service of learning. I must note that, while most
children seem to be fairly calm, sexually, during their grammar school years, perhaps up to a quarter of them are
quite busy masturbating and playing "doctor." In Freud's repressive era, these children were, at least, quieter than
their modern counterparts.

The genital stage begins at puberty, and represents the resurgence of the sex drive in adolescence, and the more
specific focusing of pleasure in sexual intercourse. Freud felt that masturbation, oral sex, homosexuality, and many
other things we find acceptable in adulthood today, were immature.

This is a true stage theory, meaning that Freudians believe that we all go through these stages, in this order, and
pretty close to these ages.

THE OEDIPAL CRISIS

Each stage has certain difficult tasks associated with it where problems are more likely to arise. For the oral stage,
this is weaning. For the anal stage, it's potty training. For the phallic stage, it is the Oedipal crisis, named after the
ancient Greek story of king Oedipus, who inadvertently killed his father and married his mother.

Here's how the Oedipal crisis works: The first love-object for all of us is our mother. We want her attention, we
want her affection, we want her caresses, we want her, in a broadly sexual way. The young boy, however, has a rival
for his mother's charms: his father! His father is bigger, stronger, smarter, and he gets to sleep with mother, while
junior pines away in his lonely little bed. Dad is the enemy.

About the time the little boy recognizes this archetypal situation, he has become aware of some of the more subtle
differences between boys and girls, the ones other than hair length and clothing styles. From his naive perspective,
the difference is that he has a penis, and girls do not. At this point in life, it seems to the child that having something
is infinitely better than not having something, and so he is pleased with this state of affairs.

But the question arises: where is the girl's penis? Perhaps she has lost it somehow. Perhaps it was cut off. Perhaps
this could happen to him! This is the beginning of castration anxiety, a slight misnomer for the fear of losing one's
penis.

To return to the story, the boy, recognizing his father's superiority and fearing for his penis, engages some of his ego
defenses: He displaces his sexual impulses from his mother to girls and, later, women; And he identifies with the
aggressor, dad, and attempts to become more and more like him, that is to say, a man. After a few years of latency,
he enters adolescence and the world of mature heterosexuality.

The girl also begins her life in love with her mother, so we have the problem of getting her to switch her affections
to her father before the Oedipal process can take place. Freud accomplishes this with the idea of penis envy: The
young girl, too, has noticed the difference between boys and girls and feels that she, somehow, doesn't measure up.
She would like to have one, too, and all the power associated with it. At very least, she would like a penis substitute,
such as a baby. As every child knows, you need a father as well as a mother to have a baby, so the young girl sets
her sights on dad.

Dad, of course, is already taken. The young girl displaces from him to boys and men, and identifies with mom, the
woman who got the man she really wanted. Note that one thing is missing here: The girl does not suffer from the
powerful motivation of castration anxiety, since she cannot lose what she doesn't have. Freud felt that the lack of
this great fear accounts for the fact (as he saw it) that women were both less firmly heterosexual than men and
somewhat less morally-inclined.

Before you get too upset by this less-than-flattering account of women's sexuality, rest assured that many people
have responded to it. I will discuss it in the discussion section.

Character

Your experiences as you grow up contribute to your personality, or character, as an adult. Freud felt that traumatic
experiences had an especially strong effect. Of course, each specific trauma would have its own unique impact on a
person, which can only be explored and understood on an individual basis. But traumas associated with stage
development, since we all have to go through them, should have more consistency.

If you have difficulties in any of the tasks associated with the stages -- weaning, potty training, or finding your
sexual identity -- you will tend to retain certain infantile or childish habits. This is called fixation. Fixation gives
each problem at each stage a long-term effect in terms of our personality or character.

If you, in the first eight months of your life, are often frustrated in your need to suckle, perhaps because mother is
uncomfortable or even rough with you, or tries to wean you too early, then you may develop an oral-passive
character. An oral-passive personality tends to be rather dependent on others. They often retain an interest in "oral
gratifications" such as eating, drinking, and smoking. It is as if they were seeking the pleasures they missed in
infancy.

When we are between five and eight months old, we begin teething. One satisfying thing to do when you are
teething is to bite on something, like mommy's nipple. If this causes a great deal of upset and precipitates an early
weaning, you may develop an oral-aggressive personality. These people retain a life-long desire to bite on things,
such as pencils, gum, and other people. They have a tendency to be verbally aggressive, argumentative, sarcastic,
and so on.

In the anal stage, we are fascinated with our "bodily functions." At first, we can go whenever and wherever we
like. Then, out of the blue and for no reason you can understand, the powers that be want you to do it only at certain
times and in certain places. And parents seem to actually value the end product of all this effort!
Some parents put themselves at the child's mercy in the process of toilet training. They beg, they cajole, they show
great joy when you do it right, they act as though their hearts were broken when you don't. The child is the king of
the house, and knows it. This child will grow up to be an anal expulsive (a.k.a. anal aggressive) personality. These
people tend to be sloppy, disorganized, generous to a fault. They may be cruel, destructive, and given to vandalism
and graffiti. The Oscar Madison character in The Odd Couple is a nice example.

Other parents are strict. They may be competing with their neighbors and relatives as to who can potty train their
child first (early potty training being associated in many people's minds with great intelligence). They may use
punishment or humiliation. This child will likely become constipated as he or she tries desperately to hold it in at all
times, and will grow up to be an anal retentive personality. He or she will tend to be especially clean, perfectionistic,
dictatorial, very stubborn, and stingy. In other words, the anal retentive is tight in all ways. The Felix Unger
character in The Odd Couple is a perfect example.

There are also two phallic personalities, although no-one has given them names. If the boy is harshly rejected by his
mother, and rather threatened by his very masculine father, he is likely to have a poor sense of self-worth when it
comes to his sexuality. He may deal with this by either withdrawing from heterosexual interaction, perhaps
becoming a book-worm, or by putting on a rather macho act and playing the ladies' man. A girl rejected by her
father and threatened by her very feminine mother is also likely to feel poorly about herself, and may become a wall-
flower or a hyper-feminine "belle."

But if a boy is not rejected by his mother, but rather favored over his weak, milquetoast father, he may develop quite
an opinion of himself (which may suffer greatly when he gets into the real world, where nobody loves him like his
mother did), and may appear rather effeminate. After all, he has no cause to identify with his father. Likewise, if a
girl is daddy's little princess and best buddy, and mommy has been relegated to a sort of servant role, then she may
become quite vain and self-centered, or possibly rather masculine.

These various phallic characters demonstrate an important point in Freudian characterology: Extremes lead to
extremes. If you are frustrated in some way or overindulged in some way, you have problems. And, although each
problem tends to lead to certain characteristics, these characteristics can also easily be reversed. So an anal retentive
person may suddenly become exceedingly generous, or may have some part of their life where they are terribly
messy. This is frustrating to scientists, but it may reflect the reality of personality!

Therapy

Freud's therapy has been more influential than any other, and more influential than any other part of his theory. Here
are some of the major points:

Relaxed atmosphere. The client must feel free to express anything. The therapy situation is in fact a unique social
situation, one where you do not have to be afraid of social judgment or ostracism. In fact, in Freudian therapy, the
therapist practically disappears. Add to that the physically relaxing couch, dim lights, sound-proof walls, and the
stage is set.

Free association. The client may talk about anything at all. The theory is that, with relaxation, the unconscious
conflicts will inevitably drift to the fore. It isn't far off to see a similarity between Freudian therapy and dreaming!
However, in therapy, there is the therapist, who is trained to recognize certain clues to problems and their solutions
that the client would overlook.

Resistance. One of these clues is resistance. When a client tries to change the topic, draws a complete blank, falls
asleep, comes in late, or skips an appointment altogether, the therapist says "aha!" These resistances suggest that the
client is nearing something in his free associations that he -- unconsciously, of course -- finds threatening.

Dream analysis. In sleep, we are somewhat less resistant to our unconscious and we will allow a few things, in
symbolic form, of course, to come to awareness. These wishes from the id provide the therapist and client with more
clues. Many forms of therapy make use of the client's dreams, but Freudian interpretation is distinct in the tendency
to find sexual meanings.
Parapraxes. A parapraxis is a slip of the tongue, often called a Freudian slip. Freud felt that they were also clues to
unconscious conflicts. Freud was also interested in the jokes his clients told. In fact, Freud felt that almost
everything meant something almost all the time -- dialing a wrong number, making a wrong turn, misspelling a
word, were serious objects of study for Freud. However, he himself noted, in response to a student who asked what
his cigar might be a symbol for, that "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." Or is it?

Other Freudians became interested in projective tests, such as the famous Rorschach or inkblot tests. The theory
behind these test is that, when the stimulus is vague, the client fills it with his or her own unconscious themes.
Again, these could provide the therapist with clues.

Transference, catharsis, and insight

Transference occurs when a client projects feelings toward the therapist that more legitimately belong with certain
important others. Freud felt that transference was necessary in therapy in order to bring the repressed emotions that
have been plaguing the client for so long, to the surface. You can't feel really angry, for example, without a real
person to be angry at. The relationship between the client and the therapist, contrary to popular images, is very close
in Freudian therapy, although it is understood that it can't get out of hand.

Catharsis is the sudden and dramatic outpouring of emotion that occurs when the trauma is resurrected. The box of
tissues on the end table is not there for decoration.

Insight is being aware of the source of the emotion, of the original traumatic event. The major portion of the therapy
is completed when catharsis and insight are experienced. What should have happened many years ago -- because
you were too little to deal with it, or under too many conflicting pressures -- has now happened, and you are on your
way to becoming a happier person.

Freud said that the goal of therapy is simply "to make the unconscious conscious."

DISCUSSION

The only thing more common than a blind admiration for Freud seems to be an equally blind hatred for him.
Certainly, the proper attitude lies somewhere in between. Let's start by exploring some of the apparent flaws in his
theory.

The least popular part of Freud's theory is the Oedipal complex and the associated ideas of castration anxiety and
penis envy. What is the reality behind these concepts? It is true that some children are very attached to their opposite
sex parent, and very competitive with their same-sex parent. It is true that some boys worry about the differences
between boys and girls, and fear that someone may cut their penis off. It is true that some girls likewise are
concerned, and wish they had a penis. And it is true that some of these children retain these affections, fears, and
aspirations into adulthood.

Most personality theorists, however, consider these examples aberrations rather than universals, exceptions rather
than rules. They occur in families that aren't working as well as they should, where parents are unhappy with each
other, use their children against each other. They occur in families where parents literally denigrate girls for their
supposed lack, and talk about cutting off the penises of unruly boys. They occur especially in neighborhoods where
correct information on even the simplest sexual facts is not forthcoming, and children learn mistaken ideas from
other children.

If we view the Oedipal crisis, castration anxiety, and penis envy in a more metaphoric and less literal fashion, they
are useful concepts: We do love our mothers and fathers as well as compete with them. Children probably do learn
the standard heterosexual behavior patterns by imitating the same-sex parent and practicing on the opposite-sex
parent. In a maledominated society, having a penis -- being male -- is better than not, and losing one's status as a
male is scary. And wanting the privileges of the male, rather than the male organ, is a reasonable thing to expect in a
girl with aspirations. But Freud did not mean for us to take these concepts metaphorically. Some of his followers,
however, did.
Sexuality

A more general criticism of Freud's theory is its emphasis on sexuality. Everything, both good and bad, seems to
stem from the expression or repression of the sex drive. Many people question that, and wonder if there are any
other forces at work. Freud himself later added the death instinct, but that proved to be another one of his less
popular ideas.

First let me point out that, in fact, a great deal of our activities are in some fashion motivated by sex. If you take a
good hard look at our modern society, you will find that most advertising uses sexual images, that movies and
television programs often don't sell well if they don't include some titillation, that the fashion industry is based on a
continual game of sexual hide-and-seek, and that we all spend a considerable portion of every day playing "the
mating game." Yet we still don't feel that all life is sexual.

But Freud's emphasis on sexuality was not based on the great amount of obvious sexuality in his society -- it was
based on the intense avoidance of sexuality, especially among the middle and upper classes, and most especially
among women. What we too easily forget is that the world has changed rather dramatically over the last hundred
years. We forget that doctors and ministers recommended strong punishment for masturbation, that "leg" was a dirty
word, that a woman who felt sexual desire was automatically considered a potential prostitute, that a bride was often
taken completely by surprise by the events of the wedding night, and could well faint at the thought.

It is to Freud's credit that he managed to rise above his culture's sexual attitudes. Even his mentor Breuer and the
brilliant Charcot couldn't fully acknowledge the sexual nature of their clients' problems. Freud's mistake was more a
matter of generalizing too far, and not taking cultural change into account. It is ironic that much of the cultural
change in sexual attitudes was in fact due to Freud's work!

The unconscious

One last concept that is often criticized is the unconscious. It is not argued that something like the unconscious
accounts for some of our behavior, but rather how much and the exact nature of the beast.

Behaviorists, humanists, and existentialists all believe that (a) the motivations and problems that can be attributed to
the unconscious are much fewer than Freud thought, and (b) the unconscious is not the great churning cauldron of
activity he made it out to be. Most psychologists today see the unconscious as whatever we don't need or don't want
to see. Some theorists don't use the concept at all.

On the other hand, at least one theorist, Carl Jung, proposed an unconscious that makes Freud's look puny! But we
will leave all these views for the appropriate chapters.

Positive aspects

People have the unfortunate tendency to "throw the baby out with the bath water." If they don't agree with ideas a, b,
and c, they figure x, y, and z must be wrong as well. But Freud had quite a few good ideas, so good that they have
been incorporated into many other theories, to the point where we forget to give him credit.

First, Freud made us aware of two powerful forces and their demands on us. Back when everyone believed people
were basically rational, he showed how much of our behavior was based on biology. When everyone conceived of
people as individually responsible for their actions, he showed the impact of society. When everyone thought of
male and female as roles determined by nature or God, he showed how much they depended on family dynamics.
The id and the superego -- the psychic manifestations of biology and society -- will always be with us in some form
or another.

Second is the basic theory, going back to Breuer, of certain neurotic symptoms as caused by psychological traumas.
Although most theorists no longer believe that all neurosis can be so explained, or that it is necessary to relive the
trauma to get better, it has become a common understanding that a childhood full of neglect, abuse, and tragedy
tends to lead to an unhappy adult.
Third is the idea of ego defenses. Even if you are uncomfortable with Freud's idea of the unconscious, it is clear that
we engage in little manipulations of reality and our memories of that reality to suit our own needs, especially when
those needs are strong. I would recommend that you learn to recognize these defenses: You will find that having
names for them will help you to notice them in yourself and others!

Finally, the basic form of therapy has been largely set by Freud. Except for some behaviorist therapies, most therapy
is still "the talking cure," and still involves a physically and socially relaxed atmosphere. And, even if other theorists
do not care for the idea of transference, the highly personal nature of the therapeutic relationship is generally
accepted as important to success.

Some of Freud's ideas are clearly tied to his culture and era. Other ideas are not easily testable. Some may even be a
matter of Freud's own personality and experiences. But Freud was an excellent observer of the human condition, and
enough of what he said has relevance today that he will be a part of personality textbooks for years to come. Even
when theorists come up with dramatically different ideas about how we work, they compare their ideas with Freud's.

Readings

Freud's work is preserved in a 23 volume set called The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. For a briefer overview, you might want to try Freud's A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis or
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. They are a part of The Standard Edition, but can also be found
separately and in paperback. Or you might try a collection, such as The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud.

Some of Freud's most interesting works are The Interpretation of Dreams, his own favorite, The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life, about Freudian slips and other day-to-day oddities, Totem and Taboo, Freud's views on our
beginnings, Civilization and Its Discontents, his pessimistic commentary on modern society, and The Future of an
Illusion, on religion. All are a part of The Standard Edition, but all are available as separate paperbacks as well.

The father of psychoanalysis has been psychoanalyzed many times. First, there is his official biography, by his
student Ernest Jones. More recent is a biography by Peter Gay. A highly critical account of Freud's work is Jeffrey
Masson's The Assault on Truth. The best book I've come across on Freud and the entire psychoanalytic movement is
Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, by George Makari. The commentary on and criticism of
Freud's work is unending!

ANNA FREUD

1895 - 1982

Dr. C. George Boeree

It seems that every time Freud felt he had his successor picked out, the nominee would abandon him. At least, that's
what happened with Jung and Adler. In the meantime, though, his daughter Anna was attending lectures, going
through analysis with her father, and generally moving towards a career as a lay psychoanalyst. She also became his
care-taker after he developed cancer in 1923. She became at very least her father's symbolic successor.

Ego psychology

Unlike Jung and Adler, she remained faithful to the basic ideas her father developed. However, she was more
interested in the dynamics of the psyche than in its structure, and was particularly fascinated by the place of the ego
in all this. Freud had, after all, spent most of his efforts on the id and the unconscious side of psychic life. As she
rightly pointed out, the ego is the "seat of observation" from which we observe the work of the id and the superego
and the unconscious generally, and deserves study in its own right.
She is probably best known for her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, in which she gives a particularly
clear description of how the defenses work, including some special attention to adolescents' use of defenses. The
defenses section of the chapter on Freud in this text is based as much on Anna's work as on Sigmund's.

This focus on the ego began a movement in psychoanalytic circles called ego psychology that today represents,
arguably, the majority of Freudians. It takes Freud's earlier work as a crucial foundation, but extends it into the
more ordinary, practical, day-to-day world of the ego. In this way, Freudian theory can be applied, not only to
psychopathology, but to social and developmental issues as well. Erik Erikson is the best-known example of an ego
psychologist.

Child psychology

But Anna Freud was not primarily a theoretician. Her interests were more practical, and most of her energies were
devoted to the analysis of children and adolescents, and to improving that analysis. Her father, after all, had focused
entirely on adult patients. Although he wrote a great deal about development, it was from the perspectives of these
adults. What do you do with the child, for whom family crises and traumas and fixations are present events, not dim
recollections?

First, the relationship of the child to the therapist is different. The child's parents are still very much a part of his or
her life, a part the therapist cannot and should not try to usurp. But neither can the therapist pretend to be just
another child rather than an authority figure. Anna Freud found that the best way to deal with this "transference
problem" was the way that came most naturally: be a caring adult, not a new playmate, not a substitute parent. Her
approach seems authoritarian by the standards of many modern child therapies, but it might make more sense.

Another problem with analyzing children is that their symbolic abilities are not as advanced as those of adults. The
younger ones, certainly, may have trouble relating their emotional difficulties verbally. Even older children are less
likely than adults to bury their problems under complex symbols. After all, the child's problems are here-and-now;
there hasn't been much time to build up defenses. So the problems are close to the surface and tend to be expressed
in more direct, less symbolic, behavioral and emotional terms.

Most of her contributions to the study of personality come out of her work at the Hamstead Child Therapy Clinic in
London, which she helped to set up. Here, she found that one of the biggest problems was communications among
therapists: Whereas adult problems were communicated by means of traditional labels, children's problems could
not be.

Because children's problems are more immediate, she reconceptualized them in terms of the child's movement along
a developmental time-line. A child keeping pace with most of his or her peers in terms of eating behaviors, personal
hygiene, play styles, relationships with other children, and so on, could be considered healthy. When one aspect or
another of a child's development seriously lagged behind the rest, the clinician could assume that there was a
problem, and could communicate the problem by describing the particular lag.

Research

She also influenced research in Freudian psychology. She standardized the records for children with diagnostic
profiles, encouraged the pooling of observations from multiple analysts, and encouraged long-term studies of
development from early childhood through adolescence. She also led the way in the use of natural experiments, that
is, careful analyses of groups of children who suffered from similar disabilities, such as blindness, or early traumas,
such as wartime loss of parents. The common criticism of Freudian psychology as having no empirical basis is true
only if "empirical basis" is restricted to laboratory experimentation!

Most of Anna Freud's work is contained within The Writings of Anna Freud, a sevenvolume collection of her books
and papers, including The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense and her work on the analysis of children and
adolescents. She is a very good writer, doesn't get too technical in most of her works, and uses many interesting
case studies as examples.

ERIK ERIKSON

1902 - 1994

DR. C. GEORGE BOEREE

Among the Oglala Lakota, it was the tradition for an adolescent boy to go off on his own, weaponless and wearing
nothing but a loincloth and mocassins, on a dream quest. Hungry, thirsty, and bone-tired, the boy would expect to
have a dream on the fourth day which would reveal to him his life's path. Returning home, he would relate his dream
to the tribal elders, who would interpret it according to ancient practice. And his dream would tell him whether he
was destined to be a good hunter, or a great warrior, or expert at the art of horse-stealing, or perhaps to become
specialized in the making of weapons, or a spiritual leader, priest, or medicine man.

In some cases, the dream would lead him into the realm of controlled deviations among the Oglala. A dream
involving the thunderbird might lead a boy to go through a period of time as a heyoka, which involved acting like a
clown or a crazy man. Or a vision of the moon or a white buffalo could lead one to a life as a berdache, a man who
dresses and behaves as if he were a woman.

In any case, the number of roles one could play in life was extremely limited for men, and even more so for women.
Most people were generalists; very few could afford to be specialists. And you learned these roles by simply being
around the other people in your family and community. You learned them by living.

By the time the Oglala Lakota were visited by Erik Erikson, things had changed quite a bit. They had been herded
onto a large but barren reservation through a series of wars and unhappy treaties. The main source of food, clothing,
shelter, and just about everything else -- the buffalo -- had long since been hunted into near-extinction. Worst of all,
the patterns of their lives had been taken from them, not by white soldiers, but by the quiet efforts of government
bureaucrats to turn the Lakota into Americans!

Children were made to stay at boarding schools much of the year, in the sincere belief that civilization and
prosperity comes with education. At boarding schools they learned many things that contradicted what they learned
at home: They were taught white standards of cleanliness and beauty, some of which contradicted Lakota standards
of modesty. They were taught to compete, which contradicted Lakota traditions of egalitarianism. They were told to
speak up, when their upbringing told them to be still. In other words, their white teachers found them quite
impossible to work with, and their parents found them quite corrupted by an alien culture.

As time went by, their original culture disappeared, but the new culture didn't provide the necessary substitutions.
There were no more dream quests, but then what roles were there left for adolescents to dream themselves into?

Erikson was moved by the difficulties faced by the Lakota childen and adolescents he talked to and observed. But
growing up and finding one's place in the world isn't easy for many other Americans, either. African-Americans
struggle to piece together an identity out of forgotten African roots, the culture of powerlessness and poverty, and
the culture of the surrounding white majority. Asian-Americans are similarly stretched between Asian and American
traditions. Rural Americans find that the cultures of childhood won't cut it in the larger society. And the great
majority of European-Americans have, in fact, little left of their own cultural identities other than wearing green on
St. Patrick's Day or a recipe for marinara sauce from grandma! American culture, because it is everybody's, is in
some senses nobody's.

Like native Americans, other Americans have also lost many of the rituals that once guided us through life. At what
point are you an adult? When you go through puberty? Have your confirmation or bar mitzvah? Your first sexual
experience? Sweet sixteen party? Your learner's permit? Your driver's license? High school graduation? Voting in
your first election? First job? Legal drinking age? College graduation? When exactly is it that everyone treats you
like an adult?

Consider some of the contradictions: You may be old enough to be entrusted with a two-ton hunk of speeding metal,
yet not be allowed to vote; You may be old enough to die for your country in war, yet not be permitted to order a
beer; As a college student, you may be trusted with thousands of dollars of student loans, yet not be permitted to
choose your own classes.

In traditional societies (even our own only 50 or 100 years ago), a young man or woman looked up to his or her
parents, relations, neighbors, and teachers. They were decent, hardworking people (most of them) and we wanted to
be just like them.

Unfortunately, most children today look to the mass media, especially T.V., for role models. It is easy to understand
why: The people on T.V. are prettier, richer, smarter, wittier, healthier, and happier than anybody in our own
neighborhoods! Unfortunately, they aren't real. I'm always astounded at how many new college students are quickly
disappointed to discover that their chosen field actually requires a lot of work and study. It doesn't on T.V. Later,
many people are equally surprised that the jobs they worked so hard to get aren't as creative and glorious and
fulfilling as they expected. Again, that isn't how it is on T.V. It shouldn't surprise us that so many young people look
to the short-cuts that crime seems to offer, or the fantasy life that drugs promise.

Some of you may see this as an exaggeration or a stereotype of modern adolescence. I certainly hope that your
passage from childhood to adulthood was a smooth one. But a lot of people -- myself and Erikson included -- could
have used a dream quest.

BIOGRAPHY

Erik Erikson was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on June 15, 1902. There is a little mystery about his heritage: His
biological father was an unnamed Danish man who abandoned Erik's mother before he was born. His mother, Karla
Abrahamsen, was a young Jewish woman who raised him alone for the first three years of his life. She then married
Dr. Theodor Homberger, who was Erik's pediatrician, and moved to Karlsruhe in southern Germany.

We cannot pass over this little piece of biography without some comment: The development of identity seems to
have been one of his greatest concerns in Erikson's own life as well as in his theory. During his childhood, and his
early adulthood, he was Erik Homberger, and his parents kept the details of his birth a secret. So here he was, a tall,
blond, blue-eyed boy who was also Jewish. At temple school, the kids teased him for being Nordic; at grammar
school, they teased him for being Jewish.

After graduating high school, Erik focussed on becoming an artist. When not taking art classes, he wandered around
Europe, visiting museums and sleeping under bridges. He was living the life of the carefree rebel, long before it
became "the thing to do."

When he was 25, his friend Peter Blos -- a fellow artist and, later, psychoanalyst -- suggested he apply for a teaching
position at an experimental school for American students run by Dorothy Burlingham, a friend of Anna Freud.
Besides teaching art, he gathered a certificate in Montessori education and one from the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society. He was psychoanalyzed by Anna Freud herself.

While there, he also met Joan Serson, a Canadian dance teacher at the school. They went on the have three children,
one of whom became a sociologist himself.

With the Nazis coming into power, they left Vienna, first for Copenhagen, then to Boston. Erikson was offered a
position at the Harvard Medical School and practiced child psychoanalysis privately. During this time, he met
psychologists like Henry Murray and Kurt Lewin, and anthropologists like Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and
Gregory Bateson. I think it can be safely said that these anthropologists had nearly as great an effect on Erikson as
Sigmund and Anna Freud!

He later taught at Yale, and later still at the University of California at Berkeley. It was during this period of time
that he did his famous studies of modern life among the Lakota and the Yurok.

When he became an American citizen, he officially changed his name to Erik Erikson. Erikson's son, Kai Erikson,
believes it was just a decision to define himself as a self-made man: Erik, son of Erik.

In 1950, he wrote Childhood and Society, which contained summaries of his studies among the native Americans,
analyses of Maxim Gorkiy and Adolph Hitler, a discussion of the "American personality," and the basic outline of
his version of Freudian theory. These themes -- the influence of culture on personality and the analysis of historical
figures -- were repeated in other works, one of which, Gandhi's Truth, won him the Pulitzer Prize and the national
Book Award.

In 1950, during Senator Joseph McCarthy's reign of terror, Erikson left Berkeley when professors there were asked
to sign "loyalty oaths." He spent ten years working and teaching at a clinic in Massachussets, and ten years more
back at Harvard. Since retiring in 1970, he wrote and did research with his wife. He died in 1994.

THEORY

Erikson is a Freudian ego-psychologist. This means that he accepts Freud's ideas as basically correct, including the
more debatable ideas such as the Oedipal complex, and accepts as well the ideas about the ego that were added by
other Freudian loyalists such as Heinz Hartmann and, of, course, Anna Freud. However, Erikson is much more
society and culture-oriented than most Freudians, as you might expect from someone with his anthropological
interests, and he often pushes the instincts and the unconscious practically out of the picture. Perhaps because of
this, Erikson is popular among Freudians and non-Freudians alike!

The epigenetic principle

He is most famous for his work in refining and expanding Freud's theory of stages. Development, he says, functions
by the epigenetic principle. This principle says that we develop through a predetermined unfolding of our
personalities in eight stages. Our progress through each stage is in part determined by our success, or lack of
success, in all the previous stages. A little like the unfolding of a rose bud, each petal opens up at a certain time, in a
certain order, which nature, through its genetics, has determined. If we interfere in the natural order of development
by pulling a petal forward prematurely or out of order, we ruin the development of the entire flower.

Each stage involves certain developmental tasks that are psychosocial in nature. Although he follows Freudian
tradition by calling them crises, they are more drawn out and less specific than that term implies. The child in
grammar school, for example, has to learn to be industrious during that period of his or her life, and that
industriousness is learned through the complex social interactions of school and family.

The various tasks are referred to by two terms. The infant's task, for example, is called "trustmistrust." At first, it
might seem obvious that the infant must learn trust and not mistrust. But Erikson made it clear that there it is a
balance we must learn: Certainly, we need to learn mostly trust; but we also need to learn a little mistrust, so as not
to grow up to become gullible fools!

Each stage has a certain optimal time as well. It is no use trying to rush children into adulthood, as is so common
among people who are obsessed with success. Neither is it possible to slow the pace or to try to protect our children
from the demands of life. There is a time for each task.

If a stage is managed well, we carry away a certain virtue or psychosocial strength which will help us through the
rest of the stages of our lives. On the other hand, if we don't do so well, we may develop maladaptations and
malignancies, as well as endanger all our future development. A malignancy is the worse of the two, and involves
too little of the positive and too much of the negative aspect of the task, such as a person who can't trust others. A
maladaptation is not quite as bad and involves too much of the positive and too little of the negative, such as a
person who trusts too much.

Children and adults

Perhaps Erikson's greatest innovation was to postulate not five stages, as Freud had done, but eight. Erikson
elaborated Freud's genital stage into adolescence plus three stages of adulthood. We certainly don't stop developing
-- especially psychologically -- after our twelfth or thirteenth birthdays; It seems only right to extend any theory of
stages to cover later development!

Erikson also had some things to say about the interaction of generations, which he called mutuality. Freud had made
it abundantly clear that a child's parents influence his or her development dramatically. Erikson pointed out that
children influence their parents' development as well. The arrival of children, for example, into a couple's life,
changes that life considerably, and moves the new parents along their developmental paths. It is even appropriate to
add a third (and in some cases, a fourth) generation to the picture: Many of us have been influenced by our
grandparents, and they by us.

A particularly clear example of mutuality can be seen in the problems of the teenage mother. Although the mother
and her child may have a fine life together, often the mother is still involved in the tasks of adolescence, that is, in
finding out who she is and how she fits into the larger society. The relationship she has or had with the child's father
may have been immature on one or both sides, and if they don't marry, she will have to deal with the problems of
finding and developing a relationship as well. The infant, on the other hand, has the simple, straight-forward needs
that infants have, and the most important of these is a mother with the mature abilities and social support a mother
should have. If the mother's parents step in to help, as one would expect, then they, too, are thrown off of their
developmental tracks, back into a life-style they thought they had passed, and which they might find terribly
demanding. And so on....

The ways in which our lives intermesh are terribly complex and very frustrating to the theorist. But ignoring them is
to ignore something vitally important about our development and our personalities.

STAGE (AGE)

Psychosocial crisis

Significant relations

Psychosocial modalities

Psychosocial virtues

Maladaptations & malignancies

I (0-1) -- infant

trust vs mistrust

mother

to get, to give in return

hope, faith

sensory distortion -- withdrawal

II (2-3) -- toddler
 autonomy vs shame and doubt

parents

to hold on, to let go

will, determination

impulsivity -- compulsion

III (3-6) -- preschooler

initiative vs guilt

family

to go after, to play

purpose, courage

ruthlessness -- inhibition

IV (7-12 or so) -- school-age child

industry vs inferiority

neighborhood and school

to complete, to make things together

competence

narrow virtuosity -- inertia

V (12-18 or so) -- adolescence

ego-identity vs roleconfusion

peer groups, role models

to be oneself, to share oneself

fidelity, loyalty

fanaticism -- repudiation

VI (the 20’s) -- young adult

intimacy vs isolation

partners, friends

to lose and find oneself in a another

love

promiscuity -- exclusivity

VII (late 20’s to 50’s) -- middle adult

generativity vs selfabsorption

household, workmates
 to make be, to take care of

care

overextension -- rejectivity

VIII (50’s and beyond) -- old adult

integrity vs despair

mankind or “my kind”

to be, through having been, to face not being

wisdom

presumption -- despair

Chart adapted from Erikson's 1959 Identity and the Life Cycle (Psychological Issues vol 1, #1)

The first stage

The first stage, infancy or the oral-sensory stage, is approximately the first year or year and a half of life. The task is
to develop trust without completely eliminating the capacity for mistrust.

If mom and dad can give the newborn a degree of familiarity, consistency, and continuity, then the child will
develop the feeling that the world -- especially the social world -- is a safe place to be, that people are reliable and
loving. Through the parents' responses, the child also learns to trust his or her own body and the biological urges that
go with it. If the parents are unreliable and inadequate, if they reject the infant or harm it, if other interests cause
both parents to turn away from the infants needs to satisfy their own instead, then the infant will develop mistrust.
He or she will be apprehensive and suspicious around people.

Please understand that this doesn't mean that the parents have to be perfect. In fact, parents who are overly
protective of the child, are there the minute the first cry comes out, will lead that child into the maladaptive tendency
Erikson calls sensory maladjustment: Overly trusting, even gullible, this person cannot believe anyone would mean
them harm, and will use all the defenses at their command to retain their pollyanna perspective.

Worse, of course, is the child whose balance is tipped way over on the mistrust side: They will develop the
malignant tendency of withdrawal, characterized by depression, paranoia, and possibly psychosis.

If the proper balance is achieved, the child will develop the virtue hope, the strong belief that, even when things are
not going well, they will work out well in the end. One of the signs that a child is doing well in the first stage is
when the child isn't overly upset by the need to wait a moment for the satisfaction of his or her needs: Mom or dad
don't have to be perfect; I trust them enough to believe that, if they can't be here immediately, they will be here soon;
Things may be tough now, but they will work out. This is the same ability that, in later life, gets us through
disappointments in love, our careers, and many other domains of life.

Stage two

The second stage is the anal-muscular stage of early childhood, from about eighteen months to three or four years
old. The task is to achieve a degree of autonomy while minimizing shame and doubt.

If mom and dad (and the other care-takers that often come into the picture at this point) permit the child, now a
toddler, to explore and manipulate his or her environment, the child will develop a sense of autonomy or
independence. The parents should not discourage the child, but neither should they push. A balance is required.
People often advise new parents to be "firm but tolerant" at this stage, and the advice is good. This way, the child
will develop both self-control and self-esteem.

On the other hand, it is rather easy for the child to develop instead a sense of shame and doubt. If the parents come
down hard on any attempt to explore and be independent, the child will soon give up with the assumption that
cannot and should not act on their own. We should keep in mind that even something as innocent as laughting at the
toddler's efforts can lead the child to feel deeply ashamed, and to doubt his or her abilities.

And there are other ways to lead children to shame and doubt: If you give children unrestricted freedom and no
sense of limits, or if you try to help children do what they should learn to do for themselves, you will also give them
the impression that they are not good for much. If you aren't patient enough to wait for your child to tie his or her
shoe-laces, your child will never learn to tie them, and will assume that this is too difficult to learn!

Nevertheless, a little "shame and doubt" is not only inevitable, but beneficial. Without it, you will develop the
maladaptive tendency Erikson calls impulsiveness, a sort of shameless willfulness that leads you, in later childhood
and even adulthood, to jump into things without proper consideration of your abilities.

Worse, of course, is too much shame and doubt, which leads to the malignancy Erikson calls compulsiveness. The
compulsive person feels as if their entire being rides on everything they do, and so everything must be done
perfectly. Following all the rules precisely keeps you from mistakes, and mistakes must be avoided at all costs.
Many of you know how it feels to always be ashamed and always doubt yourself. A little more patience and
tolerance with your own children may help them avoid your path. And give yourself a little slack, too!

If you get the proper, positive balance of autonomy and shame and doubt, you will develop the virtue of willpower
or determination. One of the most admirable -- and frustrating -- thing about two- and three-year-olds is their
determination. "Can do" is their motto. If we can preserve that "can do" attitude (with appropriate modesty to
balance it) we are much better off as adults.

Stage three

Stage three is the genital-locomotor stage or play age. From three or four to five or six, the task confronting every
child is to learn initiative without too much guilt.

Initiative means a positive response to the world's challenges, taking on responsibilities, learning new skills, feeling
purposeful. Parents can encourage initiative by encouraging children to try out their ideas. We should accept and
encourage fantasy and curiosity and imagination. This is a time for play, not for formal education. The child is now
capable, as never before, of imagining a future situation, one that isn't a reality right now. Initiative is the attempt to
make that non-reality a reality.

But if children can imagine the future, if they can plan, then they can be responsible as well, and guilty. If my two-
year-old flushes my watch down the toilet, I can safely assume that there were no "evil intentions." It was just a
matter of a shiny object going round and round and down. What fun! But if my five year old does the same thing...
well, she should know what's going to happen to the watch, what's going to happen to daddy's temper, and what's
going to happen to her! She can be guilty of the act, and she can begin to feel guilty as well. The capacity for moral
judgement has arrived.

Erikson is, of course, a Freudian, and as such, he includes the Oedipal experience in this stage. From his perspective,
the Oedipal crisis involves the reluctance a child feels in relinquishing his or her closeness to the opposite sex
parent. A parent has the responsibility, socially, to enourage the child to "grow up -- you're not a baby anymore!"
But if this process is done too harshly and too abruptly, the child learns to feel guilty about his or her feelings.

Too much initiative and too little guilt means a maladaptive tendency Erikson calls ruthlessness. The ruthless person
takes the initiative alright; They have their plans, whether it's a matter of school or romance or politics or career. It's
just that they don't care who they step on to achieve their goals. The goals are everything, and guilty feelings are for
the weak. The extreme form of ruthlessess is sociopathy.
Ruthlessness is bad for others, but actually relatively easy on the ruthless person. Harder on the person is the
malignancy of too much guilt, which Erikson calls inhibition. The inhibited person will not try things because
"nothing ventured, nothing lost" and, particularly, nothing to feel guilty about. On the sexual, Oedipal, side, the
inhibited person may be impotent or frigid.

A good balance leads to the psychosocial strength of purpose. A sense of purpose is something many people crave in
their lives, yet many do not realize that they themselves make their purposes, through imagination and initiative. I
think an even better word for this virtue would have been courage, the capacity for action despite a clear
understanding of your limitations and past failings.

Stage four

Stage four is the latency stage, or the school-age child from about six to twelve. The task is to develop a capacity for
industry while avoiding an excessive sense of inferiority. Children must "tame the imagination" and dedicate
themselves to education and to learning the social skills their society requires of them.

There is a much broader social sphere at work now: The parents and other family members are joined by teachers
and peers and other members of he community at large. They all contribute: Parents must encourage, teachers must
care, peers must accept. Children must learn that there is pleasure not only in conceiving a plan, but in carrying it
out. They must learn the feeling of success, whether it is in school or on the playground, academic or social.

A good way to tell the difference between a child in the third stage and one in the fourth stage is to look at the way
they play games. Four-year-olds may love games, but they will have only a vague understanding of the rules, may
change them several times during the course of the game, and be very unlikely to actually finish the game, unless it
is by throwing the pieces at their opponents. A seven-year-old, on the other hand, is dedicated to the rules, considers
them pretty much sacred, and is more likely to get upset if the game is not allowed to come to its required
conclusion.

If the child is allowed too little success, because of harsh teachers or rejecting peers, for example, then he or she will
develop instead a sense of inferiority or incompetence. An additional source of inferiority Erikson mentions is
racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination: If a child believes that success is related to who you are rather
than to how hard you try, then why try?

Too much industry leads to the maladaptive tendency called narrow virtuosity. We see this in children who aren't
allowed to "be children," the ones that parents or teachers push into one area of competence, without allowing the
development of broader interests. These are the kids without a life: child actors, child athletes, child musicians, child
prodigies of all sorts. We all admire their industry, but if we look a little closer, it's all that stands in the way of an
empty life.

Much more common is the malignancy called inertia. This includes all of us who suffer from the "inferiority
complexes" Alfred Adler talked about. If at first you don't succeed, don't ever try again! Many of us didn't do well in
mathematics, for example, so we'd die before we took another math class. Others were humiliated instead in the gym
class, so we never try out for a sport or play a game of raquetball. Others never developed social skills -- the most
important skills of all -- and so we never go out in public. We become inert.

A happier thing is to develop the right balance of industry and inferiority -- that is, mostly industry with just a touch
of inferiority to keep us sensibly humble. Then we have the virtue called competency.

Stage five

Stage five is adolescence, beginning with puberty and ending around 18 or 20 years old. The task during
adolescence is to achieve ego identity and avoid role confusion. It was adolescence that interested Erikson first and
most, and the patterns he saw here were the bases for his thinking about all the other stages.

Ego identity means knowing who you are and how you fit in to the rest of society. It requires that you take all you've
learned about life and yourself and mold it into a unified self-image, one that your community finds meaningful.
There are a number of things that make things easier: First, we should have a mainstream adult culture that is worthy
of the adolescent's respect, one with good adult role models and open lines of communication.

Further, society should provide clear rites of passage, certain accomplishments and rituals that help to distinguish
the adult from the child. In primitive and traditional societies, an adolescent boy may be asked to leave the village
for a period of time to live on his own, hunt some symbolic animal, or seek an inspirational vision. Boys and girls
may be required to go through certain tests of endurance, symbolic ceremonies, or educational events. In one way or
another, the distinction between the powerless, but irresponsible, time of childhood and the powerful and
responsbile time of adulthood, is made clear.

Without these things, we are likely to see role confusion, meaning an uncertainty about one's place in society and the
world. When an adolescent is confronted by role confusion, Erikson say he or she is suffering from an identity crisis.
In fact, a common question adolescents in our society ask is a straight-forward question of identity: "Who am I?"

One of Erikson's suggestions for adolescence in our society is the psychosocial moratorium. He suggests you take a
little "time out." If you have money, go to Europe. If you don't, bum around the U.S. Quit school and get a job. Quit
your job and go to school. Take a break, smell the roses, get to know yourself. We tend to want to get to "success"
as fast as possible, and yet few of us have ever taken the time to figure out what success means to us. A little like the
young Oglala Lakota, perhaps we need to dream a little.

There is such a thing as too much "ego identity," where a person is so involved in a particular role in a particular
society or subculture that there is no room left for tolerance. Erikson calls this maladaptive tendency fanaticism. A
fanatic believes that his way is the only way. Adolescents are, of course, known for their idealism, and for their
tendency to see things in black-and-white. These people will gather others around them and promote their beliefs
and life-styles without regard to others' rights to disagree.

The lack of identity is perhaps more difficult still, and Erikson refers to the malignant tendency here as repudiation.
They repudiate their membership in the world of adults and, even more, they repudiate their need for an identity.
Some adolescents allow themselves to "fuse" with a group, especially the kind of group that is particularly eager to
provide the details of your identity: religious cults, militaristic organizations, groups founded on hatred, groups that
have divorced themselves from the painful demands of mainstream society. They may become involved in
destructive activities, drugs, or alcohol, or you may withdraw into their own psychotic fantasies. After all, being
"bad" or being "nobody" is better than not knowing who you are!

If you successfully negotiate this stage, you will have the virtue Erikson called fidelity. Fidelity means loyalty, the
ability to live by societies standards despite their imperfections and incompleteness and inconsistencies. We are not
talking about blind loyalty, and we are not talking about accepting the imperfections. After all, if you love your
community, you will want to see it become the best it can be. But fidelity means that you have found a place in that
community, a place that will allow you to contribute.

Stage six

If you have made it this far, you are in the stage of young adulthood, which lasts from about 18 to about 30. The
ages in the adult stages are much fuzzier than in the childhood stages, and people may differ dramatically. The task
is to achieve some degree of intimacy, as opposed to remaining in isolation.

Intimacy is the ability to be close to others, as a lover, a friend, and as a participant in society. Because you have a
clear sense of who you are, you no longer need to fear "losing" yourself, as many adolescents do. The "fear of
commitment" some people seem to exhibit is an example of immaturity in this stage. This fear isn't always so
obvious. Many people today are always putting off the progress of their relationships: I'll get married (or have a
family, or get involved in important social issues) as soon as I finish school, as soon as I have a job, as soon as I
have a house, as soon as.... If you've been engaged for the last ten years, what's holding you back?

Neither should the young adult need to prove him- or herself anymore. A teenage relationship is often a matter of
trying to establish identity through "couple-hood." Who am I? I'm her boy-friend. The young adult relationship
should be a matter of two independent egos wanting to create something larger than themselves. We intuitively
recognize this when we frown on a relationship between a young adult and a teenager: We see the potential for
manipulation of the younger member of the party by the older.

Our society hasn't done much for young adults, either. The emphasis on careers, the isolation of urban living, the
splitting apart of relationships because of our need for mobility, and the general impersonal nature of modern life
prevent people from naturally developing their intimate relationships. I am typical of many people in having moved
dozens of times in my life. I haven't the faintest idea what has happened to the kids I grew up with, or even my
college buddies. My oldest friend lives a thousand miles away. I live where I do out of career necessity and, until
recently, have felt no real sense of community.

Before I get too depressing, let me mention that many of you may not have had these experiences. If you grew up
and stayed in your community, and especially if your community is a rural one, you are much more likely to have
deep, long-lasting friendships, to have married your high school sweetheart, and to feel a great love for your
community. But this style of life is quickly becoming an anachronism.

Erikson calls the maladaptive form promiscuity, refering particularly to the tendency to become intimate too freely,
too easily, and without any depth to your intimacy. This can be true of your relationships with friends and neighbors
and your whole community as well as with lovers.

The malignancy he calls exclusion, which refers to the tendency to isolate oneself from love, friendship, and
community, and to develop a certain hatefulness in compensation for one's loneliness.

If you successfully negotiate this stage, you will instead carry with you for the rest of your life the virtue or
psychosocial strength Erikson calls love. Love, in the context of his theory, means being able to put aside
differences and antagonisms through "mutuality of devotion." It includes not only the love we find in a good
marriage, but the love between friends and the love of one's neighbor, co-worker, and compatriot as well.

Stage seven

The seventh stage is that of middle adulthood. It is hard to pin a time to it, but it would include the period during
which we are actively involved in raising children. For most people in our society, this would put it somewhere
between the middle twenties and the late fifties. The task here is to cultivate the proper balance of generativity and
stagnation.

Generativity is an extension of love into the future. It is a concern for the next generation and all future generations.
As such, it is considerably less "selfish" than the intimacy of the previous stage: Intimacy, the love between lovers
or friends, is a love between equals, and it is necessarily reciprocal. Oh, of course we love each other unselfishly, but
the reality is such that, if the love is not returned, we don't consider it a true love. With generativity, that implicit
expectation of reciprocity isn't there, at least not as strongly. Few parents expect a "return on their investment" from
their children; If they do, we don't think of them as very good parents!

Although the majority of people practice generativity by having and raising children, there are many other ways as
well. Erikson considers teaching, writing, invention, the arts and sciences, social activism, and generally
contributing to the welfare of future generations to be generativity as well -- anything, in fact, that satisfies that old
"need to be needed."

Stagnation, on the other hand, is self-absorption, caring for no-one. The stagnant person ceases to be a productive
member of society. It is perhaps hard to imagine that we should have any "stagnation" in our lives, but the
maladaptive tendency Erikson calls overextension illustrates the problem: Some people try to be so generative that
they no longer allow time for themselves, for rest and relaxation. The person who is overextended no longer
contributes well. I'm sure we all know someone who belongs to so many clubs, or is devoted to so many causes, or
tries to take so many classes or hold so many jobs that they no longer have time for any of them!
More obvious, of course, is the malignant tendency of rejectivity. Too little generativity and too much stagnation
and you are no longer participating in or contributing to society. And much of what we call "the meaning of life" is a
matter of how we participate and what we contribute.

This is the stage of the "midlife crisis." Sometimes men and women take a look at their lives and ask that big, bad
question "what am I doing all this for?" Notice the question carefully: Because their focus is on themselves, they ask
what, rather than whom, they are doing it for. In their panic at getting older and not having experienced or
accomplished what they imagined they would when they were younger, they try to recapture their youth. Men are
often the most flambouyant examples: They leave their long-suffering wives, quit their humdrum jobs, buy some
"hip" new clothes, and start hanging around singles bars. Of course, they seldom find what they are looking for,
because they are looking for the wrong thing!

But if you are successful at this stage, you will have a capacity for caring that will serve you through the rest of your
life.

Stage eight

This last stage, referred to delicately as late adulthood or maturity, or less delicately as old age, begins sometime
around retirement, after the kids have gone, say somewhere around 60. Some older folks will protest and say it only
starts when you feel old and so on, but that's an effect of our youthworshipping culture, which has even old people
avoiding any acknowledgement of age. In Erikson's theory, reaching this stage is a good thing, and not reaching it
suggests that earlier problems retarded your development!

The task is to develop ego integrity with a minimal amount of despair. This stage, especially from the perspective of
youth, seems like the most difficult of all. First comes a detachment from society, from a sense of usefulness, for
most people in our culture. Some retire from jobs they've held for years; others find their duties as parents coming to
a close; most find that their input is no longer requested or required.

Then there is a sense of biological uselessness, as the body no longer does everything it used to. Women go through
a sometimes dramatic menopause; Men often find they can no longer "rise to the occasion." Then there are the
illnesses of old age, such as arthritis, diabetes, heart problems, concerns about breast and ovarian and prostrate
cancers. There come fears about things that one was never afraid of before -- the flu, for example, or just falling
down.

Along with the illnesses come concerns of death. Friends die. Relatives die. One's spouse dies. It is, of course,
certain that you, too, will have your turn. Faced with all this, it might seem like everyone would feel despair.

In response to this despair, some older people become preoccupied with the past. After all, that's where things were
better. Some become preoccupied with their failures, the bad decisions they made, and regret that (unlike some in
the previous stage) they really don't have the time or energy to reverse them. We find some older people become
depressed, spiteful, paranoid, hypochondriacal, or developing the patterns of senility with or without physical bases.

Ego integrity means coming to terms with your life, and thereby coming to terms with the end of life. If you are
able to look back and accept the course of events, the choices made, your life as you lived it, as being necessary,
then you needn't fear death. Although most of you are not at this point in life, perhaps you can still sympathize by
considering your life up to now. We've all made mistakes, some of them pretty nasty ones; Yet, if you hadn't made
these mistakes, you wouldn't be who you are. If you had been very fortunate, or if you had played it safe and made
very few mistakes, your life would not have been as rich as is.

The maladaptive tendency in stage eight is called presumption. This is what happens when a person "presumes"
ego integrity without actually facing the difficulties of old age. The malignant tendency is called disdain, by which
Erikson means a contempt of life, one's own or anyone's.

Someone who approaches death without fear has the strength Erikson calls wisdom. He calls it a gift to children,
because "healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death." He suggests that a
person must be somewhat gifted to be truly wise, but I would like to suggest that you understand "gifted" in as broad
a fashion as possible: I have found that there are people of very modest gifts who have taught me a great deal, not by
their wise words, but by their simple and gentle approach to life and death, by their "generosity of spirit."

DISCUSSION

I can't think of anyone, other than Jean Piaget, who has promoted the stage approach to development more than Erik
Erikson. And yet stages are not at all a popular concept among personality theorists. Of the people reviewed in this
text, only Sigmund and Anna Freud fully share his convictions. Most theorists prefer an incremental or gradual
approach to development, and speak of "phases" or "transitions" rather than of clearly marked stages..

But there are certain segments of life that are fairly easy to identify, that do have the necessary quality of
biologically determined timing. Adolescence is "preprogrammed" to occur when it occurs, as is birth and, very
possibly, natural death. The first year of life has some special, fetus-like qualities, and the last year of life includes
certain "catastrophic" qualities.

If we stretch the meaning of stages to include certain logical sequences, i.e. things that happen in a certain order, not
because they are biologically so programmed, but because they don't make sense any other way, we can make an
even better case: weaning and potty training have to precede the independence from mother required by schooling;
one is normally sexually mature before finding a lover, normally finds a lover before having children, and
necessarily has children before enjoying their leaving!

And if we stretch the meaning of stages even further to include social "programming" as well as biological, we can
include periods of dependence and schooling and work and retirement as well. So stretched, it is no longer a difficult
matter to come up with seven or eight stages; Only now, of course, you'd be hard pressed to call them stages, rather
than "phases" or something equally vague.

It is, in fact, hard to defend Erikson's eight stages if we accept the demands of his understanding of what stages are.
In different cultures, even within cultures, the timing can be quite different: In some countries, babies are weaned at
six months and potty trained at nine months; in others, they still get the breast at five and potty training involves
little more than taking it outside. At one time in our own culture, people were married at thirteen and had their first
child by fifteen. Today, we tend to postpone marriage until thirty and rush to have our one and only child before
forty. We look forward to many years of retirement; in other times and other places, retirement is unknown.

And yet Erikson's stages do seem to give us a framework. We can talk about our culture as compared with others', or
today as compared with a few centuries ago, by looking at the ways in which we differ relative to the "standard" his
theory provides. Erikson and other researchers have found that the general pattern does in fact hold across cultures
and times, and most of us find it quite familiar. In other words, his theory meets one of the most important standards
of personality theory, a standard sometimes more important than "truth:" It is useful.

It also offers us insights we might not have noticed otherwise. For example, you may tend to think of his eight stages
as a series of tasks that don't follow any particularly logical course. But if you divide the lifespan into two sequences
of four stages, you can see a real pattern, with a child development half and an adult development half.

In stage I, the infant must learn that "it" (meaning the world, especially as represented by mom and dad and itself) is
"okay." In stage II, the toddler learns "I can do," in the here-andnow. In stage III, the preschooler learns "I can plan,"
and project him or herself into the future. In stage IV, the school-age child learns "I can finish" these projections. In
going through these four stages, the child develops a competent ego, ready for the larger world.

In the adult half of the scheme, we expand beyond the ego. Stage V, is concerned with establishing something very
similar to "it is okay:" The adolescent must learn that "I am okay," a conclusion predicated on successful negotiation
of the preceding four stages. In stage VI, the young adult must learn to love, which is a sort of social "I can do," in
the hereand-now. In stage VII, the adult must learn to extend that love into the future, as caring. And in stage VIII,
the old person must learn to "finish" him- or herself as an ego, and establish a new and broader identity. We could
borrow Jung's term, and say that the second half of live is devoted to realizing one's self.
Readings

Erikson is an excellent writer and will capture your imagination whether you are convinced by his Freudian side or
not. The two books that lay out his theory are Childhood and Society and Identity: Youth and Crisis. These are more
like collections of essays on subjects as varied as Native American tribes, famous people like William James and
Adolph Hitler, nationality, race, and gender.

His most famous books are two studies in "Psychohistory," Young Man Luther on Martin Luther, and Ghandi's
Truth.

CARL JUNG

1875 - 1961

DR. C. GEORGE BOEREE

Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would
be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with
human heart throught the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban
pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches,
revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his
own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know
how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul. -- Carl Jung (from "New Paths in Psychology", in
Collected Papers on Analytic Psychology, London, 1916)

Freud said that the goal of therapy was to make the unconscious conscious. He certainly made that the goal of his
work as a theorist. And yet he makes the unconscious sound very unpleasant, to say the least: It is a cauldron of
seething desires, a bottomless pit of perverse and incestuous cravings, a burial ground for frightening experiences
which nevertheless come back to haunt us. Frankly, it doesn't sound like anything I'd like to make conscious!

A younger colleague of his, Carl Jung, was to make the exploration of this "inner space" his life's work. He went
equipped with a background in Freudian theory, of course, and with an apparently inexhaustible knowledge of
mythology, religion, and philosophy. Jung was especially knowledgeable in the symbolism of complex mystical
traditions such as Gnosticism, Alchemy, Kabala, and similar traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism. If anyone could
make sense of the unconscious and its habit of revealing itself only in symbolic form, it would be Carl Jung.

He had, in addition, a capacity for very lucid dreaming and occasional visions. In the fall of 1913, he had a vision of
a "monstrous flood" engulfing most of Europe and lapping at the mountains of his native Switzerland. He saw
thousands of people drowning and civilization crumbling. Then, the waters turned into blood. This vision was
followed, in the next few weeks, by dreams of eternal winters and rivers of blood. He was afraid that he was
becoming psychotic.

But on August 1 of that year, World War I began. Jung felt that there had been a connection, somehow, between
himself as an individual and humanity in general that could not be explained away. From then until 1928, he was to
go through a rather painful process of selfexploration that formed the basis of all of his later theorizing.

He carefully recorded his dreams, fantasies, and visions, and drew, painted, and sculpted them as well. He found that
his experiences tended to form themselves into persons, beginning with a wise old man and his companion, a little
girl. The wise old man evolved, over a number of dreams, into a sort of spiritual guru. The little girl became
"anima," the feminine soul, who served as his main medium of communication with the deeper aspects of his
unconscious.

A leathery brown dwarf would show up guarding the entrance to the unconscious. He was "the shadow," a primitive
companion for Jung's ego. Jung dreamt that he and the dwarf killed a beautiful blond youth, whom he called
Siegfried. For Jung, this represented a warning about the dangers of the worship of glory and heroism which would
soon cause so much sorrow all over Europe -- and a warning about the dangers of some of his own tendencies
towards heroworship, of Sigmund Freud!

Jung dreamt a great deal about the dead, the land of the dead, and the rising of the dead. These represented the
unconscious itself -- not the "little" personal unconscious that Freud made such a big deal out of, but a new
collective unconscious of humanity itself, an unconscious that could contain all the dead, not just our personal
ghosts. Jung began to see the mentally ill as people who are haunted by these ghosts, in an age where no-one is
supposed to even believe in them. If we could only recapture our mythologies, we would understand these ghosts,
become comfortable with the dead, and heal our mental illnesses.

Critics have suggested that Jung was, very simply, ill himself when all this happened. But Jung felt that, if you want
to understand the jungle, you can't be content just to sail back and forth near the shore. You've got to get into it, no
matter how strange and frightening it might seem.

BIOGRAPHY

Carl Gustav Jung was born July 26, 1875, in the small Swiss village of Kessewil. His father was Paul Jung, a
country parson, and his mother was Emilie Preiswerk Jung. He was surrounded by a fairly well educated extended
family, including quite a few clergymen and some eccentrics as well.

The elder Jung started Carl on Latin when he was six years old, beginning a long interest in language and literature
-- especially ancient literature. Besides most modern western European languages, Jungcould read several ancient
ones, including Sanskrit, the language of the original Hindu holy books.

Carl was a rather solitary adolescent, who didn't care much for school, and especially couldn't take competition. He
went to boarding school in Basel, Switzerland, where he found himself the object of a lot of jealous harassment. He
began to use sickness as an excuse, developing an embarrassing tendency to faint under pressure.

Although his first career choice was archeology, he went on to study medicine at the University of Basel. While
working under the famous neurologist Krafft-Ebing, he settled on psychiatry as his career.

After graduating, he took a position at the Burghoeltzli Mental Hospital in Zurich under Eugene Bleuler, an expert
on (and the namer of) schizophrenia. In 1903, he married Emma Rauschenbach. He also taught classes at the
University of Zurich, had a private practice, and invented word association at this time!

Long an admirer of Freud, he met him in Vienna in 1907. The story goes that after they met, Freud canceled all his
appointments for the day, and they talked for 13 hours straight, such was the impact of the meeting of these two
great minds! Freud eventually came to see Jung as the crown prince of psychoanalysis and his heir apparent.

But Jung had never been entirely sold on Freud's theory. Their relationship began to cool in 1909, during a trip to
America. They were entertaining themselves by analyzing each others' dreams (more fun, apparently, than
shuffleboard), when Freud seemed to show an excess of resistance to Jung's efforts at analysis. Freud finally said
that they'd have to stop because he was afraid he would lose his authority! Jung felt rather insulted.

World War I was a painful period of self-examination for Jung. It was, however, also the beginning of one of the
most interesting theories of personality the world has ever seen.

After the war, Jung traveled widely, visiting, for example, tribal people in Africa, America, and India. He retired in
1946, and began to retreat from public attention after his wife died in 1955. He died on June 6, 1961, in Zurich.
 THEORY

Jung's theory divides the psyche into three parts. The first is the ego,which Jung identifies with the conscious mind.
Closely related is the personal unconscious, which includes anything which is not presently conscious, but can be.
The personal unconscious is like most people's understanding of the unconscious in that it includes both memories
that are easily brought to mind and those that have been suppressed for some reason. But it does not include the
instincts that Freud would have it include.

But then Jung adds the part of the psyche that makes his theory stand out from all others: the collective unconscious.
You could call it your "psychic inheritance." It is the reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge
we are all born with. And yet we can never be directly conscious of it. It influences all of our experiences and
behaviors, most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly, by looking at those influences.

There are some experiences that show the effects of the collective unconscious more clearly than others: The
experiences of love at first sight, of deja vu (the feeling that you've been here before), and the immediate recognition
of certain symbols and the meanings of certain myths, could all be understood as the sudden conjunction of our
outer reality and the inner reality of the collective unconscious. Grander examples are the creative experiences
shared by artists and musicians all over the world and in all times, or the spiritual experiences of mystics of all
religions, or the parallels in dreams, fantasies, mythologies, fairy tales, and literature.

A nice example that has been greatly discussed recently is the near-death experience. It seems that many people, of
many different cultural backgrounds, find that they have very similar recollections when they are brought back from
a close encounter with death. They speak of leaving their bodies, seeing their bodies and the events surrounding
them clearly, of being pulled through a long tunnel towards a bright light, of seeing deceased relatives or religious
figures waiting for them, and of their disappointment at having to leave this happy scene to return to their bodies.
Perhaps we are all "built" to experience death in this fashion.

Archetypes

The contents of the collective unconscious are called archetypes. Jung also called them dominants, imagos,
mythological or primordial images, and a few other names, but archetypes seems to have won out over these. An
archetype is an unlearned tendency to experience things in a certain way.

The archetype has no form of its own, but it acts as an "organizing principle" on the things we see or do. It works the
way that instincts work in Freud's theory: At first, the baby just wants something to eat, without knowing what it
wants. It has a rather indefinite yearning which, nevertheless, can be satisfied by some things and not by others.
Later, with experience, the child begins to yearn for something more specific when it is hungry -- a bottle, a cookie,
a broiled lobster, a slice of New York style pizza.

The archetype is like a black hole in space: You only know its there by how it draws matter and light to itself.

The mother archetype

The mother archetype is a particularly good example. All of our ancestors had mothers. We have evolved in an
environment that included a mother or mother-substitute. We would never have survived without our connection
with a nurturing-one during our times as helpless infants. It stands to reason that we are "built" in a way that reflects
that evolutionary environment: We come into this world ready to want mother, to seek her, to recognize her, to deal
with her.

So the mother archetype is our built-in ability to recognize a certain relationship, that of "mothering." Jung says that
this is rather abstract, and we are likely to project the archetype out into the world and onto a particular person,
usually our own mothers. Even when an archetype doesn't have a particular real person available, we tend to
personify the archetype, that is, turn it into a mythological "story-book" character. This character symbolizes the
archetype.
The mother archetype is symbolized by the primordial mother or "earth mother" of mythology, by Eve and Mary in
western traditions, and by less personal symbols such as the church, the nation, a forest, or the ocean. According to
Jung, someone whose own mother failed to satisfy the demands of the archetype may well be one that spends his or
her life seeking comfort in the church, or in identification with "the motherland," or in meditating upon the figure of
Mary, or in a life at sea.

Mana

You must understand that these archetypes are not really biological things, like Freud's instincts. They are more
spiritual demands. For example, if you dreamt about long things, Freud might suggest these things represent the
phallus and ultimately sex. But Jung might have a very different interpretation. Even dreaming quite specifically
about a penis might not have much to do with some unfulfilled need for sex.

It is curious that in primitive societies, phallic symbols do not usually refer to sex at all. They usually symbolize
mana, or spiritual power. These symbols would be displayed on occasions when the spirits are being called upon to
increase the yield of corn, or fish, or to heal someone. The connection between the penis and strength, between
semen and seed, between fertilization and fertility are understood by most cultures.

The shadow

Sex and the life instincts in general are, of course, represented somewhere in Jung's system. They are a part of an
archetype called the shadow. It derives from our prehuman, animal past, when our concerns were limited to survival
and reproduction, and when we weren't selfconscious.

It is the "dark side" of the ego, and the evil that we are capable of is often stored there. Actually, the shadow is
amoral -- neither good nor bad, just like animals. An animal is capable of tender care for its young and vicious
killing for food, but it doesn't choose to do either. It just does what it does. It is "innocent." But from our human
perspective, the animal world looks rather brutal, inhuman, so the shadow becomes something of a garbage can for
the parts of ourselves that we can't quite admit to.

Symbols of the shadow include the snake (as in the garden of Eden), the dragon, monsters, and demons. It often
guards the entrance to a cave or a pool of water, which is the collective unconscious. Next time you dream about
wrestling with the devil, it may only be yourself you are wrestling with!

The persona

The persona represents your public image. The word is, obviously, related to the word person and personality, and
comes from a Latin word for mask. So the persona is the mask you put on before you show yourself to the outside
world. Although it begins as an archetype, by the time we are finished realizing it, it is the part of us most distant
from the collective unconscious.

At its best, it is just the "good impression" we all wish to present as we fill the roles society requires of us. But, of
course, it can also be the "false impression" we use to manipulate people's opinions and behaviors. And, at its worst,
it can be mistaken, even by ourselves, for our true nature: Sometimes we believe we really are what we pretend to
be!

Anima and animus

A part of our persona is the role of male or female we must play. For most people that role is determined by their
physical gender. But Jung, like Freud and Adler and others, felt that we are all really bisexual in nature. When we
begin our lives as fetuses, we have undifferentiated sex organs that only gradually, under the influence of hormones,
become male or female. Likewise, when we begin our social lives as infants, we are neither male nor female in the
social sense. Almost immediately -- as soon as those pink or blue booties go on -- we come under the influence of
society, which gradually molds us into men and women.
In all societies, the expectations placed on men and women differ, usually based on our different roles in
reproduction, but often involving many details that are purely traditional. In our society today, we still have many
remnants of these traditional expectations. Women are still expected to be more nurturant and less aggressive; men
are still expected to be strong and to ignore the emotional side of life. But Jung felt these expectations meant that we
had developed only half of our potential.

The anima is the female aspect present in the collective unconscious of men, and the animus is the male aspect
present in the collective unconscious of women. Together, they are refered to as syzygy. The anima may be
personified as a young girl, very spontaneous and intuitive, or as a witch, or as the earth mother. It is likely to be
associated with deep emotionality and the force of life itself. The animus may be personified as a wise old man, a
sorcerer, or often a number of males, and tends to be logical, often rationalistic, even argumentative.

The anima or animus is the archetype through which you communicate with the collective unconscious generally,
and it is important to get into touch with it. It is also the archetype that is responsible for much of our love life: We
are, as an ancient Greek myth suggests, always looking for our other half, the half that the Gods took from us, in
members of the opposite sex. When we fall in love at first sight, then we have found someone that "fills" our anima
or animus archetype particularly well!

Other archetypes

Jung said that there is no fixed number of archetypes which we could simply list and memorize. They overlap and
easily melt into each other as needed, and their logic is not the usual kind. But here are some he mentions:

Besides mother, their are other family archetypes. Obviously, there is father, who is often symbolized by a guide or
an authority figure. There is also the archetype family, which represents the idea of blood relationship and ties that
run deeper than those based on conscious reasons.

There is also the child, represented in mythology and art by children, infants most especially, as well as other small
creatures. The Christ child celebrated at Christmas is a manifestation of the child archetype, and represents the
future, becoming, rebirth, and salvation. Curiously, Christmas falls during the winter solstice, which in northern
primitive cultures also represents the future and rebirth. People used to light bonfires and perform ceremonies to
encourage the sun's return to them. The child archetype often blends with other archetypes to form the child-god, or
the child-hero.

Many archetypes are story characters. The hero is one of the main ones. He is the mana personality and the defeater
of evil dragons. Basically, he represents the ego -- we do tend to identify with the hero of the story -- and is often
engaged in fighting the shadow, in the form of dragons and other monsters. The hero is, however, often dumb as a
post. He is, after all, ignorant of the ways of the collective unconscious. Luke Skywalker, in the Star Wars films, is
the perfect example of a hero.

The hero is often out to rescue the maiden. She represents purity, innocence, and, in all likelihood, naivete. In the
beginning of the Star Wars story, Princess Leia is the maiden. But, as the story progresses, she becomes the anima,
discovering the powers of the force -- the collective unconscious -- and becoming an equal partner with Luke, who
turns out to be her brother.

The hero is guided by the wise old man. He is a form of the animus, and reveals to the hero the nature of the
collective unconscious. In Star Wars, he is played by Obi Wan Kenobi and, later, Yoda. Notice that they teach Luke
about the force and, as Luke matures, they die and become a part of him.

You might be curious as to the archetype represented by Darth Vader, the "dark father." He is the shadow and the
master of the dark side of the force. He also turns out to be Luke and Leia's father. When he dies, he becomes one of
the wise old men.

There is also an animal archetype, representing humanity's relationships with the animal world. The hero's faithful
horse would be an example. Snakes are often symbolic of the animal archetype, and are thought to be particularly
wise. Animals, after all, are more in touch with their natures than we are. Perhaps loyal little robots and reliable old
spaceships -- the Falcon-- are also symbols of animal.

And there is the trickster, often represented by a clown or a magician. The trickster's role is to hamper the hero's
progress and to generally make trouble. In Norse mythology, many of the gods' adventures originate in some trick or
another played on their majesties by the halfgod Loki.

There are other archetypes that are a little more difficult to talk about. One is the original man, represented in
western religion by Adam. Another is the God archetype, representing our need to comprehend the universe, to give
a meaning to all that happens, to see it all as having some purpose and direction.

The hermaphrodite, both male and female, represents the union of opposites, an important idea in Jung's theory. In
some religious art, Jesus is presented as a rather feminine man. Likewise, in China, the character Kuan Yin began as
a male saint (the bodhisattva Avalokiteshwara), but was portrayed in such a feminine manner that he is more often
thought of as the female goddess of compassion!

The most important archetype of all is the self. The self is the ultimate unity of the personality and issymbolized by
the circle, the cross, and the mandala figures that Jung was fond of painting. A mandala is a drawing that is used in
meditation because it tends to draw your focus back to the center, and it can be as simple as a geometric figure or as
complicated as a stained glass window. The personifications that best represent self are Christ and Buddha, two
people who many believe achieved perfection. But Jung felt that perfection of the personality is only truly achieved
in death.

The dynamics of the psyche

So much for the content of the psyche. Now let's turn to the principles of its operation. Jung gives us three
principles, beginning with the principle of opposites. Every wish immediately suggests its opposite. If I have a good
thought, for example, I cannot help but have in me somewhere the opposite bad thought. In fact, it is a very basic
point: In order to have a concept of good, you must have a concept of bad, just like you can't have up without down
or black without white.

This idea came home to me when I was about eleven. I occasionally tried to help poor innocent woodland creatures
who had been hurt in some way -- often, I'm afraid, killing them in the process. Once I tried to nurse a baby robin
back to health. But when I picked it up, I was so struck by how light it was that the thought came to me that I could
easily crush it in my hand. Mind you, I didn't like the idea, but it was undeniably there.

According to Jung, it is the opposition that creates the power (or libido) of the psyche. It is like the two poles of a
battery, or the splitting of an atom. It is the contrast that gives energy, so that a strong contrast gives strong energy,
and a weak contrast gives weak energy.

The second principle is the principle of equivalence. The energy created from the opposition is "given" to both sides
equally. So, when I held that baby bird in my hand, there was energy to go ahead and try to help it. But there is an
equal amount of energy to go ahead and crush it. I tried to help the bird, so that energy went into the various
behaviors involved in helping it. But what happens to the other energy?

Well, that depends on your attitude towards the wish that you didn't fulfill. If you acknowledge it, face it, keep it
available to the conscious mind, then the energy goes towards a general improvement of your psyche. You grow, in
other words.

But if you pretend that you never had that evil wish, if you deny and suppress it, the energy will go towards the
development of a complex. A complex is a pattern of suppressed thoughts and feelings that cluster -- constellate --
around a theme provided by some archetype. If you deny ever having thought about crushing the little bird, you
might put that idea into the form offered by the shadow (your "dark side"). Or if a man denies his emotional side, his
emotionality might find its way into the anima archetype. And so on.
Here's where the problem comes: If you pretend all your life that you are only good, that you don't even have the
capacity to lie and cheat and steal and kill, then all the times when you do good, that other side of you goes into a
complex around the shadow. That complex will begin to develop a life of its own, and it will haunt you. You might
find yourself having nightmares in which you go around stomping on little baby birds!

If it goes on long enough, the complex may take over, may "possess" you, and you might wind up with a multiple
personality. In the movie The Three Faces of Eve, Joanne Woodward portrayed a meek, mild woman who
eventually discovered that she went out and partied like crazy on Saturday nights. She didn't smoke, but found
cigarettes in her purse, didn't drink, but woke up with hangovers, didn't fool around, but found herself in sexy
outfits. Although multiple personality is rare, it does tend to involve these kinds of black-and-white extremes.

The final principle is the principle of entropy. This is the tendency for oppositions to come together, and so for
energy to decrease, over a person's lifetime. Jung borrowed the idea from physics, where entropy refers to the
tendency of all physical systems to "run down," that is, for all energy to become evenly distributed. If you have, for
example, a heat source in one corner of the room, the whole room will eventually be heated.

When we are young, the opposites will tend to be extreme, and so we tend to have lots of energy. For example,
adolescents tend to exaggerate male-female differences, with boys trying hard to be macho and girls trying equally
hard to be feminine. And so their sexual activity is invested with great amounts of energy! Plus, adolescents often
swing from one extreme to another, being wild and crazy one minute and finding religion the next.

As we get older, most of us come to be more comfortable with our different facets. We are a bit less naively
idealistic and recognize that we are all mixtures of good and bad. We are less threatened by the opposite sex within
us and become more androgynous. Even physically, in old age, men and women become more alike. This process of
rising above our opposites, of seeing both sides of who we are, is called transcendence.

The self

The goal of life is to realize the self. The self is an archetype that represents the transcendence of all opposites, so
that every aspect of your personality is expressed equally. You are then neither and both male and female, neither
and both ego and shadow, neither and both good and bad, neither and both conscious and unconscious, neither and
both an individual and the whole of creation. And yet, with no oppositions, there is no energy, and you cease to act.
Of course, you no longer need to act.

To keep it from getting too mystical, think of it as a new center, a more balanced position, for your psyche. When
you are young, you focus on the ego and worry about the trivialities of the persona. When you are older (assuming
you have been developing as you should), you focus a little deeper, on the self, and become closer to all people, all
life, even the universe itself. The self-realized person is actually less selfish.

Synchronicity

Personality theorists have argued for many years about whether psychological processes function in terms of
mechanism or teleology. Mechanism is the idea that things work in through cause and effect: One thing leads to
another which leads to another, and so on, so that the past determines the present. Teleology is the idea that we are
lead on by our ideas about a future state, by things like purposes, meanings, values, and so on. Mechanism is linked
with determinism and with the natural sciences. Teleology is linked with free will and has become rather rare. It is
still common among moral, legal, and religious philosophers, and, of course, among personality theorists.

Among the people discussed in this book, Freudians and behaviorists tend to be mechanists, while the neo-
Freudians, humanists, and existentialists tend to be teleologists. Jung believes that both play a part. But he adds a
third alternative called synchronicity.

Synchronicity is the occurrence of two events that are not linked causally, nor linked teleologically, yet are
meaningfully related. Once, a client was describing a dream involving a scarab beetle when, at that very instant, a
very similar beetle flew into the window. Often, people dream about something, like the death of a loved one, and
find the next morning that their loved one did, in fact, die at about that time. Sometimes people pick up he phone to
call a friend, only to find that their friend is already on the line. Most psychologists would call these things
coincidences, or try to show how they are more likely to occur than we think. Jung believed the were indications of
how we are connected, with our fellow humans and with nature in general, through the collective unconscious.

Jung was never clear about his own religious beliefs. But this unusual idea of synchronicity is easily explained by
the Hindu view of reality. In the Hindu view, our individual egos are like islands in a sea: We look out at the world
and each other and think we are separate entities. What we don't see is that we are connected to each other by means
of the ocean floor beneath the waters.

The outer world is called maya, meaning illusion, and is thought of as God's dream or God's dance. That is, God
creates it, but it has no reality of its own. Our individual egos they call jivatman, which means individual souls. But
they, too, are something of an illusion. We are all actually extensions of the one and only Atman, or God, who
allows bits of himself to forget his identity, to become apparently separate and independent, to become us. But we
never truly are separate. When we die, we wake up and realize who we were from the beginning: God.

When we dream or meditate, we sink into our personal unconscious, coming closer and closer to our true selves, the
collective unconscious. It is in states like this that we are especially open to "communications" from other egos.
Synchronicity makes Jung's theory one of the rare ones that is not only compatible with parapsychological
phenomena, but actually tries to explain them!

Introversion and extroversion

Jung developed a personality typology that has become so popular that some people don't realize he did anything
else! It begins with the distinction between introversion and extroversion. Introverts are people who prefer their
internal world of thoughts, feelings, fantasies, dreams, and so on, while extroverts prefer the external world of things
and people and activities.

The words have become confused with ideas like shyness and sociability, partially because introverts tend to be shy
and extroverts tend to be sociable. But Jung intended for them to refer more to whether you ("ego") more often faced
toward the persona and outer reality, or toward the collective unconscious and its archetypes. In that sense, the
introvert is somewhat more mature than the extrovert. Our culture, of course, values the extrovert much more. And
Jung warned that we all tend to value our own type most!

We now find the introvert-extravert dimension in several theories, notably Hans Eysenck's, although often hidden
under alternative names such as "sociability" and "surgency."

The functions

Whether we are introverts or extroverts, we need to deal with the world, inner and outer. And each of us has our
preferred ways of dealing with it, ways we are comfortable with and good at. Jung suggests there are four basic
ways, or functions:

The first is sensing. Sensing means what it says: getting information by means of the senses. A sensing person is
good at looking and listening and generally getting to know the world. Jung called this one of the irrational
functions, meaning that it involved perception rather than judging of information.

The second is thinking. Thinking means evaluating information or ideas rationally, logically. Jung called this a
rational function, meaning that it involves decision making or judging, rather than simple intake of information.

The third is intuiting. Intuiting is a kind of perception that works outside of the usual conscious processes. It is
irrational or perceptual, like sensing, but comes from the complex integration of large amounts of information, rather
than simple seeing or hearing. Jung said it was like seeing around corners.

The fourth is feeling. Feeling, like thinking, is a matter of evaluating information, this time by weighing one's
overall, emotional response. Jung calls it rational, obviously not in the usual sense of the word.
We all have these functions. We just have them in different proportions, you might say. Each of us has a superior
function, which we prefer and which is best developed in us, a secondary function, which we are aware of and use in
support of our superior function, a tertiary function, which is only slightly less developed but not terribly conscious,
and an inferior function, which is poorly developed and so unconscious that we might deny its existence in
ourselves.

Most of us develop only one or two of the functions, but our goal should be to develop all four. Once again, Jung
sees the transcendence of opposites as the ideal.

Assessment

Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers found Jung's types and functions so revealing of people's
personalities that they decided to develop a paper-and-pencil test. It came to be called the Myers-Briggs Type
Indicator, and is one of the most popular, and most studied, tests around.

On the basis of your answers on about 125 questions, you are placed in one of sixteen types, with the understanding
that some people might find themselves somewhere between two or three types. What type you are says quite a bit
about you -- your likes and dislikes, your likely career choices, your compatibility with others, and so on. People
tend to like it quite a bit. It has the unusual quality among personality tests of not being too judgmental: None of the
types is terribly negative, nor are any overly positive. Rather than assessing how "crazy" you are, the "Myers-
Briggs" simply opens up your personality for exploration.

The test has four scales. Extroversion - Introversion (E-I) is the most important. Test researchers have found that
about 75 % of the population is extroverted.

The next one is Sensing - Intuiting (S-N), with about 75 % of the population sensing.

The next is Thinking - Feeling (T-F). Although these are distributed evenly through the population, researchers have
found that two-thirds of men are thinkers, while two-thirds of women are feelers. This might seem like stereotyping,
but keep in mind that feeling and thinking are both valued equally by Jungians, and that one-third of men are feelers
and onethird of women are thinkers. Note, though, that society does value thinking and feeling differently, and that
feeling men and thinking women often have difficulties dealing with people's stereotyped expectations.

The last is Judging - Perceiving (J-P), not one of Jung's original dimensions. Myers and Briggs included this one in
order to help determine which of a person's functions is superior. Generally, judging people are more careful,
perhaps inhibited, in their lives. Perceiving people tend to be more spontaneous, sometimes careless. If you are an
extrovert and a "J," you are a thinker or feeler, whichever is stronger. Extroverted and "P" means you are a senser or
intuiter. On the other hand, an introvert with a high "J" score will be a senser or intuiter, while an introvert with a
high "P" score will be a thinker or feeler. J and P are equally distributed in the population.

Each type is identified by four letters, such as ENFJ. These have proven so popular, you can even find them on
people's license plates!

ENFJ (Extroverted feeling with intuiting): These people are easy speakers. They tend to idealize their friends. They
make good parents, but have a tendency to allow themselves to be used. They make good therapists, teachers,
executives, and salespeople.

ENFP (Extroverted intuiting with feeling): These people love novelty and surprises. They are big on emotions and
expression. They are susceptible to muscle tension and tend to be hyperalert. they tend to feel self-conscious. They
are good at sales, advertising, politics, and acting.

ENTJ (Extroverted thinking with intuiting): In charge at home, they expect a lot from spouses and kids. They like
organization and structure and tend to make good executives and administrators.
ENTP (Extroverted intuiting with thinking): These are lively people, not humdrum or orderly. As mates, they are a
little dangerous, especially economically. They are good at analysis and make good entrepreneurs. They do tend to
play at oneupmanship.

ESFJ (Extroverted feeling with sensing): These people like harmony. They tend to have strong shoulds and should-
nots. They may be dependent, first on parents and later on spouses. They wear their hearts on their sleeves and excel
in service occupations involving personal contact.

ESFP (Extroverted sensing with feeling): Very generous and impulsive, they have a low tolerance for anxiety. They
make good performers, they like public relations, and they love the phone. They should avoid scholarly pursuits,
especially science.

ESTJ (Extroverted thinking with sensing): These are responsible mates and parents and are loyal to the workplace.
They are realistic, down-to-earth, orderly, and love tradition. They often find themselves joining civic clubs!

ESTP (Extroverted sensing with thinking): These are action-oriented people, often sophisticated, sometimes ruthless
-- our "James Bonds." As mates, they are exciting and charming, but they have trouble with commitment. They
make good promoters, entrepreneurs, and con artists.

INFJ (Introverted intuiting with feeling): These are serious students and workers who really want to contribute. They
are private and easily hurt. They make good spouses, but tend to be physically reserved. People often think they are
psychic. They make good therapists, general practitioners, ministers, and so on.

INFP (Introverted feeling with intuiting): These people are idealistic, self-sacrificing, and somewhat cool or
reserved. They are very family and home oriented, but don't relax well. You find them in psychology, architecture,
and religion, but never in business.

INTJ (Introverted intuiting with thinking): These are the most independent of all types. They love logic and ideas
and are drawn to scientific research. They can be rather single-minded, though.

INTP (Introverted thinking with intuiting): Faithful, preoccupied, and forgetful, these are the bookworms. They tend
to be very precise in their use of language. They are good at logic and math and make good philosophers and
theoretical scientists, but not writers or salespeople.

ISFJ (Introverted sensing with feeling): These people are service and work oriented. They may suffer from fatigue
and tend to be attracted to troublemakers. They are good nurses, teachers, secretaries, general practitioners,
librarians, middle managers, and housekeepers.

ISFP (Introverted feeling with sensing): They are shy and retiring, are not talkative, but like sensuous action. They
like painting, drawing, sculpting, composing, dancing -- the arts generally -- and they like nature. They are not big
on commitment.

ISTJ (Introverted sensing with thinking): These are dependable pillars of strength. They often try to reform their
mates and other people. They make good bank examiners, auditors, accountants, tax examiners, supervisors in
libraries and hospitals, business, home ec., and phys. ed. teachers, and boy or girl scouts!

ISTP (Introverted thinking with sensing): These people are action-oriented and fearless, and crave excitement. They
are impulsive and dangerous to stop. They often like tools, instruments, and weapons, and often become technical
experts. They are not interested in communications and are often incorrectly diagnosed as dyslexic or hyperactive.
They tend to do badly in school.

Even without taking the test, you may very well recognize yourself in one or two of these types. Or ask others --
they may be more accurate! But, if you like, you can take my Jungian personality test on the internet: Just click
here!

DISCUSSION
Quite a few people find that Jung has a great deal to say to them. They include writers, artists, musicians, film
makers, theologians, clergy of all denominations, students of mythology, and, of course, some psychologists.
Examples that come to mind are the mythologist Joseph Campbell, the film maker George Lucas, and the science
fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin. Anyone interested in creativity, spirituality, psychic phenomena, the universal, and
so on will find in Jung a kindred spirit.

But scientists, including most psychologists, have a lot of trouble with Jung. Not only does he fully support the
teleological view (as do most personality theorists), but he goes a step further and talks about the mystical
interconnectedness of synchronicity. Not only does he postulate an unconscious, where things are not easily
available to the empirical eye, but he postulates a collective unconscious that never has been and never will be
conscious.

In fact, Jung takes an approach that is essentially the reverse of the mainstream's reductionism: Jung begins with the
highest levels -- even spiritualism -- and derives the lower levels of psychology and physiology from them.

Even psychologists who applaud his teleology and antireductionist position may not be comfortable with him. Like
Freud, Jung tries to bring everything into his system. He has little room for chance, accident, or circumstances.
Personality -- and life in general -- seems "overexplained" in Jung's theory.

I have found that his theory sometimes attracts students who have difficulty dealing with reality. When the world,
especially the social world, becomes too difficult, some people retreat into fantasy. Some, for example, become
couch potatoes. But others turn to complex ideologies that pretend to explain everything. Some get involved in
Gnostic or Tantric religions, the kind that present intricate rosters of angels and demons and heavens and hells, and
endlessly discuss symbols. Some go to Jung. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this; but for someone who is
out of touch with reality, this is hardly going to help.

These criticisms do not cut the foundation out from under Jung's theory. But they do suggest that some careful
consideration is in order.

The positive things

On the plus side, there is the Myers-Briggs and other tests based on Jung's types and functions. Because they do not
place people on dimensions that run from "good" to "bad," they are much less threatening. They encourage people to
become more aware of themselves.

The archetypes, at first glance, might seem to be Jung's strangest idea. And yet they have proven to be very useful in
the analysis of myths, fairy tales, literature in general, artistic symbolism, and religious exposition. They apparently
capture some of the basic "units" of our self-expression. Many people have suggested that there are only so many
stories and characters in the world, and we just keep on rearranging the details.

This suggests that the archetypes actually do refer to some deep structures of the human mind. After all, from the
physiological perspective, we come into his world with a certain structure: We see in a certain way, hear in a certain
way, "process information" in a certain way, behave in a certain way, because our neurons and glands and muscles
are structured in a certain way. At least one cognitive psychologist has suggested looking for the structures that
correspond to Jung's archetypes!

Finally, Jung has opened our eyes to the differences between child development and adult development. Children
clearly emphasize differentiation -- separating one thing from another -- in their learning. "What's this?" " Why is it
this way and not that?" "What kinds are there?" They actively seek diversity. And many people, psychologists
included, have been so impressed by this that they have assumed that all learning is a matter of differentiation, of
learning more and more "things."

But Jung has pointed out that adults search more for integration, for the transcending of opposites. Adults search for
the connections between things, how things fit together, how they interact, how they contribute to the whole. We
want to make sense of it, find the meaning of it, the purpose of it all. Children unravel the world; adults try to knit it
back together.
Connections

On the one hand, Jung is still attached to his Freudian roots. He emphasizes the unconscious even more than
Freudians do. In fact, he might be seen as the logical extension of Freud's tendency to put the causes of things into
the past. Freud, too, talked about myths --Oedipus, for example -- and how they impact on the modern psyche.

On the other hand, Jung has a lot in common with the neo-Freudians, humanists, and existentialists. He believes that
we are meant to progress, to move in a positive direction, and not just to adapt, as the Freudians and behaviorists
would have it. His idea of self-realization is clearly similar to self-actualization.

The balancing or transcending of opposites also has counterparts in other theories. Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Andreas
Angyal, David Bakan, Gardner Murphy, and Rollo May all make reference to balancing two opposing tendencies,
one towards individual development and the other towards the development of compassion or social interest. Rollo
May talks about the psyche being composed of many "daimons" (little gods) such as the desire for sex, or love, or
power. All are positive in their place, but should any one take over the whole personality, we would have "daimonic
possession," or mental illness!

Finally, we owe to Jung the broadening of interpretation, whether of symptoms or dreams or free-associations.
While Freud developed more-or-less rigid (specifically, sexual) interpretations, Jung allowed for a rather free-
wheeling "mythological" interpretation, wherein anything could mean, well, anything. Existential analysis, in
particular, has benefited from Jung's ideas.

Readings

Most of Jung's writings are contained in The Collected Works of Carl G. Jung. I have to warn you that most of his
works are not easy going, but they are full of interesting things that make them worth the trouble.

If you are looking for something a little easier, you might try Analytic Psychology: Its Theory and Practice, which is
a collection of lectures and is available in paperback. Or read Man and His Symbols, which is available in several
editions ranging from large ones with many color pictures to an inexpensive paperback. If you want a smattering of
Jung, try a collection of his writings, such as Modern Library's The Basic Writings of C. C. Jung.

The best book I've ever read about Jung, however, is the autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections, written
with his student Aniela Jaffé. It makes a good introduction, assuming you've read something like the preceding
chapter first.

ALFRED ADLER

1870 - 1937

Dr. C. George Boeree

I would like to introduce Alfred Adler by talking about someone Adler never knew: Theodore Roosevelt. Born to
Martha and Theodore Senior in Manhattan on October 27, 1858, he was said to be a particularly beautiful baby who
needed no help entering his new world. His parents were strong, intelligent, handsome, and quite well-to-do. It
should have been an idyllic childhood

But "Teedie," as he was called, was not as healthy as he first appeared. He had severe asthma, and tended to catch
colds easily, develop coughs and fevers, and suffer from nausea and diarrhea. He was small and thin. His voice was
reedy, and remained so even in adulthood. He became malnourished and was often forced by his asthma to sleep
sitting up in chairs. Several times, he came dangerously close to dying from lack of oxygen.

Not to paint too negative a picture, Teedie was an active boy -- some would say over-active -- and had a fantastic
personality. He was full of curiosity about nature and would lead expeditions of cousins to find mice, squirrels,
snakes, frogs, and anything else that could be dissected or pickled. His repeated confinement when his asthma flared
up turned him to books, which he devoured throughout his life. He may have been sickly, but he certainly had a
desire to live!

After traveling through Europe with his family, his health became worse. He had grown taller but no more muscular.
Finally, with encouragement from the family doctor, Roosevelt Senior encouraged the boy, now twelve, to begin
lifting weights. Like anything else he tackled, he did this enthusiastically. He got healthier, and for the first time in
his life got through a whole month without an attack of asthma.

When he was thirteen, he became aware of another defect of his: When he found that he couldn't hit anything with
the rifle his father had given him. When friends read a billboard to him -- he didn't realize it had writing on it -- it
was discovered that he was terribly nearsighted!

In the same year, he was sent off to the country on his own after a bad attack of asthma. On the way, he was waylaid
by a couple of other boys his own age. He found that not only couldn't he defend himself, he couldn't even lay a
hand on them. He later announced to his father his intention to learn to box. By the time he went to Harvard, he was
not only a healthier Teddy Roosevelt, but was a regular winner of a variety of athletic contests.

The rest, as they say, is history. "Teedie" Roosevelt went on to become a successful New York assemblyman, North
Dakota cowboy, New York commissioner of police, Assistant secretary of the Navy, lieutenant colonel of the
"Rough Riders," the Governor of New York, and best-selling author, all by the age of forty. With the death of
President William McKinley in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest president of the United States.

How is it that someone so sickly should become so healthy, vigorous, and successful? Why is it that some children,
sickly or not, thrive, while others wither away? Is the drive that Roosevelt had peculiar to him, or is it something
that lies in each of us? These kinds of questions intrigued a young Viennese physician named Alfred Adler, and led
him to develop his theory, called Individual Psychology.

BIOGRAPHY

Alfred Adler was born in the suburbs of Vienna on February 7, 1870, the third child, second son, of a Jewish grain
merchant and his wife. As a child, Alfred developed rickets, which kept him from walking until he was four years
old. At five, he nearly died of pneumonia. It was at this age that he decided to be a physician.

Alfred was an average student and preferred playing outdoors to being cooped up in school. He was quite outgoing,
popular, and active, and was known for his efforts at outdoing his older brother, Sigmund.

He received a medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1895. During his college years, he became attached
to a group of socialist students, among which he found his wife-tobe, Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein. She was an
intellectual and social activist who had come from Russia to study in Vienna. They married in 1897 and eventually
had four children, two of whom became psychiatrists.

He began his medical career as an opthamologist, but he soon switched to general practice, and established his office
in a lower-class part of Vienna, across from the Prater, a combination amusement park and circus. His clients
included circus people, and it has been suggested (Furtmuller, 1965) that the unusual strengths and weaknesses of
the performers led to his insights into organ inferiorities and compensation.

He then turned to psychiatry, and in 1907 was invited to join Freud's discussion group. After writing papers on
organic inferiority, which were quite compatible with Freud's views, he wrote, first, a paper concerning an
aggression instinct, which Freud did not approve of, and then a paper on children's feelings of inferiority, which
suggested that Freud's sexual notions be taken more metaphorically than literally.

Although Freud named Adler the president of the Viennese Analytic Society and the coeditor of the organization's
newsletter, Adler didn't stop his criticism. A debate between Adler's supporters and Freud's was arranged, but it
resulted in Adler, with nine other members of the organization, resigning to form the Society for Free
Psychoanalysis in 1911. This organization became The Society for Individual Psychology in the following year.

During World War I, Adler served as a physician in the Austrian Army, first on the Russian front, and later in a
children's hospital. He saw first hand the damage that war does, and his thought turned increasingly to the concept of
social interest. He felt that if humanity was to survive, it had to change its ways!

After the war, he was involved in various projects, including clinics attached to state schools and the training of
teachers. In 1926, he went to the United States to lecture, and he eventually accepted a visiting position at the Long
Island College of Medicine. In 1934, he and his family left Vienna forever. On May 28, 1937, during a series of
lectures at Aberdeen University, he died of a heart attack.

THEORY

Alfred Adler postulates a single "drive" or motivating force behind all our behavior and experience. By the time his
theory had gelled into its most mature form, he called that motivating force the striving for perfection. It is the desire
we all have to fulfill our potentials, to come closer and closer to our ideal. It is, as many of you will already see, very
similar to the more popular idea of self-actualization.

"Perfection" and "ideal" are troublesome words, though. On the one hand, they are very positive goals. Shouldn't we
all be striving for the ideal? And yet, in psychology, they are often given a rather negative connotation.
Perfection and ideals are, practically by definition, things you can't reach. Many people, in fact, live very sad and
painful lives trying to be perfect! As you will see, other theorists, like Karen Horney and Carl Rogers, emphasize
this problem. Adler talks about it, too. But he sees this negative kind of idealism as a perversion of the more positive
understanding. We will return to this in a little while.

Striving for perfection was not the first phrase Adler used to refer to his single motivating force. His earliest phrase
was the aggression drive, referring to the reaction we have when other drives, such as our need to eat, be sexually
satisfied, get things done, or be loved, are frustrated. It might be better called the assertiveness drive, since we tend
to think of aggression as physical and negative. But it was Adler's idea of the aggression drive that first caused
friction between him and Freud. Freud was afraid that it would detract from the crucial position of the sex drive in
psychoanalytic theory. Despite Freud's dislike for the idea, he himself introduced something very similar much later
in his life: the death instinct.

Another word Adler used to refer to basic motivation was compensation, or striving to overcome. Since we all have
problems, short-comings, inferiorities of one sort or another, Adler felt, earlier in his writing, that our personalities
could be accounted for by the ways in which we do -- or don't -- compensate or overcome those problems. The idea
still plays an important role in his theory, as you will see, but he rejected it as a label for the basic motive because it
makes it sound as if it is your problems that cause you to be what you are.

One of Adler's earliest phrases was masculine protest. He noted something pretty obvious in his culture (and by no
means absent from our own): Boys were held in higher esteem than girls. Boys wanted, often desperately, to be
thought of as strong, aggressive, in control -- i.e. "masculine" -- and not weak, passive, or dependent -- i.e.
"feminine." The point, of course, was that men are somehow basically better than women. They do, after all, have
the power, the education, and apparently the talent and motivation needed to do "great things," and women don't.

You can still hear this in the kinds of comments older people make about little boys and girls: If a baby boy fusses or
demands to have his own way (masculine protest!), they will say he's a natural boy; If a little girl is quiet and shy,
she is praised for her femininity; If, on the other hand, the boy is quiet and shy, they worry that he might grow up to
be a sissy; Or if a girl is assertive and gets her way, they call her a "tomboy" and will try to reassure you that she'll
grow out of it!

But Adler did not see men's assertiveness and success in the world as due to some innate superiority. He saw it as a
reflection of the fact that boys are encouraged to be assertive in life, and girls are discouraged. Both boys and girls,
however, begin life with the capacity for "protest!" Because so many people misunderstood him to mean that men
are, innately, more assertive, lead him to limit his use of the phrase.

The last phrase he used, before switching to striving for perfection, was striving for superiority. His use of this
phrase reflects one of the philosophical roots of his ideas: Friederich Nietzsche developed a philosophy that
considered the will to power the basic motive of human life. Although striving for superiority does refer to the desire
to be better, it also contains the idea that we want to be better than others, rather than better in our own right. Adler
later tended to use striving for superiority more in reference to unhealthy or neurotic striving.

Life style

A lot of this playing with words reflects Adler's groping towards a really different kind of personality theory than
that represented by Freud's. Freud's theory was what we nowadays would call a reductionistic one: He tried most of
his life to get the concepts down to the physiological level. Although he admitted failure in the end, life is
nevertheless explained in terms of basic physiological needs. In addition, Freud tended to "carve up" the person into
smaller theoretical concepts -- the id, ego, and superego -- as well.

Adler was influenced by the writings of Jan Smuts, the South African philosopher and statesman. Smuts felt that, in
order to understand people, we have to understand them more as unified wholes than as a collection of bits and
pieces, and we have to understand them in the context of their environment, both physical and social. This approach
is called holism, and Adler took it very much to heart.

First, to reflect the idea that we should see people as wholes rather than parts, he decided to label his approach to
psychology individual psychology. The word individual means literally "un-divided."

Second, instead of talking about a person's personality, with the traditional sense of internal traits, structures,
dynamics, conflicts, and so on, he preferred to talk about style of life (nowadays, "lifestyle"). Life style refers to
how you live your life, how you handle problems and interpersonal relations. Here's what he himself had to say
about it: "The style of life of a tree is the individuality of a tree expressing itself and molding itself in an
environment. We recognize a style when we see it against a background of an environment different from what we
expect, for then we realize that every tree has a life pattern and is not merely a mechanical reaction to the
environment."

Teleology

The last point -- that lifestyle is "not merely a mechanical reaction" -- is a second way in which Adler differs
dramatically from Freud. For Freud, the things that happened in the past, such as early childhood trauma, determine
what you are like in the present. Adler sees motivation as a matter of moving towards the future, rather than being
driven, mechanistically, by the past. We are drawn towards our goals, our purposes, our ideals. This is called
teleology.

Moving things from the past into the future has some dramatic effects. Since the future is not here yet, a teleological
approach to motivation takes the necessity out of things. In a traditional mechanistic approach, cause leads to effect:
If a, b, and c happen, then x, y, and z must, of necessity, happen. But you don't have to reach your goals or meet
your ideals, and they can change along the way. Teleology acknowledges that life is hard and uncertain, but it
always has room for change!

Another major influence on Adler's thinking was the philosopher Hans Vaihinger, who wrote a book called The
Philosophy of "As If." Vaihinger believed that ultimate truth would always be beyond us, but that, for practical
purposes, we need to create partial truths. His main interest was science, so he gave as examples such partial truths
as protons and electrons, waves of light, gravity as distortion of space, and so on. Contrary to what many of us
nonscientists tend to assume, these are not things that anyone has seen or proven to exist: They are useful constructs.
They work for the moment, let us do science, and hopefully will lead to better, more useful constructs. We use them
"as if" they were true. He called these partial truths fictions.
Vaihinger, and Adler, pointed out that we use these fictions in day to day living as well. We behave as if we knew
the world would be here tomorrow, as if we were sure what good and bad are all about, as if everything we see is as
we see it, and so on. Adler called this fictional finalism. You can understand the phrase most easily if you think
about an example: Many people behave as if there were a heaven or a hell in their personal future. Of course, there
may be a heaven or a hell, but most of us don't think of this as a proven fact. That makes it a "fiction" in Vaihinger's
and Adler's sense of the word. And finalism refers to the teleology of it: The fiction lies in the future, and yet
influences our behavior today.

Adler added that, at the center of each of our lifestyles, there sits one of these fictions, an important one about who
we are and where we are going.

Social interest

Second in importance only to striving for perfection is the idea of social interest or social feeling (originally called
Gemeinschaftsgefuhl or "community feeling"). In keeping with his holism, it is easy to see that anyone "striving for
perfection" can hardly do so without considering his or her social environment. As social animals, we simply don't
exist, much less thrive, without others, and even the most resolute people-hater forms that hatred in a social context!

Adler felt that social concern was not simply inborn, nor just learned, but a combination of both: It is based on an
innate disposition, but it has to be nurtured to survive. That it is to some extent innate is shown by the way babies
and small children often show sympathy for others without having been taught to do so. Notice how, when one baby
in a nursery begins to cry, they all begin to cry. Or how, when we walk into a room where people are laughing, we
ourselves begin to smile.

And yet, right along with the examples of how generous little children can be to others, we have examples of how
selfish and cruel they can be. Although we instinctively seem to know that what hurts him can hurt me, and vice
versa, we also instinctively seem to know that, if we have to choose between it hurting him and it hurting me, we'll
take "hurting him" every time! So the tendency to empathize must be supported by parents and the culture at large.
Even if we disregard the possibilities of conflict between my needs and yours, empathy involves feeling the pain of
others, and in a hard world, that can quickly become overwhelming. Much easier to just "toughen up" and ignore
that unpleasant empathy -- unless society steps in on empathy's behalf!

One misunderstanding Adler wanted to avoid was the idea that social interest was somehow another version of
extraversion. Americans in particular tend to see social concern as a matter of being open and friendly and slapping
people on the back and calling them by their first names. Some people may indeed express their social concern this
way; But other people just use that kind of behavior to further their own ends. Adler meant social concern or feeling
not in terms of particular social behaviors, but in the much broader sense of caring for family, for community, for
society, for humanity, even for life. Social concern is a matter of being useful to others.

On the other hand, a lack of social concern is, for Adler, the very definition of mental illhealth: All failures --
neurotics, psychotics, criminals, drunkards, problem children, suicides, perverts, and prostitutes -- are failures
because they are lacking in social interest.... Their goal of success is a goal of personal superiority, and their
triumphs have meaning only to themselves.

Inferiority

Here we are, all of us, "pulled" towards fulfillment, perfection, self-actualization. And yet some of us -- the failures
-- end up terribly unfulfilled, baldly imperfect, and far from selfactualized. And all because we lack social interest,
or, to put it in the positive form, because we are too self-interested. So what makes so many of us self-interested?

Adler says it's a matter of being overwhelmed by our inferiority. If you are moving along, doing well, feeling
competent, you can afford to think of others. If you are not, if life is getting the best of you, then your attentions
become increasingly focussed on yourself.

Obviously, everyone suffers from inferiority in one form or another. For example, Adler began his theoretical work
considering organ inferiority, that is, the fact that each of us has weaker, as well as stronger, parts of our anatomy or
physiology. Some of us are born with heart murmurs, or develop heart problems early in life; Some have weak
lungs, or kidneys, or early liver problems; Some of us stutter or lisp; Some have diabetes, or asthma, or polio; Some
have weak eyes, or poor hearing, or a poor musculature; Some of us have innate tendencies to being heavy, others to
being skinny; Some of us are retarded, some of us are deformed; Some of us are terribly tall or terribly short; And so
on and so on.

Adler noted that many people respond to these organic inferiorities with compensation. They make up for their
deficiencies in some way: The inferior organ can be strengthened and even become stronger than it is in others; Or
other organs can be overdeveloped to take up the slack; Or the person can psychologically compensate for the
organic problem by developing certain skills or even certain personality styles. There are, as you well know, many
examples of people who overcame great physical odds to become what those who are better endowed physically
wouldn't even dream of!

Sadly, there are also many people who cannot handle their difficulties, and live lives of quiet despair. I would guess
that our optimistic, up-beat society seriously underestimates their numbers.

But Adler soon saw that this is only part of the picture. Even more people have psychological inferiorities. Some of
us are told that we are dumb, or ugly, or weak. Some of us come to believe that we are just plain no good. In school,
we are tested over and over, and given grades that tell us we aren't as good as the next person. Or we are demeaned
for our pimples or our bad posture and find ourselves without friends or dates. Or we are forced into basketball
games, where we wait to see which team will be stuck with us. In these examples, it's not a matter of true organic
inferiority -- we are not really retarded or deformed or weak -- but we learn to believe that we are. Again, some
compensate by becoming good at what we feel inferior about. More compensate by becoming good at something
else, but otherwise retaining our sense of inferiority. And some just never develop any self esteem at all.

If the preceding hasn't hit you personally yet, Adler also noted an even more general form of inferiority: The natural
inferiority of children. all children are, by nature, smaller, weaker, less socially and intellectually competent, than
the adults around them. Adler suggested that, if we look at children's games, toys, and fantasies, they tend to have
one thing in common: The desire to grow up, to be big, to be an adult. This kind of compensation is really identical
with striving for perfection! Many children, however, are left with the feeling that other people will always be better
than they are.

If you are overwhelmed by the forces of inferiority -- whether it is your body hurting, the people around you holding
you in contempt, or just the general difficulties of growing up -- you develop an inferiority complex. Looking back
on my own childhood, I can see several sources for later inferiority complexes: Physically, I've tended to be heavy,
with some real "fat boy" stages along the way; Also, because I was born in Holland, I didn't grow up with the skills
of baseball, football, and basketball in my genes; Finally, my artistically talented parents often left me --
unintentionally -- with the feeling that I'd never be as good as they were. So, as I grew up, I became shy and
withdrawn, and concentrated on the only thing I was good at, school. It took a long time for me to realize my self-
worth.

If you weren't "super-nerd," you may have had one of the most common inferiority complexes I've come across:
"Math phobia!" Perhaps it started because you could never remember what seven times eight was. Every year, there
was some topic you never quite got the hang of. Every year, you fell a little further behind. And then you hit the
crisis point: Algebra. How could you be expected to know what "x" is when you still didn't know what seven times
eight was?

Many, many people truly believe that they are not meant to do math, that they are missing that piece of their brains
or something. I'd like to tell you here and now that anyone can do math, if they are taught properly and when they
are really ready. That aside, you've got to wonder how many people have given up being scientists, teachers,
business people, or even going to college, because of this inferiority complex.

But the inferiority complex is not just a little problem, it's a neurosis, meaning it's a life-size problem. You become
shy and timid, insecure, indecisive, cowardly, submissive, compliant, and so on. You begin to rely on people to
carry you along, even manipulating them into supporting you: "You think I'm smart / pretty / strong / sexy / good,
don't you?" Eventually, you become a drain on them, and you may find yourself by yourself. Nobody can take all
that self-centered whining for long!

There is another way in which people respond to inferiority besides compensation and the inferiority complex: You
can also develop a superiority complex. The superiority complex involves covering up your inferiority by pretending
to be superior. If you feel small, one way to feel big is to make everyone else feel even smaller! Bullies, braggarts,
and petty dictators everywhere are the prime example. More subtle examples are the people who are given to
attention-getting dramatics, the ones who feel powerful when they commit crimes, and the ones who put others
down for their gender, race, ethnic origins, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, weight, height, etc. etc. Even more
subtle still are the people who hide their feelings of worthlessness in the delusions of power afforded by alcohol and
drugs.

Psychological types

Although all neurosis is, for Adler, a matter of insufficient social interest, he did note that three types could be
distinguished based on the different levels of energy they involved:

The first is the ruling type. They are, from childhood on, characterized by a tendency to be rather aggressive and
dominant over others. Their energy -- the strength of their striving after personal power -- is so great that they tend
to push over anything or anybody who gets in their way. The most energetic of them are bullies and sadists;
somewhat less energetic ones hurt others by hurting themselves, and include alcoholics, drug addicts, and suicides.

The second is the leaning type. They are sensitive people who have developed a shell around themselves which
protects them, but they must rely on others to carry them through life's difficulties. They have low energy levels and
so become dependent. When overwhelmed, they develop what we typically think of as neurotic symptoms: phobias,
obsessions and compulsions, general anxiety, hysteria, amnesias, and so on, depending on individual details of their
lifestyle.

The third type is the avoiding type. These have the lowest levels of energy and only survive by essentially
avoiding life -- especially other people. When pushed to the limits, they tend to become psychotic, retreating finally
into their own personal worlds.

There is a fourth type as well: the socially useful type. This is the healthy person, one who has both social interest
and energy. Note that without energy, you can't really have social interest, since you wouldn't be able to actually do
anything for anyone!

Adler noted that his four types looked very much like the four types proposed by the ancient Greeks. They, too,
noticed that some people are always sad, others always angry, and so on.

But they attributed these temperaments (from the same root as temperature) to the relative presence of four bodily
fluids called humors.

If you had too much yellow bile, you would be choleric (hot and dry) and angry all the time. The choleric is,
roughly, the ruling type.

If you had too much phlegm, you would be phlegmatic (cold and wet) and be sluggish. This is roughly the leaning
type.

If you had too much black bile -- and we don't know what the Greeks were referring to here -- you would be
melancholy (cold and dry) and tend to be sad constantly. This is roughly the avoiding type.

And, if you had a lot of blood relative to the other humors, you be in a good humor, sanguine (warm and moist).
This naturally cheerful and friendly person represents the socially useful type.
One word of warning about Adler's types: Adler believed very strongly that each person is a unique individual with
his or her own unique lifestyle. The idea of types is, for him, only a heuristic device, meaning a useful fiction, not an
absolute reality!

Childhood

Adler, like Freud, saw personality or lifestyle as something established quite early in life. In fact, the prototype of
your lifestyle tends to be fixed by about five years old. New experiences, rather than change that prototype, tend to
be interpreted in terms of the prototype, "force fit," in other words, into preconceived notions, just like new
acquaintances tend to get "force fit" into our stereotypes.

Adler felt that there were three basic childhood situations that most contribute to a faulty lifestyle. The first is one
we've spoken of several times: organ inferiorities, as well as early childhood diseases. They are what he called
"overburdened," and if someone doesn't come along to draw their attention to others, they will remain focussed on
themselves. Most will go through life with a strong sense of inferiority; A few will overcompensate with a
superiority complex. Only with the encouragement of loved ones will some truly compensate.

The second is pampering. Many children are taught, by the actions of others, that they can take without giving. Their
wishes are everyone else's commands. This may sound like a wonderful situation, until you realize that the
pampered child fails in two ways: First, he doesn't learn to do for himself, and discovers later that he is truly
inferior; And secondly, he doesn't learn any other way to deal with others than the giving of commands. And society
responds to pampered people in only one way: hatred.

The third is neglect. A child who is neglected or abused learns what the pampered child learns, but learns it in a far
more direct manner: They learn inferiority because they are told and shown every day that they are of no value;
They learn selfishness because they are taught to trust no one. If you haven't known love, you don't develop a
capacity for it later. We should note that the neglected child includes not only orphans and the victims of abuse, but
the children whose parents are never there, and the ones raised in a rigid, authoritarian manner.

Birth order

Adler must be credited as the first theorist to include not only a child's mother and father and other adults as early
influence on the child, but the child's brothers and sisters as well. His consideration of the effects of siblings and the
order in which they were born is probably what Adler is best-known for. I have to warn you, though, that Adler
considered birth-order another one of those heuristic ideas -- useful fictions -- that contribute to understanding
people, but must be not be taken too seriously.

The only child is more likely than others to be pampered, with all the ill results we've discussed. After all, the
parents of the only child have put all their eggs in one basket, so to speak, and are more likely to take special care --
sometimes anxiety-filled care -- of their pride and joy. If the parents are abusive, on the other hand, the only child
will have to bear that abuse alone.

The first child begins life as an only child, with all the attention to him- or herself. Sadly, just as things are getting
comfortable, the second child arrives and "dethrones" the first. At first, the child may battle for his or her lost
position. He or she might try acting like the baby - after all, it seems to work for the baby! -- only to be rebuffed and
told to grow up. Some become disobedient and rebellious, others sullen and withdrawn. Adler believes that first
children are more likely than any other to become problem children. More positively, first children are often
precocious. They tend to be relatively solitary and more conservative than the other children in the family.

The second child is in a very different situation: He or she has the first child as a sort of "pace-setter," and tends to
become quite competitive, constantly trying to surpass the older child. They often succeed, but many feel as if the
race is never done, and they tend to dream of constant running without getting anywhere. Other "middle" children
will tend to be similar to the second child, although each may focus on a different "competitor."

The youngest child is likely to be the most pampered in a family with more than one child. After all, he or she is the
only one who is never dethroned! And so youngest children are the second most likely source of problem children,
just behind first children. On the other hand, the youngest may also feel incredible inferiority, with everyone older
and "therefore" superior. But, with all those "pace-setters" ahead, the youngest can also be driven to exceed all of
them.

Who is a first, second, or youngest child isn't as obvious as it might seem. If there is a long stretch between children,
they may not see themselves and each other the same way as if they were closer together. There are eight years
between my first and second daughter and three between the second and the third: That would make my first
daughter an only child, my second a first child, and my third the second and youngest! And if some of the children
are boys and some girls, it makes a difference as well. A second child who is a girl might not take her older brother
as someone to compete with; A boy in a family of girls may feel more like the only child; And so on. As with
everything in Adler's system, birth order is to be understood in the context of the individual's own special
circumstances.

Diagnosis

In order to help you to discover the "fictions" your lifestyle is based upon, Adler would look at a great variety of
things -- your birth-order position, for example. First, he might examine you and your medical history for any
possible organic roots to your problem. A serious illness, for example, may have side effects that closely resemble
neurotic and psychotic symptoms.

In your very first session with you, he might ask for your earliest childhood memory. He is not so much looking for
the truth here as for an indication of that early prototype of your present lifestyle. If your earliest memory involves
security and a great deal of attention, that might indicate pampering; If you recall some aggressive competition with
your older brother, that might suggest the strong strivings of a second child and the "ruling" type of personality; If
your memory involves neglect and hiding under the sink, it might mean severe inferiority and avoidance; And so on.

He might also ask about any childhood problems you may have had: Bad habits involving eating or the bathroom
might indicate ways in which you controlled your parents; Fears, such as a fear of the dark or of being left alone,
might suggest pampering; Stuttering is likely to mean that speech was associated with anxiety; Overt aggression and
stealing may be signs of a superiority complex; Daydreaming, isolation, laziness, and lying may be various ways of
avoiding facing one's inferiorities.

Like Freud and Jung, dreams (and daydreams) were important to Adler. He took a more direct approach to them,
though: Dreams are an expression of your style of life and, far from contradicting your daytime feelings, are unified
with your conscious life. Usually, they reflect the goals you have and the problems you face in reaching them. If you
can't remember any dreams, Adler isn't put off: Go ahead and fantasize right then and there. Your fantasies will
reflect your lifestyle just as well.

Adler would also pay attention to how you express yourself: Your posture, the way you shake hands, the gestures
you use, how you move, your "body language," as we say today. He notes that pampered people often lean against
something! Even your sleep postures may contribute some insight: A person who sleeps in the fetal position with the
covers over his or her head is clearly different from one who sprawls over the entire bed completely uncovered!

He would also want to know the exogenous factors, the events that triggered the symptoms that concern you. He
gives a number of common triggers: Sexual problems, like uncertainty, guilt, the first time, impotence, and so on;
The problems women face, such as pregnancy and childbirth and the onset and end of menstruation; Your love life,
dating, engagement, marriage, and divorce; Your work life, including school, exams, career decisions, and the job
itself; And mortal danger or the loss of a loved one.

Last, and not least, Adler was open to the less rational and scientific, more art-like side of diagnosis: He suggested
we not ignore empathy, intuition, and just plain guess-work!

Therapy

There are considerable differences between Adler's therapy and Freud's: First, Adler preferred to have everyone
sitting up and talking face to face. Further, he went to great lengths to avoid appearing too authoritarian. In fact, he
advised that the therapist never allow the patient to force him into the role of an authoritarian figure, because that
allows the patient to play some of the same games he or she is likely to have played many times before: The patient
may set you up as a savior, only to attack you when you inevitably reveal your humanness. By pulling you down,
they feel as if they are raising themselves, with their neurotic lifestyles, up.

This is essentially the explanation Adler gave for resistance: When a patient forgets appointments, comes in late,
demands special favors, or generally becomes stubborn and uncooperative, it is not, as Freud thought, a matter of
repression. Rather, resistance is just a sign of the patient's lack of courage to give up their neurotic lifestyle.

The patient must come to understand the nature of his or her lifestyle and its roots in selfcentered fictions. This
understanding or insight cannot be forced: If you just tell someone "look, here is your problem!" he or she will only
pull away from you and look for ways of bolstering their present fictions. Instead, A patient must be brought into
such a state of feeling that he likes to listen, and wants to understand. Only then can he be influenced to live what he
has understood. (Ansbacher and Ansbacher, 1956, p. 335.) It is the patient, not the therapist, who is ultimately
responsible for curing him- or herself.

Finally, the therapist must encourage the patient, which means awakening his or her social interest, and the energy
that goes with it. By developing a genuine human relationship with the patient, the therapist provides the basic form
of social interest, which the patient can then transfer to others.

Discussion

Although Adler's theory may be less interesting than Freud's, with its sexuality, or Jung's, with its mythology, it has
probably struck you as the most common-sensical of the three. Students generally like Adler and his theory. In fact,
quite a few personality theorists like him, too. Maslow, for example, once said that, the older he gets, the more right
Adler seems. If you have some knowledge of Carl Rogers' brand of therapy, you may have noticed how similar it is
to Adler's. And a number of students of personality theories have noted that the theorists called Neo-Freudians --
Horney, Fromm, and Sullivan -- should really have been called Neo-Adlerians.

And so the "positives" of Adler's theory don't really need to be listed: His clear descriptions of people's complaints,
his straight-forward and common-sense interpretations of their problems, his simple theoretical structure, his trust
and even affection for the common person, all make his theory both comfortable and highly influential.

Problems

Criticisms of Adler tend to involve the issue of whether or not, or to what degree, his theory is scientific. The
mainstream of psychology today is experimentally oriented, which means, among other things, that the concepts a
theory uses must be measurable and manipulable. This in turn means that an experimental orientation prefers
physical or behavioral variables. Adler, as you saw, uses basic concepts that are far from physical and behavioral:
Striving for perfection? How do you measure that? Or compensation? Or feelings of inferiority? Or social interest?
The experimental method also makes a basic assumption: That all things operate in terms of cause and effect. Adler
would certainly agree that physical things do so, but he would adamantly deny that people do! Instead, he takes the
teleological route, that people are "determined" by their ideals, goals, values, "final fictions." Teleology takes the
necessity out of things: A person doesn't have to respond a certain way to a certain circumstance; A person has
choices to make; A person creates his or her own personality or lifestyle. From the experimental perspective, these
things are illusions that a scientist, even a personality theorist, dare not give in to.

Even if you are open to the teleological approach, though, there are criticisms you can make regarding how
scientific Adler's theory is: Many of the details of his theory are too anecdotal, that is, are true in particular cases,
but don't necessarily have the generality Adler seems to claim for them. A first child (even broadly defined) doesn't
necessarily feel dethroned, nor a second child necessarily feel competitive, for example.

Adler could, however, respond to these criticisms very easily: First, didn't we just finish saying that, if you accept
teleology, nothing about human personality is necessary. And secondly, didn't he go to great lengths to explain his
ideas about fictional finalism? All of his concepts are useful constructs, not absolute truths, and science is just a
matter of creating increasingly useful constructs. So if you have better ideas, let's hear them!

Readings

If you are interested in learning more about Alfred Adler's theory, go straight to Ansbacher and Ansbacher's The
Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. They take selections from his writings, organize them, and add running
commentary. It introduces all of his ideas in a very readable fashion. His own books include Understanding Human
Nature, Problems of Neurosis, The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, and Social Interest: A Challenge
to Mankind. Anotther collection by Ansbacher and Ansbacher (Superiority and Social Interest) includes a
Biography by Carl Furtmuller

You can find early and recent work by Adler and others in English in The International Journal of Individual
Psychology. .

KAREN HORNEY

1885 - 1952

Dr. C. George Boeree

Biography

Karen Horney was born September 16, 1885, to Clotilde and Berndt Wackels Danielson. Her father was a ship's
captain, a religious man, and an authoritarian. His children called him "the Bible thrower," because, according to
Horney, he did! Her mother, who was known as Sonni, was a very different person -- Berndt's second wife, 19 years
his junior, and considerably more urbane. Karen also had an older brother, also named Berndt, for whom she cared
deeply, as well as four older siblings from her father's previous marriage.

Karen Horney's childhood seems to have been one of misperceptions: For example, while she paints a picture of her
father as a harsh disciplinarian who preferred her brother Berndt over her, he apparently brought her gifts from all
over the world and even took her on three long sea voyages with him - a very unusual thing for sea captains to do in
those days! Nevertheless, she felt deprived of her father's affections, and so became especially attached to her
mother, becoming, as she put it, "her little lamb."

At the age of nine, she changed her approach to life, and became ambitious and even rebellious. She said "If I
couldn't be pretty, I decided I would be smart," which is only unusual in that she actually was pretty! Also during
this time, she developed something of a crush on her own brother. Embarrassed by her attentions, as you might
expect of a young teenage boy, he pushed her away. This led to her first bout with depression -- a problem that
would plague her the rest of her life.

In early adulthood came several years of stress. In 1904, her mother divorced her father and left him with Karen and
young Berndt. In 1906, she entered medical school, against her parents' wishes and, in fact, against the opinions of
polite society of the time. While there, she met a law student named Oscar Horney, whom she married in 1909. In
1910, Karen gave birth to Brigitte, the first of her three daughters. In 1911, her mother Sonni died. The strain of
these events were hard on Karen, and she entered psychoanalysis.

As Freud might have predicted, she had married a man not unlike her father: Oscar was an authoritarian as harsh
with his children as the captain had been with his. Horney notes that she did not intervene, but rather considered the
atmosphere good for her children and encouraging their independence. Only many years later did hindsight change
her perspective on childrearing.
In 1923, Oskar's business collapsed and he developed meningitis. He became a broken man, morose and
argumentative. Also in 1923, Karen's brother died at the age of 40 of a pulmonary infection. Karen became very
depressed, to the point of swimming out to a sea piling during a vacation with thoughts of committing suicide.

Karen and her daughters moved out of Oskar's house in 1926 and, four years later, moved to the U.S., eventually
settling in Brooklyn. In the 1930's, Brooklyn was the intellectual capital of the world, due in part to the influx of
Jewish refugees from Germany. it was here that she became friends with such intellectuals as Erich Fromm and
Harry Stack Sullivan, even pausing to have an affair with the former. And it was here that she developed her
theories on neurosis, based on her experiences as a psychotherapist.

She practiced, taught, and wrote until her death in 1952.

Theory

Horney's theory is perhaps the best theory of neurosis we have. First, she offered a different way of viewing
neurosis. She saw it as much more continuous with normal life than previous theorists. Specifically, she saw
neurosis as an attempt to make life bearable, as a way of "interpersonal control and coping." This is, of course, what
we all strive to do on a day-to-day basis, only most of us seem to be doing alright, while the neurotic seems to be
sinking fast.

In her clinical experience, she discerned ten particular patterns of neurotic needs. They are based on things that we
all need, but they have become distorted in several ways by the difficulties of some people's lives:

Let's take the first need, for affection and approval, as an example. We all need affection, so what makes such a need
neurotic? First, the need is unrealistic, unreasonable, indiscriminate. For example, we all need affection, but we don't
expect it from everyone we meet. We don't expect great outpourings of affection from even our close friends and
relations. We don't expect our loved ones to show affection at all times, in all circumstances. We don't expect great
shows of love while our partners are filing out tax forms, for example. And, we realize that there may be times in
our lives where we have to be self-sufficient.

Second, the neurotic's need is much more intense, and he or she will experience great anxiety if the need is not met,
or if it even appears that it may not be met in the future. It is this, of course, that leads to the unrealistic nature of the
need. Affection, to continue the example, has to be shown clearly at all times, in all circumstances, by all people, or
the panic sets in. The neurotic has made the need too central to their existence.

The neurotic needs are as follows:

1. The neurotic need for affection and approval, the indiscriminate need to please others and be liked by them.

2. The neurotic need for a partner, for someone who will take over one's life. This includes the idea that love will
solve all of one's problems. Again, we all would like a partner to share life with, but the neurotic goes a step or two
too far.

3. The neurotic need to restrict one's life to narrow borders, to be undemanding, satisfied with little, to be
inconspicuous. Even this has its normal counterpart. Who hasn't felt the need to simplify life when it gets too
stressful, to join a monastic order, disappear into routine, or to return to the womb?

4. The neurotic need for power, for control over others, for a facade of omnipotence. We all seek strength, but the
neurotic may be desperate for it. This is dominance for its own sake, often accompanied by a contempt for the weak
and a strong belief in one's own rational powers.

5. The neurotic need to exploit others and get the better of them. In the ordinary person, this might be the need to
have an effect, to have impact, to be heard. In the neurotic, it can become manipulation and the belief that people are
there to be used. It may also involve a fear of being used, of looking stupid. You may have noticed that the people
who love practical jokes more often than not cannot take being the butt of such a joke themselves!
6. The neurotic need for social recognition or prestige. We are social creatures, and sexual ones, and like to be
appreciated. But these people are overwhelmingly concerned with appearances and popularity. They fear being
ignored, be thought plain, "uncool," or "out of it."

7. The neurotic need for personal admiration. We need to be admired for inner qualities as well as outer ones. We
need to feel important and valued. But some people are more desperate, and need to remind everyone of their
importance -- "Nobody recognizes genius," "I'm the real power behind the scenes, you know," and so on. Their fear
is of being thought nobodies, unimportant and meaningless.

8. The neurotic need for personal achievement. Again, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with achievement -- far
from it! But some people are obsessed with it. They have to be number one at everything they do. Since this is, of
course, quite a difficult task, you will find these people devaluing anything they cannot be number one in! If they are
good runners, then the discus and the hammer are "side shows." If academic abilities are their strength, physical
abilities are of no importance, and so on.

9. The neurotic need for self-sufficiency and independence. We should all cultivate some autonomy, but some
people feel that they shouldn't ever need anybody. They tend to refuse help and are often reluctant to commit to a
relationship.

10. The neurotic need for perfection and unassailability. To become better and better at life and our special interests
is hardly neurotic, but some people are driven to be perfect and scared of being flawed. They can't be caught making
a mistake and need to be in control at all times.

As Horney investigated these neurotic needs, she began to recognize that they can be clustered into three broad
coping strategies:

I. Compliance, which includes needs one, two, and three.

II. Aggression, including needs four through eight.

III. Withdrawal, including needs nine, ten, and three. She added three here because it is crucial to the illusion of total
independence and perfection that you limit the breadth of your life!

In her writings, she used a number of other phrases to refer to these three strategies. Besides compliance, she
referred to the first as the moving-toward strategy and the self-effacing solution. One should also note that it is the
same as Adler's getting or leaning approach, or the phlegmatic personality.

Besides aggression, the second was referred to as moving-against and the expansive solution. It is the same as
Alder's ruling or dominant type, or the choleric personality.

And, besides withdrawal, she called the third moving-away-from and the resigning solution. It is somewhat like
Adler's avoiding type, the melancholy personality.

Development

It is true that some people who are abused or neglected as children suffer from neuroses as adults. What we often
forget is that most do not. If you have a violent father, or a schizophrenic mother, or are sexually molested by a
strange uncle, you may nevertheless have other family members that love you, take care of you, and work to protect
you from further injury, and you will grow up to be a healthy, happy adult. It is even more true that the great
majority of adult neurotics did not in fact suffer from childhood neglect or abuse! So the question becomes, if it is
not neglect or abuse that causes neurosis, what does?

Horney's answer, which she called the "basic evil," is parental indifference, a lack of warmth and affection in
childhood. Even occasional beatings or an early sexual experience can be overcome, if the child feels wanted and
loved.
The key to understanding parental indifference is that it is a matter of the child's perception, and not the parents'
intentions. "The road to hell," it might pay to remember, "is paved with good intentions." A well-intentioned parent
may easily communicate indifference to children with such things as showing a preference for one child over
another, blaming a child for what they may not have done, overindulging one moment and rejecting another,
neglecting to fulfill promises, disturbing a child's friendships, making fun of a child's thinking, and so on. Please
notice that many parents -- even good ones -- find themselves doing these things because of the many pressures they
may be under. Other parents do these things because they themselves are neurotic, and place their own needs ahead
of their children's

Horney noticed that, in contrast to our stereotypes of children as weak and passive, their first reaction to parental
indifference is anger, a response she calls basic hostility. To be frustrated first leads to an effort at protesting the
injustice! Some children find this hostility effective, and over time it becomes a habitual response to life's
difficulties. In other words, they develop an aggressive coping strategy. They say to themselves, "If I have power, no
one can hurt me."

Most children, however, find themselves overwhelmed by basic anxiety, which in children is mostly a matter of fear
of helplessness and abandonment. For survival's sake, basic hostility must be suppressed and the parents won over.
If this seems to work better for the child, it may become the preferred coping strategy -- compliance. They say to
themselves, "If I can make you love me, you will not hurt me."

Some children find that neither aggression nor compliance eliminate the perceived parental indifference. They
"solve" the problem by withdrawing from family involvement into themselves, eventually becoming sufficient unto
themselves -- the third coping strategy. They say, "If I withdraw, nothing can hurt me."

Self theory

Horney had one more way of looking at neurosis -- in terms of self images. For Horney, the self is the core of your
being, your potential. If you were healthy, you would have an accurate conception of who you are, and you would
then be free to realize that potential (selfrealization).

The neurotic has a different view of things. The neurotics self is "split" into a despised self and an ideal self. Other
theorists postulate a "looking-glass" self, the you you think others see. If you look around and see (accurately or not)
others despising you, then you take that inside you as what you assume is the real you. On the other hand, if you are
lacking in some way, that implies there are certain ideals you should be living up to. You create an ideal self out of
these "shoulds." Understand that the ideal self is not a positive goal; it is unrealistic and ultimately impossible. So
the neurotic swings back and forth between hating themselves and pretending to be perfect.

Horney described this stretching between the despised and ideal selves as "the tyranny of the shoulds" and neurotic
"striving for glory:"

The compliant person believes "I should be sweet, self-sacrificing, saintly." The aggressive person says "I should be
powerful, recognized, a winner." The withdrawing person believes "I should be independent, aloof, perfect." And
while vacillating between these two impossible selves, the neurotic is alienated from their true core and prevented
from actualizing their potentials.

Discussion

At first glance, it may appear that Horney stole some of Adler's best ideas. It is clear, for example, that her three
coping strategies are very close to Adler's three types. It is, of course, quite conceivable that she was influenced by
Adler. But if you look at how she derived her three strategies -- by collapsing groups of neurotic needs -- you see
that she simply came to the same conclusions from a different approach. There is no question, of course, that Adler
and Horney (and Fromm and Sullivan) form an unofficial school of psychiatry. They are often called neo-
Freudians, although that is rather inaccurate. Unfortunately, the other common term is the Social Psychologists
which, while accurate, is a term already used for an area of study.

Please notice how Horney's self theory fleshes out Adler's theory about the differences between healthy and neurotic
striving for perfection, and (to get ahead of ourselves a bit) how similar this conception is to Carl Rogers'. I usually
feel that, when different people come up with similar ideas relatively independently, this is a good sign we're getting
at something valuable!

Karen Horney had a couple more interesting ideas that should be mentioned. First, she criticized Freud's idea of
penis envy. Although she conceded that it did occasionally occur in neurotic women, she felt strongly that it was not
anywhere near to a universal. She suggested that what may appear to be signs of penis envy is really justified envy
of men's power in this world.

In fact, she suggested, there may also be a male counterpart to penis envy -- womb envy -- in some men who feel
envious of a woman's ability to bear children. Perhaps the degree to which many men are driven to succeed, and to
have their names live on after them, is in compensation for their inability to more directly extend themselves into the
future by means of carrying, bearing, and nurturing their children!

A second idea, one that still gets little respect in the psychological community, is selfanalysis. Horney wrote one of
the earliest "self-help" books, and suggested that, with relatively minor neurotic problems, we could be our own
psychiatrists. You can see how this might threaten a few of the delicate egos who make their livings as therapists! I
am always surprised at the negative reaction some of my colleagues have to people like Joyce Brothers, the famous
psychologist-columnist. Apparently, if you aren't working within the official guidelines, your work is dismissed as
"pop psych."

The major negative comment I might make about Horney is that her theory is limited to the neurotic. Besides
leaving out psychotics and other problems, she leaves out the truly healthy person. Nevertheless, since she does put
neurosis and health on a single continuum, she does speak to the neurotic in all of us.

References

Karen Horney's best book is Neurosis and Human Growth (1950). It is the best book on neurosis ever, in my
humble opinion. She wrote more "pop" versions called The Neurotic Personality of our Time(1937) and Our Inner
Conflicts (1945). Her thoughts on therapy can be found in New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939). For an early insight
into feminist psychology, read Feminine Psychology (1967). And to read about self-analysis read SelfAnalysis
(1942).

ERICH FROMM

1900 - 1980

Dr. C. George Boeree

Biography
Erich Fromm was born in 1900 in Frankfurt, Germany. His father was a business man and, according to Erich, rather
moody. His mother was frequently depressed. In other words, like quite a few of the people we've looked at, his
childhood wasn't very happy.

Like Jung, Erich came from a very religious family, in his case orthodox Jews. Fromm himself later became what he
called an atheistic mystic.

In his autobiography, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, Fromm talks about two events in his early adolescence that
started him along his path. The first involved a friend of the family's:

Maybe she was 25 years of age; she was beautiful, attractive, and in addition a painter, the first painter I ever knew.
I remember having heard that she had been engaged but after some time had broken the engagement; I remember
that she was almost invariably in the company of her widowed father. As I remember him, he was an old,
uninteresting, and rather unattractive man, or so I thought (maybe my judgment was somewhat biased by jealousy).
Then one day I heard the shocking news: her father had died, and immediately afterwards, she had killed herself and
left a will which stipulated that she wanted to be buried with her father. (p. 4) As you can imagine, this news hit the
12 year old Erich hard, and he found himself asking what many of us might ask: why? Later, he began finding some
answers -- partial ones, admittedly -- in Freud.

The second event was even larger: World War I. At the tender age of 14, he saw the extremes that nationalism could
go to. All around him, he heard the message: We (Germans, or more precisely, Christian Germans) are great; They
(the English and their allies) are cheap mercenaries. The hatred, the "war hysteria," frightened him, as well it should.

So again he wanted to understand something irrational -- the irrationality of mass behavior -- and he found some
answers, this time in the writings of Karl Marx.

To finish Fromm's story, he received his PhD from Heidelberg in 1922 and began a career as a psychotherapist. He
moved to the U.S. in 1934 -- a popular time for leaving Germany! -- and settled in New York City, where he met
many of the other great refugee thinkers that gathered there, including Karen Horney, with whom he had an affair.

Toward the end of his career, he moved to Mexico City to teach. He had done considerable research into the
relationship between economic class and personality types there. He died in 1980 in Switzerland.

Theory

As his biography suggests, Fromm's theory is a rather unique blend of Freud and Marx. Freud, of course,
emphasized the unconscious, biological drives, repression, and so on. In other words, Freud postulated that our
characters were determined by biology. Marx, on the other hand, saw people as determined by their society, and
most especially by their economic systems.

He added to this mix of two deterministic systems something quite foreign to them: The idea of freedom. He allows
people to transcend the determinisms that Freud and Marx attribute to them. In fact, Fromm makes freedom the
central characteristic of human nature!

There are, Fromm points out, examples where determinism alone operates. A good example of nearly pure
biological determinism, ala Freud, is animals (at least simple ones). Animals don't worry about freedom -- their
instincts take care of everything. Woodchucks, for example, don't need career counseling to decide what they are
going to be when they grow up: They are going to be woodchucks!

A good example of socioeconomic determinism, ala Marx, is the traditional society of the Middle Ages. Just like
woodchucks, few people in the Middle Ages needed career counseling: They had fate, the Great Chain of Being, to
tell them what to do. Basically, if your father was a peasant, you'd be a peasant. If your father was a king, that's what
you'd become. And if you were a woman, well, there was only one role for women.
Today, we might look at life in the Middle Ages, or life as an animal, and cringe. But the fact is that the lack of
freedom represented by biological or social determinism is easy. Your life has structure, meaning, there are no
doubts, no cause for soul-searching, you fit in and never suffered an identity crisis.

Historically speaking, this simple, if hard, life began to get shaken up with the Renaissance. In the Renaissance,
people started to see humanity as the center of the universe, instead of God. In other words, we didn't just look to the
church (and other traditional establishments) for the path we were to take. Then came the Reformation, which
introduced the idea of each of us being individually responsible for our own soul's salvation. And then came
democratic revolutions such as the American and the French revolutions. Now all of a sudden we were supposed to
govern ourselves! And then came the industrial revolution, and instead of tilling the soil or making things with our
hands, we had to sell our labor in exchange for money. All of a sudden, we became employees and consumers! Then
came socialist revolutions such as the Russian and the Chinese, which introduced the idea of participatory
economics. You were no longer responsible only for your own well-being, but for fellow workers as well!

So, over a mere 500 years, the idea of the individual, with individual thoughts, feelings, moral conscience, freedom,
and responsibility, came into being. but with individuality came isolation, alienation, and bewilderment. Freedom is
a difficult thing to have, and when we can we tend to flee from it.

Fromm describes three ways in which we escape from freedom:

1. Authoritarianism. We seek to avoid freedom by fusing ourselves with others, by becoming a part of an
authoritarian system like the society of the Middle Ages. There are two ways to approach this. One is to submit to
the power of others, becoming passive and compliant. The other is to become an authority yourself, a person who
applies structure to others. Either way, you escape your separate identity.

Fromm referred to the extreme version of authoritarianism as masochism and sadism, and points out that both feel
compelled to play their separate roles, so that even the sadist, with all his apparent power over the masochist, is not
free to choose his actions. But milder versions of authoritarianism are everywhere. In many classes, for example,
there is an implicit contract between students and professors: Students demand structure, and the professor sticks to
his notes. It seems innocuous and even natural, but this way the students avoid taking any responsibility for their
learning, and the professor can avoid taking on the real issues of his field.

2. Destructiveness. Authoritarians respond to a painful existence by, in a sense, eliminating themselves: If there is no
me, how can anything hurt me? But others respond to pain by striking out against the world: If I destroy the world,
how can it hurt me? It is this escape from freedom that accounts for much of the indiscriminate nastiness of life --
brutality, vandalism, humiliation, vandalism, crime, terrorism....

Fromm adds that, if a person's desire to destroy is blocked by circumstances, he or she may redirect it inward. The
most obvious kind of self-destructiveness is, of course, suicide. But we can also include many illnesses, drug
addiction, alcoholism, even the joys of passive entertainment. He turns Freud's death instinct upside down: Self-
destructiveness is frustrated destructiveness, not the other way around.

3. Automaton conformity. Authoritarians escape by hiding within an authoritarian hierarchy. But our society
emphasizes equality! There is less hierarchy to hide in (though plenty remains for anyone who wants it, and some
who don't). When we need to hide, we hide in our mass culture instead. When I get dressed in the morning, there are
so many decisions! But I only need to look at what you are wearing, and my frustrations disappear. Or I can look at
the television, which, like a horoscope, will tell me quickly and effectively what to do. If I look like, talk like, think
like, feel like... everyone else in my society, then I disappear into the crowd, and I don't need to acknowledge my
freedom or take responsibility. It is the horizontal counterpart to authoritarianism.

The person who uses automaton conformity is like a social chameleon: He takes on the coloring of his surroundings.
Since he looks like a million other people, he no longer feels alone. He isn't alone, perhaps, but he's not himself
either. The automaton conformist experiences a split between his genuine feelings and the colors he shows the
world, very much along the lines of Horney's theory.
In fact, since humanity's "true nature" is freedom, any of these escapes from freedom alienates us from ourselves.
Here's what Fromm had to say:

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and
decision making which replace the principles of instincts. he has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to
organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the
dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another anger which is specifically human: that of
becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also
against the danger of losing his mind. (Fromm, 1968, p. 61)

I should add here that freedom is in fact a complex idea, and that Fromm is talking about "true" personal freedom,
rather than just political freedom (often called liberty): Most of us, whether they are free or not, tend to like the idea
of political freedom, because it means that we can do what we want. A good example is the sexual sadist (or
masochist) who has a psychological problem that drives his behavior. He is not free in the personal sense, but he
will welcome the politically free society that says that what consenting adults do among themselves is not the state's
business! Another example involves most of us today: We may well fight for freedom (of the political sort), and
yet when we have it, we tend to be conformist and often rather irresponsible. We have the vote, but we fail to use it!
Fromm is very much for political freedom -- but he is especially eager that we make use of that freedom and take the
responsibility that goes with it.

Families

Which of the escapes from freedom you tend to use has a great deal to do with what kind of family you grew up in.
Fromm outlines two kinds of unproductive families.

1. Symbiotic families. Symbiosis is the relationship two organisms have who cannot live without each other. In a
symbiotic family, some members of the family are "swallowed up" by other members, so that they do not fully
develop personalities of their own. The more obvious example is the case where the parent "swallows" the child, so
that the child's personality is merely a reflection of the parent's wishes. In many traditional societies, this is the case
with many children, especially girls.

The other example is the case where the child "swallows" the parent. In this case, the child dominates or manipulates
the parent, who exists essentially to serve the child. If this sounds odd, let me assure you it is common, especially in
traditional societies, especially in the relationship between a boy and his mother. Within the context of the particular
culture, it is even necessary: How else does a boy learn the art of authority he will need to survive as an adult?

In reality, nearly everyone in a traditional society learns both how to dominate and how to be submissive, since
nearly everyone has someone above them and below them in the social hierarchy. Obviously, the authoritarian
escape from freedom is built-in to such a society. But note that, for all that it may offend our modern standards of
equality, this is the way people lived for thousands of years. It is a very stable social system, it allows for a great
deal of love and friendship, and billions of people live in it still.

2. Withdrawing families. In fact, the main alternative is most notable for its cool indifference, if not cold
hatefulness. Although withdrawal as a family style has always been around, it has come to dominate some societies
only in the last few hundred years, that is, since the bourgeoisie -- the merchant class -- arrive on the scene in force.

The "cold" version is the older of the two, found in northern Europe and parts of Asia, and wherever merchants are a
formidable class. Parents are very demanding of their children, who are expected to live up to high, well-defined
standards. Punishment is not a matter of a slap upside the head in full anger and in the middle of dinner; it is instead
a formal affair, a full-fledged ritual, possibly involving cutting switches and meeting in the woodshed. Punishment is
cold-blooded, done "for your own good." Alternatively, a culture may use guilt and withdrawal of affection as
punishment. Either way, children in these cultures become rather strongly driven to succeed in whatever their
culture defines as success.
This puritanical style of family encourages the destructive escape from freedom, which is internalized until
circumstances (such as war) allow its release. I might add that this kind of family more immediately encourages
perfectionism -- living by the rules -- which is also a way of avoiding freedom that Fromm does not discuss. When
the rules are more important than people, destructiveness is inevitable.

The second withdrawing kind of family is the modern family, found in the most advanced parts of the world, most
notably the USA. Changes in attitudes about child rearing have lead many people to shudder at the use of physical
punishment and guilt in raising children. The newer idea is to raise your children as your equals. A father should be
a boy's best buddy; a mother should be a daughter's soul mate. But, in the process of controlling their emotions, the
parents become coolly indifferent. They are, in fact, no longer really parents, just cohabitants with their children.
The children, now without any real adult guidance, turn to their peers and to the media for their values. This is the
modern, shallow, television family!

The escape from freedom is particularly obvious here: It is automaton conformity. Although this is still very much a
minority family in the world (except, of course, on TV!), this is the one Fromm worries about the most. It seems to
portent the future.

What makes up a good, healthy, productive family? Fromm suggests it is a family where parents take the
responsibility to teach their children reason in an atmosphere of love. Growing up in this sort of family, children
learn to acknowledge their freedom and to take responsibility for themselves, and ultimately for society as a whole.

The social unconscious

But our families mostly just reflect our society and culture. Fromm emphasizes that we soak up our society with our
mother's milk. It is so close to us that we usually forget that our society is just one of an infinite number of ways of
dealing with the issues of life. We often think that our way of doing things is the only way, the natural way. We
have learned so well that it has all become unconscious -- the social unconscious, to be precise. So, many times we
believe that we are acting according to our own free will, but we are only following orders we are so used to we no
longer notice them.

Fromm believes that our social unconscious is best understood by examining our economic systems. In fact, he
defines, and even names, five personality types, which he calls orientations, in economic terms! If you like, you can
take a personality test made up of lists of adjectives Fromm used to describe his orientations. Click here to see it!

1. The receptive orientation. These are people who expect to get what they need. if they don't get it immediately,
they wait for it. They believe that all goods and satisfactions come from outside themselves. This type is most
common among peasant populations. It is also found in cultures that have particularly abundant natural resources, so
that one need not work hard for one's sustenance (although nature may also suddenly withdraw its bounty!). it is also
found at the very bottom of any society: Slaves, serfs, welfare families, migrant workers... all are at the mercy of
others.

This orientation is associated with symbiotic families, especially where children are "swallowed" by parents, and
with the masochistic (passive) form of authoritarianism. It is similar to Freud's oral passive, Adler's leaning-getting,
and Horney's compliant personality. In its extreme form, it can be characterized by adjectives such as submissive
and wishful. In a more moderate form, adjectives such as accepting and optimistic are more descriptive.

2. The exploitative orientation. These people expect to have to take what they need. In fact, things increase in value
to the extent that they are taken from others: Wealth is preferably stolen, ideas plagiarized, love achieved by
coercion. This type is prevalent among history's aristocracies, and in the upper classes of colonial empires. Think of
the English in India for example: Their position was based entirely on their power to take from the indigenous
population. Among their characteristic qualities is the ability to be comfortable ordering others around! We can also
see it in pastoral barbarians and populations who rely on raiding (such as the Vikings).

The exploitative orientation is associated with the "swallowing" side of the symbiotic family, and with the
masochistic style of authoritarianism. They are Freud's oral aggressive, Adler's ruling-dominant, and Horney's
aggressive types. In extremes, they are aggressive, conceited, and seducing. Mixed with healthier qualities, they are
assertive, proud, captivating.

3. The hoarding orientation. hoarding people expect to keep. They see the world as possessions and potential
possessions. Even loved ones are things to possess, to keep, or to buy. Fromm, drawing on Karl Marx, relates this
type to the bourgeoisie, the merchant middle class, as well as richer peasants and crafts people. He associates it
particularly with the Protestant work ethic and such groups as our own Puritans.

Hoarding is associated with the cold form of withdrawing family, and with destructiveness. I might add that there is
a clear connection with perfectionism as well. Freud would call it the anal retentive type, Adler (to some extent) the
avoiding type, and Horney (a little more clearly) the withdrawing type. In its pure form, it means you are stubborn,
stingy, and unimaginative. If you are a milder version of hoarding, you might be steadfast, economical, and
practical.

4. The marketing orientation. The marketing orientation expects to sell. Success is a matter of how well I can sell
myself, package myself, advertise myself. My family, my schooling, my jobs, my clothes -- all are an advertisement,
and must be "right." Even love is thought of as a transaction. Only the marketing orientation thinks up the marriage
contract, wherein we agree that I shall provide such and such, and you in return shall provide this and that. If one of
us fails to hold up our end of the arrangement, the marriage is null and void -- no hard feelings (perhaps we can still
be best of friends!) This, according to Fromm, is the orientation of the modern industrial society. This is our
orientation!

This modern type comes out of the cool withdrawing family, and tend to use automaton conformity as its escape
from freedom. Adler and Horney don't have an equivalent, but Freud might: This is at least half of the vague phallic
personality, the type that lives life as flirtation. In extreme, the marketing person is opportunistic, childish, tactless.
Less extreme, and he or she is purposeful, youthful, social. Notice today's values as expressed to us by our mass
media: Fashion, fitness, eternal youth, adventure, daring, novelty, sexuality... these are the concerns of the "yuppie,"
and his or her less-wealthy admirers. The surface is everything! Let's go bungee-jumping!

5. The productive orientation. There is a healthy personality as well, which Fromm occasionally refers to as the
person without a mask. This is the person who, without disavowing his or her biological and social nature,
nevertheless does not shirk away from freedom and responsibility. This person comes out of a family that loves
without overwhelming the individual, that prefers reason to rules, and freedom to conformity.

The society that gives rise to the productive type (on more than a chance basis) doesn't exist yet, according to
Fromm. He does, of course, have some ideas about what it will be like. He calls it humanistic communitarian
socialism. That's quite a mouthful, and made up of words that aren't exactly popular in the USA, but let me explain:
Humanistic means oriented towards human beings, and not towards some higher entity -- not the all-powerful State
nor someone's conception of God. Communitarian means composed of small communities (Gemeinschaften, in
German), as opposed to big government or corporations. Socialism means everyone is responsible for the welfare of
everyone else. Thus understood, it's hard to argue with Fromm's idealism!

Fromm says that the first four orientations (which others might call neurotic) are living in the having mode. They
focus on consuming, obtaining, possessing.... They are defined by what they have. Fromm says that "I have it" tends
to become "it has me," and we become driven by our possessions!

The productive orientation , on the other hand, lives in the being mode. What you are is defined by your actions in
this world. You live without a mask, experiencing life, relating to people, being yourself.

He says that most people, being so used to the having mode, use the word have to describe their problems: "Doctor,
I have a problem: I have insomnia. Although I have a beautiful home, wonderful children, and a happy marriage, I
have many worries." He is looking to the therapist to remove the bad things, and let him keep the good ones, a little
like asking a surgeon to take out your gall bladder. What you should be saying is more like "I am troubled. I am
happily married, yet I cannot sleep...." By saying you have a problem, you are avoiding facing the fact that you are
the problem -- i.e. you avoid, once again, taking responsibility for your life.
Orientation Society Family Escape from Freedom

Receptive Peasant society

Symbiotic (passive)

Authoritarian (masochistic)

Exploitative Aristocratic society Symbiotic (active) Authoritarian (sadistic)

Hoarding Bourgeois society

Withdrawing (puritanical)

Perfectionist to destructive

Marketing Modern society

Withdrawing (infantile)

Automaton conformist

Productive

Humanistic communitarian socialism

Loving and reasoning

Freedom and responsibility acknowledged and accepted

Evil

Fromm was always interested in trying to understand the really evil people of this world -- not just one's who were
confused or mislead or stupid or sick, but the one's who, with full consciousness of the evil of their acts, performed
them anyway: Hitler, Stalin, Charles Manson, Jim Jones, and so on, large and small.

All the orientations we've talked about, productive and non-productive, in the having mode or the being mode, have
one thing in common: They are all efforts at life. Like Horney, Fromm believed that even the most miserable
neurotic is at the least trying to cope with life. They are, to use his word, biophilous, life-loving.

But there is another type of person he calls necrophilous -- the lovers of death. They have the passionate attraction to
all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to
destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion "to tear
apart living structures."

If you think back to high school, you may remember a few misfits: They were real horror movie aficionados. They
may have made models of torture devices and guillotines. They loved to play war games. They liked to blow things
up with their chemistry sets. They got a kick out of torturing small animals. They treasured their guns. They were
really into mechanical devices. The more sophisticated the technology, the happier they were. Beavis and Butthead
are modeled after these kids.

I remember watching an interview on TV once, back during the little war in Nicaragua. There were plenty of
American mercenaries among the Contras, and one in particular had caught the reporters eye. He was a munitions
expert -- someone who blew up bridges, buildings, and, of course, the occasional enemy soldier. When asked how
he got into this line of work, he smiled and told the reporter that he might not like the story. You see, when he was a
kid, he liked to put firecrackers up the backside of little birds he had caught, light the fuses, let them go, and watch
them blow up. This man was a necrophiliac.
Fromm makes a few guesses as to how such a person happens. He suggested that there may be some genetic flaw
that prevents them from feeling or responding to affection. It may also be a matter of a life so full of frustration that
the person spends the rest of their life in a rage.

And finally, he suggests that it may be a matter of growing up with a necrophilous mother, so that the child has no
one to learn love from. It is very possible that some combination of these factors is at work. And yet there is still the
idea that these people know what they are doing, are conscious of their evil, and choose it. It is a subject that would
bear more study!

Biophilous

Necrophilous

Having Mode

Receptive Exploitative Hoarding Marketing

Being Mode

Productive

Human Needs

Erich Fromm, like many others, believed that we have needs that go far beyond the basic, physiological ones that
some people, like Freud and many behaviorists, think explain all of our behavior. He calls these human needs, in
contrast to the more basic animal needs. And he suggests that the human needs can be expressed in one simple
statement: The human being needs to find an answer to his existence.

Fromm says that helping us to answer this question is perhaps the major purpose of culture. In a way, he says, all
cultures are like religions, trying to explain the meaning of life. Some, of course, do so better than others.

A more negative way of expressing this need is to say that we need to avoid insanity, and he defines neurosis as an
effort to satisfy the need for answers that doesn't work for us. He says that every neurosis is a sort of private
religion, one we turn to when our culture no longer satisfies.

He lists five human needs:

1. Relatedness

As human beings, we are aware of our separateness from each other, and seek to overcome it. Fromm calls this our
need for relatedness, and views it as love in the broadest sense. Love, he says, "is union with somebody, or
something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self." (p 37
of The Sane Society). It allows us to transcend our separateness without denying us our uniqueness.

The need is so powerful that sometimes we seek it in unhealthy ways. For example, some seek to eliminate their
isolation by submitting themselves to another person, to a group, or to their conception of a God. Others look to
eliminate their isolation by dominating others. Either way, these are not satisfying: Your separateness is not
overcome.

Another way some attempt to overcome this need is by denying it. The opposite of relatedness is what Fromm calls
narcissism. Narcissism -- the love of self -- is natural in infants, in that they don't perceive themselves as separate
from the world and others to begin with. But in adults, it is a source of pathology. Like the schizophrenic, the
narcissist has only one reality: the world of his own thoughts, feelings, and needs. His world becomes what he
wants it to be, and he loses contact with reality.

2. Creativity

Fromm believes that we all desire to overcome, to transcend, another fact of our being: Our sense of being passive
creatures. We want to be creators. There are many ways to be creative: We give birth, we plant seeds, we make
pots, we paint pictures, we write books, we love each other. Creativity is, in fact, an expression of love

Unfortunately, some don't find an avenue for creativity. Frustrated, they attempt to transcend their passivity by
becoming destroyers instead. Destroying puts me "above" the things -- or people -- I destroy. It makes me feel
powerful. We can hate as well as love. But in the end, it fails to bring us that sense of transcendence we need.

3. Rootedness

We also need roots. We need to feel at home in the universe, even though, as human beings, we are somewhat
alienated from the natural world.

The simplest version is to maintain our ties to our mothers. But to grow up means we have to leave the warmth of
our mothers' love. To stay would be what Fromm calls a kind of psychological incest. In order to manage in the
difficult world of adulthood, we need to find new, boader roots. We need to discover our brotherhood (and
sisterhood) with humanity.

This, too has its pathological side: For example, the schhizophrenic tries to retreat into a womb-like existence, one
where, you might say, the umbilical cord has never been cut. There is also the neurotic who is afraid to leave his
home, even to get the mail. And there's the fanatic who sees his tribe, his country, his church... as the only good
one, the only real one. Everyone else is a dangerous outsider, to be avoided or even destroyed.

4. A sense of identity

"Man may be defined as the animal that can say 'I.'" (p 62 of The Sane Society) Fromm believes that we need to
have a sense of identity, of individuality, in order to stay sane.

This need is so powerful that we are sometimes driven to find it, for example by doing anything for signs of status,
or by trying desperately to conform. We sometimes will even give up our lives in order to remain a part of our
group. But this is only pretend identity, an identity we take from others, instead of one we develop ourselves, and it
fails to satisfy our need.
5. A frame of orientation

Finally, we need to understand the world and our place in it. Again, our society -- and especially the religious
aspects of our culture -- often attempts to provide us with this understanding. Things like our myths, our
philosophies, and our sciences provide us with structure.

Fromm says this is really two needs: First, we need a frame of orientation -- almost anything will do. Even a bad
one is better than none! And so people are generally quite gullible. We want to believe, sometimes even
desperately. If we don't have an explanation handy, we will make one up, via rationalization.

The second aspect is that we want to have a good frame of orientation, one that is useful, accurate. This is where
reason comes in. It is nice that our parents and others provide us with explanations for the world and our lives, but if
they don't hold up, what good are they? A frame of orientation needs to be rational.

Fromm adds one more thing: He says we don't just want a cold philosophy or material science. We want a frame of
orientation that provides us with meaning. We want understanding, but we want a warm, human understanding.

Discussion

Fromm, in some ways, is a transition figure or, if you prefer, a theorist that brings other theories together. Most
significantly for us, he draws together the Freudian and neo-Freudian theories we have been talking about
(especially Adler's and Horney's) and the humanistic theories we will discuss later. He is, in fact, so close to being
an existentialist that it almost doesn't matter! I believe interest in his ideas will rise as the fortune of existential
psychology does.

Another aspect of his theory is fairly unique to him: his interest in the economic and cultural roots of personality.
No one before or since has put it so directly: Your personality is to a considerable extent a reflection of such issues
as social class, minority status, education, vocation, religious and philosophical background, and so forth. This has
been a very underrepresented view, perhaps because of its association with Marxism. But it is, I think, inevitable
that we begin to consider it more and more, especially as a counterbalance to the increasing influence of biological
theories.

References

Fromm is an excellent and exciting writer. You can find the basics of his theory in Escape from Freedom (1941)
and Man for Himself (1947). His interesting treatise on love in the modern world is calledThe Art of Loving (1956).
My favorite of his books is The Sane Society (1955), which perhaps should have been called "the insane society"
because most of it is devoted to demonstrating how crazy our world is right now, and how that leads to our
psychological difficulties. He has also written "the" book on aggression, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
(1973), which includes his ideas on necrophilia. He has written many other great books, including ones on
Christianity, Marxism, and Zen Buddhism!

B. F. SKINNER

1904 - 1990

Dr. C. George Boeree

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born March 20, 1904, in the small Pennsylvania town of Susquehanna. His father
was a lawyer, and his mother a strong and intelligent housewife. His upbringing was old-fashioned and hard-
working.

Burrhus was an active, out-going boy who loved the outdoors and building things, and actually enjoyed school. His
life was not without its tragedies, however. In particular, his brother died at the age of 16 of a cerebral aneurysm.

Burrhus received his BA in English from Hamilton College in upstate New York. He didn’t fit in very well, not
enjoying the fraternity parties or the football games. He wrote for school paper, including articles critical of the
school, the faculty, and even Phi Beta Kappa! To top it off, he was an atheist -- in a school that required daily
chapel attendance.

He wanted to be a writer and did try, sending off poetry and short stories. When he graduated, he built a study in his
parents’ attic to concentrate, but it just wasn’t working for him.

Ultimately, he resigned himself to writing newspaper articles on labor problems, and lived for a while in Greenwich
Village in New York City as a “bohemian.” After some traveling, he decided to go back to school, this time at
Harvard. He got his masters in psychology in 1930 and his doctorate in 1931, and stayed there to do research until
1936.

Also in that year, he moved to Minneapolis to teach at the University of Minnesota. There he met and soon married
Yvonne Blue. They had two daughters, the second of which became famous as the first infant to be raised in one of
Skinner’s inventions, the air crib. Although it was nothing more than a combination crib and playpen with glass
sides and air conditioning, it looked too much like keeping a baby in an aquarium to catch on.

In 1945, he became the chairman of the psychology department at Indiana University. In 1948, he was invited to
come to Harvard, where he remained for the rest of his life. He was a very active man, doing research and guiding
hundreds of doctoral candidates as well as writing many books. While not successful as a writer of fiction and
poetry, he became one of our best psychology writers, including the book Walden II, which is a fictional account of
a community run by his behaviorist principles.

August 18, 1990, B. F. Skinner died of leukemia after becoming perhaps the most celebrated psychologist since
Sigmund Freud.

Theory

B. F. Skinner’s entire system is based on operant conditioning. The organism is in the process of “operating” on the
environment, which in ordinary terms means it is bouncing around its world, doing what it does. During this
“operating,” the organism encounters a special kind of stimulus, called a reinforcing stimulus, or simply a reinforcer.
This special stimulus has the effect of increasing the operant -- that is, the behavior occurring just before the
reinforcer. This is operant conditioning: “the behavior is followed by a consequence, and the nature of the
consequence modifies the organisms tendency to repeat the behavior in the future.”

Imagine a rat in a cage. This is a special cage (called, in fact, a “Skinner box”) that has a bar or pedal on one wall
that, when pressed, causes a little mechanism to release a food pellet into the cage. The rat is bouncing around the
cage, doing whatever it is rats do, when he accidentally presses the bar and -- hey, presto! -- a food pellet falls into
the cage! The operant is the behavior just prior to the reinforcer, which is the food pellet, of course. In no time at
all, the rat is furiously peddling away at the bar, hoarding his pile of pellets in the corner of the cage.
A behavior followed by a reinforcing stimulus results in an increased probability of that behavior occurring in the
future.

What if you don’t give the rat any more pellets? Apparently, he’s no fool, and after a few futile attempts, he stops
his bar-pressing behavior. This is called extinction of the operant behavior.

A behavior no longer followed by the reinforcing stimulus results in a decreased probability of that behavior
occurring in the future.

Now, if you were to turn the pellet machine back on, so that pressing the bar again provides the rat with pellets, the
behavior of bar-pushing will “pop” right back into existence, much more quickly than it took for the rat to learn the
behavior the first time. This is because the return of the reinforcer takes place in the context of a reinforcement
history that goes all the way back to the very first time the rat was reinforced for pushing on the bar!

Schedules of reinforcement

Skinner likes to tell about how he “accidentally -- i.e. operantly -- came across his various discoveries. For example,
he talks about running low on food pellets in the middle of a study. Now, these were the days before “Purina rat
chow” and the like, so Skinner had to make his own rat pellets, a slow and tedious task. So he decided to reduce the
number of reinforcements he gave his rats for whatever behavior he was trying to condition, and, lo and behold, the
rats kept up their operant behaviors, and at a stable rate, no less. This is how Skinner discovered schedules of
reinforcement!

Continuous reinforcement is the original scenario: Every time that the rat does the behavior (such as pedal-
pushing), he gets a rat goodie.

The fixed ratio schedule was the first one Skinner discovered: If the rat presses the pedal three times, say, he gets a
goodie. Or five times. Or twenty times. Or “x” times. There is a fixed ratio between behaviors and reinforcers: 3 to
1, 5 to 1, 20 to 1, etc. This is a little like “piece rate” in the clothing manufacturing industry: You get paid so much
for so many shirts.

The fixed interval schedule uses a timing device of some sort. If the rat presses the bar at least once during a
particular stretch of time (say 20 seconds), then he gets a goodie. If he fails to do so, he doesn’t get a goodie. But
even if he hits that bar a hundred times during that 20 seconds, he still only gets one goodie! One strange thing that
happens is that the rats tend to “pace” themselves: They slow down the rate of their behavior right after the
reinforcer, and speed up when the time for it gets close.

Skinner also looked at variable schedules. Variable ratio means you change the “x” each time -- first it takes 3
presses to get a goodie, then 10, then 1, then 7 and so on. Variable interval means you keep changing the time
period -- first 20 seconds, then 5, then 35, then 10 and so on.

In both cases, it keeps the rats on their rat toes. With the variable interval schedule, they no longer “pace”
themselves, because they can no longer establish a “rhythm” between behavior and reward. Most importantly, these
schedules are very resistant to extinction. It makes sense, if you think about it. If you haven’t gotten a reinforcer for
a while, well, it could just be that you are at a particularly “bad” ratio or interval! Just one more bar press, maybe
this’ll be the one!

This, according to Skinner, is the mechanism of gambling. You may not win very often, but you never know
whether and when you’ll win again. It could be the very next time, and if you don’t roll them dice, or play that
hand, or bet on that number this once, you’ll miss on the score of the century!

Shaping

A question Skinner had to deal with was how we get to more complex sorts of behaviors. He responded with the
idea of shaping, or “the method of successive approximations.” Basically, it involves first reinforcing a behavior
only vaguely similar to the one desired. Once that is established, you look out for variations that come a little closer
to what you want, and so on, until you have the animal performing a behavior that would never show up in ordinary
life. Skinner and his students have been quite successful in teaching simple animals to do some quite extraordinary
things. My favorite is teaching pigeons to bowl!

I used shaping on one of my daughters once. She was about three or four years old, and was afraid to go down a
particular slide. So I picked her up, put her at the end of the slide, asked if she was okay and if she could jump
down. She did, of course, and I showered her with praise. I then picked her up and put her a foot or so up the slide,
asked her if she was okay, and asked her to slide down and jump off. So far so good. I repeated this again and
again, each time moving her a little up the slide, and backing off if she got nervous. Eventually, I could put her at
the top of the slide and she could slide all the way down and jump off. Unfortunately, she still couldn’t climb up the
ladder, so I was a very busy father for a while.

This is the same method that is used in the therapy called systematic desensitization, invented by another behaviorist
named Joseph Wolpe. A person with a phobia -- say of spiders -- would be asked to come up with ten scenarios
involving spiders and panic of one degree or another. The first scenario would be a very mild one -- say seeing a
small spider at a great distance outdoors. The second would be a little more scary, and so on, until the tenth scenario
would involve something totally terrifying -- say a tarantula climbing on your face while you’re driving your car at a
hundred miles an hour! The therapist will then teach you how to relax your muscles -- which is incompatible with
anxiety. After you practice that for a few days, you come back and you and the therapist go through your scenarios,
one step at a time, making sure you stay relaxed, backing off if necessary, until you can finally imagine the tarantula
while remaining perfectly tension-free.

This is a technique quite near and dear to me because I did in fact have a spider phobia, and did in fact get rid of it
with systematic desensitization. It worked so well that, after one session (beyond the original scenario-writing and
muscle-training session) I could go out an pick up a daddy-long-legs. Cool.

Beyond these fairly simple examples, shaping also accounts for the most complex of behaviors. You don’t, for
example, become a brain surgeon by stumbling into an operating theater, cutting open someone's head, successfully
removing a tumor, and being rewarded with prestige and a hefty paycheck, along the lines of the rat in the Skinner
box. Instead, you are gently shaped by your environment to enjoy certain things, do well in school, take a certain
bio class, see a doctor movie perhaps, have a good hospital visit, enter med school, be encouraged to drift towards
brain surgery as a speciality, and so on. This could be something your parents were carefully doing to you, as if you
were a rat in a cage. But much more likely, this is something that was more or less unintentional.

Aversive stimuli

An aversive stimulus is the opposite of a reinforcing stimulus, something we might find unpleasant or painful.

A behavior followed by an aversive stimulus results in a decreased probability of the behavior occurring in the
future.

This both defines an aversive stimulus and describes the form of conditioning known as punishment. If you shock a
rat for doing x, it’ll do a lot less of x. If you spank Johnny for throwing his toys he will throw his toys less and less
(maybe).

On the other hand, if you remove an already active aversive stimulus after a rat or Johnny performs a certain
behavior, you are doing negative reinforcement. If you turn off the electricity when the rat stands on his hind legs,
he’ll do a lot more standing. If you stop your perpetually nagging when I finally take out the garbage, I’ll be more
likely to take out the garbage (perhaps). You could say it “feels so good” when the aversive stimulus stops, that this
serves as a reinforcer!

Behavior followed by the removal of an aversive stimulus results in an increased probability of that behavior
occurring in the future. Notice how difficult it can be to distinguish some forms of negative reinforcement from
positive reinforcement: If I starve you, is the food I give you when you do what I want a positive -- i.e. a reinforcer?
Or is it the removal of a negative -- i.e. the aversive stimulus of hunger?
Skinner (contrary to some stereotypes that have arisen about behaviorists) doesn’t “approve” of the use of aversive
stimuli -- not because of ethics, but because they don’t work well! Notice that I said earlier that Johnny will maybe
stop throwing his toys, and that I perhaps will take out the garbage? That’s because whatever was reinforcing the
bad behaviors hasn’t been removed, as it would’ve been in the case of extinction. This hidden reinforcer has just
been “covered up” with a conflicting aversive stimulus. So, sure, sometimes the child (or me) will behave -- but it
still feels good to throw those toys. All Johnny needs to do is wait till you’re out of the room, or find a way to
blame it on his brother, or in some way escape the consequences, and he’s back to his old ways. In fact, because
Johnny now only gets to enjoy his reinforcer occasionally, he’s gone into a variable schedule of reinforcement, and
he’ll be even more resistant to extinction than ever!

Behavior modification

Behavior modification -- often referred to as b-mod -- is the therapy technique based on Skinner’s work. It is very
straight-forward: Extinguish an undesirable behavior (by removing the reinforcer) and replace it with a desirable
behavior by reinforcement. It has been used on all sorts of psychological problems -- addictions, neuroses, shyness,
autism, even schizophrenia -- and works particularly well with children. There are examples of backward
psychotics who haven’t communicated with others for years who have been conditioned to behave themselves in
fairly normal ways, such as eating with a knife and fork, taking care of their own hygiene needs, dressing
themselves, and so on.

There is an offshoot of b-mod called the token economy. This is used primarily in institutions such as psychiatric
hospitals, juvenile halls, and prisons. Certain rules are made explicit in the institution, and behaving yourself
appropriately is rewarded with tokens -- poker chips, tickets, funny money, recorded notes, etc. Certain poor
behavior is also often followed by a withdrawal of these tokens. The tokens can be traded in for desirable things
such as candy, cigarettes, games, movies, time out of the institution, and so on. This has been found to be very
effective in maintaining order in these often difficult institutions.

There is a drawback to token economy: When an “inmate” of one of these institutions leaves, they return to an
environment that reinforces the kinds of behaviors that got them into the institution in the first place. The
psychotic’s family may be thoroughly dysfunctional. The juvenile offender may go right back to “the ‘hood.” No
one is giving them tokens for eating politely. The only reinforcements may be attention for “acting out,” or some
gang glory for robbing a Seven-Eleven. In other words, the environment doesn’t travel well!

Walden II

Skinner started his career as an English major, writing poems and short stories. He has, of course, written a large
number of papers and books on behaviorism. But he will probably be most remembered by the general run of
readers for his book Walden II, wherein he describes a utopia-like commune run on his operant principles.

People, especially the religious right, came down hard on his book. They said that his ideas take away our freedom
and dignity as human beings. He responded to the sea of criticism with another book (one of his best) called
Beyond Freedom and Dignity. He asked: What do we mean when we say we want to be free? Usually we mean we
don’t want to be in a society that punishes us for doing what we want to do. Okay -- aversive stimuli don’t work
well anyway, so out with them! Instead, we’ll only use reinforcers to “control” society. And if we pick the right
reinforcers, we will feel free, because we will be doing what we feel we want!

Likewise for dignity. When we say “she died with dignity,” what do we mean? We mean she kept up her “good”
behaviors without any apparent ulterior motives. In fact, she kept her dignity because her reinforcement history has
led her to see behaving in that "dignified" manner as more reinforcing than making a scene.

The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded. There is no true
freedom or dignity. Right now, our reinforcers for good and bad behavior are chaotic and out of our control -- it’s a
matter of having good or bad luck with your “choice” of parents, teachers, peers, and other influences. Let’s instead
take control, as a society, and design our culture in such a way that good gets rewarded and bad gets extinguished!
With the right behavioral technology, we can design culture.
Both freedom and dignity are examples of what Skinner calls mentalistic constructs -- unobservable and so useless
for a scientific psychology. Other examples include defense mechanisms, the unconscious, archetypes, fictional
finalisms, coping strategies, selfactualization, consciousness, even things like hunger and thirst. The most important
example is what he refers to as the homunculus -- Latin for “the little man” -- that supposedly resides inside us and
is used to explain our behavior, ideas like soul, mind, ego, will, self, and, of course, personality.

Instead, Skinner recommends that psychologists concentrate on observables, that is, the environment and our
behavior in it.

Readings

Whether you agree with him or not, Skinner is a good writer and fun to read. I’ve already mentioned Walden II and
Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971). The best summary of his theory is the book About Behaviorism (1974).

ALBERT BANDURA

1925 - PRESENT

DR. C. GEORGE BOEREE

Biography

Albert Bandura was born December 4, 1925, in the small town of Mundare in northern Alberta, Canada. He was
educated in a small elementary school and high school in one, with minimal resources, yet a remarkable success
rate. After high school, he worked for one summer filling holes on the Alaska Highway in the Yukon.

He received his bachelors degree in Psychology from the University of British Columbia in 1949. He went on to the
University of Iowa, where he received his Ph.D. in 1952. It was there that he came under the influence of the
behaviorist tradition and learning theory.

While at Iowa, he met Virginia Varns, an instructor in the nursing school. They married and later had two
daughters. After graduating, he took a postdoctoral position at the Wichita Guidance Center in Wichita, Kansas.

In 1953, he started teaching at Stanford University. While there, he collaborated with his first graduate student,
Richard Walters, resulting in their first book, Adolescent Aggression, in 1959.

Bandura was president of the APA in 1973, and received the APA’s Award for Distinguished Scientific
Contributions in 1980. He continues to work at Stanford to this day.

Theory

Behaviorism, with its emphasis on experimental methods, focuses on variables we can observe, measure, and
manipulate, and avoids whatever is subjective, internal, and unavailable -- i.e. mental. In the experimental method,
the standard procedure is to manipulate one variable, and then measure its effects on another. All this boils down to
a theory of personality that says that one’s environment causes one’s behavior.

Bandura found this a bit too simplistic for the phenomena he was observing -- aggression in adolescents -- and so
decided to add a little something to the formula: He suggested that environment causes behavior, true; but behavior
causes environment as well. He labeled this concept reciprocal determinism: The world and a person’s behavior
cause each other.
Later, he went a step further. He began to look at personality as an interaction among three “things:” the
environment, behavior, and the person’s psychological processes. These psychological processes consist of our
ability to entertain images in our minds, and language. At the point where he introduces imagery, in particular, he
ceases to be a strict behaviorist, and begins to join the ranks of the cognitivists. In fact, he is often considered a
“father” of the cognitivist movement!

Adding imagery and language to the mix allows Bandura to theorize much more effectively than someone like, say,
B. F. Skinner, about two things that many people would consider the “strong suit” of the human species:
observational learning (modeling) and self-regulation.

Observational learning, or modeling

Of the hundreds of studies Bandura was responsible for, one group stands out above the others -- the bobo doll
studies. He made of film of one of his students, a young woman, essentially beating up a bobo doll. In case you
don’t know, a bobo doll is an inflatable, eggshape balloon creature with a weight in the bottom that makes it bob
back up when you knock him down. Nowadays, it might have Darth Vader painted on it, but back then it was
simply “Bobo” the clown.

The woman punched the clown, shouting “sockeroo!” She kicked it, sat on it, hit with a little hammer, and so on,
shouting various aggressive phrases. Bandura showed his film to groups of kindergartners who, as you might
predict, liked it a lot. They then were let out to play. In the play room, of course, were several observers with pens
and clipboards in hand, a brand new bobo doll, and a few little hammers.

And you might predict as well what the observers recorded: A lot of little kids beating the daylights out of the bobo
doll. They punched it and shouted “sockeroo,” kicked it, sat on it, hit it with the little hammers, and so on. In other
words, they imitated the young lady in the film, and quite precisely at that.

This might seem like a real nothing of an experiment at first, but consider: These children changed their behavior
without first being rewarded for approximations to that behavior! And while that may not seem extraordinary to the
average parent, teacher, or casual observer of children, it didn’t fit so well with standard behavioristic learning
theory. He called the phenomenon observational learning or modeling, and his theory is usually called social
learning theory.

Bandura did a large number of variations on the study: The model was rewarded or punished in a variety of ways,
the kids were rewarded for their imitations, the model was changed to be less attractive or less prestigious, and so
on. Responding to criticism that bobo dolls were supposed to be hit, he even did a film of the young woman beating
up a live clown. When the children went into the other room, what should they find there but -- the live clown!
They proceeded to punch him, kick him, hit him with little hammers, and so on.

All these variations allowed Bandura to establish that there were certain steps involved in the modeling process:

1. Attention. If you are going to learn anything, you have to be paying attention. Likewise, anything that puts a
damper on attention is going to decrease learning, including observational learning. If, for example, you are sleepy,
groggy, drugged, sick, nervous, or “hyper,” you will learn less well. Likewise, if you are being distracted by
competing stimuli.

Some of the things that influence attention involve characteristics of the model. If the model is colorful and
dramatic, for example, we pay more attention. If the model is attractive, or prestigious, or appears to be particularly
competent, you will pay more attention. And if the model seems more like yourself, you pay more attention. These
kinds of variables directed Bandura towards an examination of television and its effects on kids!

2. Retention. Second, you must be able to retain -- remember -- what you have paid attention to. This is where
imagery and language come in: we store what we have seen the model doing in the form of mental images or verbal
descriptions. When so stored, you can later “bring up” the image or description, so that you can reproduce it with
your own behavior.
3. Reproduction. At this point, you’re just sitting there daydreaming. You have to translate the images or
descriptions into actual behavior. So you have to have the ability to reproduce the behavior in the first place. I can
watch Olympic ice skaters all day long, yet not be able to reproduce their jumps, because I can’t ice skate at all! On
the other hand, if I could skate, my performance would in fact improve if I watch skaters who are better than I am.

Another important tidbit about reproduction is that our ability to imitate improves with practice at the behaviors
involved. And one more tidbit: Our abilities improve even when we just imagine ourselves performing! Many
athletes, for example, imagine their performance in their mind’s eye prior to actually performing.

4. Motivation. And yet, with all this, you’re still not going to do anything unless you are motivated to imitate, i.e.
until you have some reason for doing it. Bandura mentions a number of motives:

a. past reinforcement, ala traditional behaviorism. b. promised reinforcements (incentives) that we can imagine. c.
vicarious reinforcement -- seeing and recalling the model being reinforced.

Notice that these are, traditionally, considered to be the things that “cause” learning. Bandura is saying that they
don’t so much cause learning as cause us to demonstrate what we have learned. That is, he sees them as motives.

Of course, the negative motivations are there as well, giving you reasons not to imitate someone:

d. past punishment. e. promised punishment (threats). d. vicarious punishment.

Like most traditional behaviorists, Bandura says that punishment in whatever form does not work as well as
reinforcement and, in fact, has a tendency to “backfire” on us.

Self-regulation

Self-regulation -- controlling our own behavior -- is the other “workhorse” of human personality. Here Bandura
suggests three steps:

1. Self-observation. We look at ourselves, our behavior, and keep tabs on it.

2. Judgment. We compare what we see with a standard. For example, we can compare our performance with
traditional standards, such as “rules of etiquette.” Or we can create arbitrary ones, like “I’ll read a book a week.”
Or we can compete with others, or with ourselves.

3. Self-response. If you did well in comparison with your standard, you give yourself rewarding self-responses. If
you did poorly, you give yourself punishing selfresponses. These self-responses can range from the obvious
(treating yourself to a sundae or working late) to the more covert (feelings of pride or shame).

A very important concept in psychology that can be understood well with self-regulation is self-concept (better
known as self-esteem). If, over the years, you find yourself meeting your standards and life loaded with self-praise
and self-reward, you will have a pleasant selfconcept (high self-esteem). If, on the other hand, you find yourself
forever failing to meet your standards and punishing yourself, you will have a poor self-concept (low self-esteem).

Recall that behaviorists generally view reinforcement as effective, and punishment as fraught with problems. The
same goes for self-punishment. Bandura sees three likely results of excessive self-punishment:

a. compensation -- a superiority complex, for example, and delusions of grandeur. b. inactivity -- apathy, boredom,
depression. c. escape -- drugs and alcohol, television fantasies, or even the ultimate escape, suicide.

These have some resemblance to the unhealthy personalities Adler and Horney talk about: an aggressive type, a
compliant type, and an avoidant type respectively.

Bandura’s recommendations to those who suffer from poor self-concepts come straight from the three steps of self-
regulation:

1. Regarding self-observation -- know thyself! Make sure you have an accurate picture of your behavior.
2. Regarding standards -- make sure your standards aren’t set too high. Don’t set yourself up for failure! Standards
that are too low, on the other hand, are meaningless.

3. Regarding self-response -- use self-rewards, not self-punishments. Celebrate your victories, don’t dwell on your
failures.

Therapy

Self-control therapy

The ideas behind self-regulation have been incorporated into a therapy technique called selfcontrol therapy. It has
been quite successful with relatively simple problems of habit, such as smoking, overeating, and study habits.

1. Behavioral charts. Self-observation requires that you keep close tabs on your behavior, both before you begin
changes and after. This can involve something as simple as counting how many cigarettes you smoke in a day to
complex behavioral diaries. With the diary approach, you keep track of the details, the when and where of your
habit. This lets you get a grip on what kinds of cues are associated with the habit: Do you smoke more after meals,
with coffee, with certain friends, in certain locations...?

2. Environmental planning. Taking your lead from your behavioral charts and diaries, you can begin to alter your
environment. For example, you can remove or avoid some of those cues that lead to your bad behaviors: Put away
the ashtrays, drink tea instead of coffee, divorce that smoking partner.... You can find the time and place best suited
for the good alternative behaviors: When and where do you find you study best? And so on.

3. Self-contracts. Finally, you arrange to reward yourself when you adhere to your plan, and possibly punish
yourself when you do not. These contracts should be written down and witnessed (by your therapist, for example),
and the details should be spelled out very explicitly: “I will go out to dinner on Saturday night if I smoke fewer
cigarettes this week than last week. I will do paperwork instead if I do not.”

You may involve other people and have them control your rewards and punishments, if you aren’t strict enough with
yourself. Beware, however: This can be murder on your relationships, as you bite their heads off for trying to do
what you told them to do!

Modeling therapy

The therapy Bandura is most famous for, however, is modeling therapy. The theory is that, if you can get someone
with a psychological disorder to observe someone dealing with the same issues in a more productive fashion, the
first person will learn by modeling the second.

Bandura’s original research on this involved herpephobics -- people with a neurotic fear of snakes. The client would
be lead to a window looking in on a lab room. In that room is nothing but a chair, a table, a cage on the table with a
locked latch, and a snake clearly visible in the cage. The client then watches another person -- an actor -- go through
a slow and painful approach to the snake. He acts terrified at first, but shakes himself out of it, tells himself to relax
and breathe normally and take one step at a time towards the snake. He may stop in the middle, retreat in panic, and
start all over. Ultimately, he gets to the point where he opens the cage, removes the snake, sits down on the chair,
and drapes it over his neck, all the while giving himself calming instructions.

After the client has seen all this (no doubt with his mouth hanging open the whole time), he is invited to try it
himself. Mind you, he knows that the other person is an actor -- there is no deception involved here, only modeling!
And yet, many clients -- lifelong phobics -- can go through the entire routine first time around, even after only one
viewing of the actor! This is a powerful therapy.

One drawback to the therapy is that it isn’t easy to get the rooms, the snakes, the actors, etc., together. So Bandura
and his students have tested versions of the therapy using recordings of actors and even just imagining the process
under the therapist’s direction. These methods work nearly as well.
Discussion

Albert Bandura has had an enormous impact on personality theory and therapy. His straightforward, behaviorist-
like style makes good sense to most people. His action-oriented, problem-solving approach likewise appeals to
those who want to get things done, rather than philosophize about ids, archetypes, actualization, freedom, and all
the many other mentalistic constructs personologists tend to dwell on.

Among academic psychologists, research is crucial, and behaviorism has been the preferred approach. Since the
late 1960’s, behaviorism has given way to the “cognitive revolution,” of which Bandura is considered a part.
Cognitive psychology retains the experimentallyoriented flavor of behaviorism, without artificially restraining the
researcher to external behaviors, when the mental life of clients and subjects is so obviously important.

This is a powerful movement, and the contributors include some of the most important people in psychology today:
Julian Rotter, Walter Mischel, Michael Mahoney, and David Meichenbaum spring to my mind. Also involved are
such theorists of therapy as Aaron Beck (cognitive therapy) and Albert Ellis (rational emotive therapy). The
followers of George Kelly also find themselves in this camp. And the many people working on personality trait
research -- such as Buss and Plomin (temperament theory) and McCrae and Costa (five factor theory) -- are
essentially “cognitive behaviorists” like Bandura.

My gut feeling is that the field of competitors in personality theory will eventually boil down to the cognitivists on
the one side and existentialists on the other. Stay tuned!

Readings

The place to go for Bandura’s theory is Social Foundations of Thought and Action (1986). If it’s a little too dense
for you, you might want to try his earlier Social Learning Theory(1977), or even Social Learning and Personality
Development (1963), which he wrote with Walters. If aggression is what you’re interested in, try Aggression: A
Social Learning Analysis (1973).

GORDON ALLPORT

1897 - 1967

Dr. C. George Boeree

Gordon Allport was born in Montezuma, Indiana, in 1897, the youngest of four brothers. A shy and studious boy,
he was teased quite a bit and lived a fairly isolated childhood. His father was a country doctor, which meant that
Gordon grew up with his father’s patients and nurses and all the paraphernalia of a miniature hospital. Everyone
worked hard. His early life was otherwise fairly pleasant and uneventful.

One of Allport’s stories is always mentioned in his biographies: When he was 22, he traveled to Vienna. He had
arranged to meet with the great Sigmund Freud! When he arrived in Freud’s office, Freud simply sat and waited for
Gordon to begin. After a little bit, Gordon could no longer stand the silence, and he blurted out an observation he
had made on his way to meet Freud. He mentioned that he had seen a little boy on the bus who was very upset at
having to sit where a dirty old man had sat previously. Gordon thought this was likely something he had learned
from his mother, a very neat and apparently rather domineering type. Freud, instead of taking it as a simple
observation, took it to be an expression of some deep, unconscious process in Gordon’s mind, and said “And was
that little boy you?”
This experience made him realize that depth psychology sometimes digs too deeply, in the same way that he had
earlier realized that behaviorism often doesn’t dig deeply enough!

Allport received his Ph.D. in Psychology in 1922 from Harvard, following in the foot steps of his brother Floyd,
who became an important social psychologist. His career was spent developing his theory, examining such social
issues as prejudice, and developing personality tests. He died in Cambridge Massachusetts in 1967.

Theory

One thing that motivates human beings is the tendency to satisfy biological survival needs, which Allport referred to
as opportunistic functioning. He noted that opportunistic functioning can be characterized as reactive, past-oriented,
and, of course, biological.

But Allport felt that opportunistic functioning was relatively unimportant for understanding most of human
behavior. Most human behavior, he believed, is motivated by something very different -- functioning in a manner
expressive of the self -- which he called propriate functioning. Most of what we do in life is a matter of being who
we are! Propriate functioning can be characterized as proactive, future-oriented, and psychological.

Propriate comes from the word proprium, which is Allport’s name for that essential concept, the self. He had
reviewed hundreds of definitions for that concept and came to feel that, in order to more scientific, it would be
necessary to dispense with the common word self and substitute something else. For better or worse, the word
proprium never caught on.

To get an intuitive feel for what propriate functioning means, think of the last time you wanted to do something or
become something because you really felt that doing or becoming that something would be expressive of the things
about yourself that you believe to be most important. Remember the last time you did something to express your
self, the last time you told yourself, “that’s really me!” Doing things in keeping with what you really are, that’s
propriate functioning.

The proprium

Putting so much emphasis on the self or proprium, Allport wanted to define it as carefully as possible. He came at
that task from two directions, phenomenologically and functionally.

First, phenomenologically, i.e. the self as experienced: He suggested that His functional definition
became a developmental theory all by itself. The self has seven functions, which tend to arise at certain times of
one’s life: 1. Sense of body 2. Self-identity 3. Self-esteem 4. Self-extension 5. Self-image 6. Rational
coping 7. Propriate striving

Sense of body develops in the first two years of life. We have one, we feel its closeness, its warmth. It has
boundaries that pain and injury, touch and movement, make us aware of. Allport had a favorite demonstration of
this aspect of self: Imagine spitting saliva into a cup -- and then drinking it down! What’s the problem? It’s the
same stuff you swallow all day long! But, of course, it has gone out from your bodily self and become, thereby,
foreign to you.

Self-identity also develops in the first two years. There comes a point were we recognize ourselves as continuing, as
having a past, present, and future. We see ourselves as individual entities, separate and different from others. We
even have a name! Will you be the same person when you wake up tomorrow? Of course -- we take that continuity
for granted.

Self-esteem develops between two and four years old. There also comes a time when we recognize that we have
value, to others and to ourselves. This is especially tied to a continuing development of our competencies. This, for
Allport, is what the “anal” stage is really all about!
Self-extension develops between four and six. Certain things, people, and events around us also come to be thought
of as central and warm, essential to my existence. “My” is very close to “me!” Some people define themselves in
terms of their parents, spouse, or children, their clan, gang, community, college, or nation. Some find their identity
in activities: I’m a psychologist, a student, a bricklayer. Some find identity in a place: my house, my hometown.
When my child does something wrong, why do I feel guilty? If someone scratches my car, why do I feel like they
just punches me?

Self-image also develops between four and six. This is the “looking-glass self,” the me as others see me. This is the
impression I make on others, my “look,” my social esteem or status, including my sexual identity. It is the
beginning of what others call conscience, ideal self, and persona.

Rational coping is learned predominantly in the years from six till twelve. The child begins to develop his or her
abilities to deal with life’s problems rationally and effectively. This is analogous to Erikson’s “industry.”

Propriate striving doesn’t usually begin till after twelve years old. This is my self as goals, ideal, plans, vocations,
callings, a sense of direction, a sense of purpose. The culmination of propriate striving, according to Allport, is the
ability to say that I am the proprietor of my life -- i.e. the owner and operator!

(One can't help but notice the time periods Allport uses -- they are very close to the time periods of Freud's stages!
But please understand that Allport's scheme is not a stage theory - just a description of the usual way people
develop.)

Traits or dispositions

Now, as the proprium is developing in this way, we are also developing personal traits, or personal dispositions.
Allport originally used the word traits, but found that so many people assumed he meant traits as perceived by
someone looking at another person or measured by personality tests, rather than as unique, individual characteristics
within a person, that he changed it to dispositions.

A personal disposition is defined as “a generalized neuropsychic structure (peculiar to the individual), with the
capacity to render many stimuli functionally equivalent, and to initiate and guide consistent (equivalent) forms of
adaptive and stylistic behavior.”

A personal disposition produces equivalences in function and meaning between various perceptions, beliefs,
feelings, and actions that are not necessarily equivalent in the natural world, or in anyone else’s mind. A person
with the personal disposition “fear of communism” may equate Russians, liberals, professors, strikers, social
activists, environmentalists, feminists, and so on. He may lump them all together and respond to any of them with a
set of behaviors that express his fear: making speeches, writing letters, voting, arming himself, getting angry, etc.

Another way to put it is to say that dispositions are concrete, easily recognized, consistencies in our behaviors.
Allport believes that traits are essentially unique to each individual: One person’s “fear of communism” isn’t the
same as another's. And you can’t really expect that knowledge of other people is going to help you understand any
one particular person. For this reason, Allport strongly pushed what he called idiographic methods -- methods that
focused on studying one person at a time, such as interviews, observation, analysis of letters or diaries, and so on.
These are nowadays generally referred to as qualitative methods.

Allport does recognize that within any particular culture, there are common traits or dispositions, ones that are a part
of that culture, that everyone in that culture recognizes and names. In our culture, we commonly differentiate
between introverts and extraverts or liberals and conservatives, and we all know (roughly) what we mean. But
another culture may not recognize these. What, for example, would liberal and conservative mean in the middle
ages?

Allport recognizes that some traits are more closely tied to the proprium (one’s self) than others. Central traits are
the building blocks of your personality. When you describe someone, you are likely to use words that refer to these
central traits: smart, dumb, wild, shy, sneaky, dopey, grumpy.... He noted that most people have somewhere
between five and ten of these.
There are also secondary traits, ones that aren’t quite so obvious, or so general, or so consistent. Preferences,
attitudes, situational traits are all secondary. For example, “he gets angry when you try to tickle him,” “she has
some very unusual sexual preferences,” and “you can’t take him to restaurants.”

But then there are cardinal traits. These are the traits that some people have which practically define their life.
Someone who spends their life seeking fame, or fortune, or sex is such a person. Often we use specific historical
people to name these cardinal traits: Scrooge (greed), Joan of Arc (heroic self-sacrifice), Mother Teresa (religious
service), Marquis de Sade (sadism), Machiavelli (political ruthlessness), and so on. Relatively few people develop a
cardinal trait. If they do, it tends to be late in life.

Psychological maturity

If you have a well-developed proprium and a rich, adaptive set of dispositions, you have attained psychological
maturity, Allport’s term for mental health. He lists seven characteristics:

1. Specific, enduring extensions of self, i.e. involvement. 2. Dependable techniques for warm relating to others
(e.g. trust, empathy, genuineness, tolerance...). 3. Emotional security and self-acceptance. 4. Habits of realistic
perception (as opposed to defensiveness). 5. Problem-centeredness, and the development of problem-solving skills.
6. Self-objectification -- insight into one’s own behavior, the ability to laugh at oneself, etc. 7. A unifying
philosophy of life, including a particular value orientation, differentiated religious sentiment, and a personalized
conscience.

Functional autonomy

Allport didn’t believe in looking too much into a person’s past in order to understand his present. This belief is most
strongly evident in the concept of functional autonomy: Your motives today are independent (autonomous) of their
origins. It doesn’t matter, for example, why you wanted to become a doctor, or why you developed a taste for olives
or for kinky sex, the fact is that this is the way you are now!

Functional autonomy comes in two flavors: The first is perseverative functional autonomy. This refers essentially
to habits -- behaviors that no longer serve their original purpose, but still continue. You may have started smoking
as a symbol of adolescent rebellion, for example, but now you smoke because you can’t quit! Social rituals such as
saying “bless you” when someone sneezes had a reason once upon a time (during the plague, a sneeze was a far
more serious symptom than it is today!), but now continues because it is seen as polite.

Propriate functional autonomy is something a bit more self-directed than habits. Values are the usual example.
Perhaps you were punished for being selfish when you were a child. That doesn’t in any way detract from your
well-known generosity today -- it has become your value!

Perhaps you can see how the idea of functional autonomy may have derived from Allport’s frustration with Freud
(or the behaviorists). Of course, that hardly means that it’s only a defensive belief on Allport’s part!

The idea of propriate functional autonomy -- values -- lead Allport and his associates Vernon and Lindzey to
develop a categorization of values (in a book called A Study of Values, 1960) and a test of values. Click here for a
"demo" of the values test!

1. the theoretical -- a scientist, for example, values truth. 2. the economic -- a businessperson may value
usefulness. 3. the aesthetic -- an artist naturally values beauty. 4. the social -- a nurse may have a strong love of
people. 5. the political -- a politician may value power. 6. the religious -- a monk or nun probably values unity.

Most of us, of course, have several of these values at more moderate levels, plus we may value one or two of these
quite negatively. There are modern tests used for helping kids find their careers that have very similar dimensions.

Conclusions

Allport is one of those theorists who was so right about so many things that his ideas have simply passed on into the
spirit of the times. His theory is one of the first humanistic theories, and would influence many others, including
Kelly, Maslow, and Rogers. One unfortunate aspect of his theory is his original use of the word trait, which brought
down the wrath of a number of situationally oriented behaviorists who would have been much more open to his
theory if they had bothered to understand it. But that has always been a weakness of psychology in general and
personality in particular: Ignorance of the past and the theories and research of others.

References

Allport’s most significant books are Pattern and Growth in Personality (1965), The Person in Psychology (1968),
and The Nature of Prejudice (1954). He was a good writer, and none of these books are too technical

ABRAHAM MASLOW

1908-1970

Dr. C. George Boeree

Biography

Abraham Harold Maslow was born April 1, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York. He was the first of seven children born to
his parents, who themselves were uneducated Jewish immigrants from Russia. His parents, hoping for the best for
their children in the new world, pushed him hard for academic success. Not surprisingly, he became very lonely as a
boy, and found his refuge in books.

To satisfy his parents, he first studied law at the City College of New York (CCNY). After three semesters, he
transferred to Cornell, and then back to CCNY. He married Bertha Goodman, his first cousin, against his parents
wishes. Abe and Bertha went on to have two daughters.

He and Bertha moved to Wisconsin so that he could attend the University of Wisconsin. Here, he became interested
in psychology, and his school work began to improve dramatically. He spent time there working with Harry Harlow,
who is famous for his experiments with baby rhesus monkeys and attachment behavior.

He received his BA in 1930, his MA in 1931, and his PhD in 1934, all in psychology, all from the University of
Wisconsin. A year after graduation, he returned to New York to work with E. L. Thorndike at Columbia, where
Maslow became interested in research on human sexuality.

He began teaching full time at Brooklyn College. During this period of his life, he came into contact with the many
European intellectuals that were immigrating to the US, and Brooklyn in particular, at that time -- people like Adler,
Fromm, Horney, as well as several Gestalt and Freudian psychologists.

Maslow served as the chair of the psychology department at Brandeis from 1951 to 1969. While there he met Kurt
Goldstein, who had originated the idea of self-actualization in his famous book, The Organism (1934). It was also
here that he began his crusade for a humanistic psychology -- something ultimately much more important to him
than his own theorizing.

He spend his final years in semi-retirement in California, until, on June 8 1970, he died of a heart attack after years
of ill health.

Theory
One of the many interesting things Maslow noticed while he worked with monkeys early in his career, was that
some needs take precedence over others. For example, if you are hungry and thirsty, you will tend to try to take care
of the thirst first. After all, you can do without food for weeks, but you can only do without water for a couple of
days! Thirst is a “stronger” need than hunger. Likewise, if you are very very thirsty, but someone has put a choke
hold on you and you can’t breath, which is more important? The need to breathe, of course. On the other hand, sex
is less powerful than any of these. Let’s face it, you won’t die if you don’t get it!

Maslow took this idea and created his now famous hierarchy of needs. Beyond the details of air, water, food, and
sex, he laid out five broader layers: the physiological needs, the needs for safety and security, the needs for love and
belonging, the needs for esteem, and the need to actualize the self, in that order.

1. The physiological needs. These include the needs we have for oxygen, water, protein, salt, sugar, calcium, and
other minerals and vitamins. They also include the need to maintain a pH balance (getting too acidic or base will
kill you) and temperature (98.6 or near to it). Also, there’s the needs to be active, to rest, to sleep, to get rid of
wastes (CO2, sweat, urine, and feces), to avoid pain, and to have sex. Quite a collection!

Maslow believed, and research supports him, that these are in fact individual needs, and that a lack of, say, vitamin
C, will lead to a very specific hunger for things which have in the past provided that vitamin C -- e.g. orange juice. I
guess the cravings that some pregnant women have, and the way in which babies eat the most foul tasting baby food,
support the idea anecdotally.

2. The safety and security needs. When the physiological needs are largely taken care of, this second layer of needs
comes into play. You will become increasingly interested in finding safe circumstances, stability, protection. You
might develop a need for structure, for order, some limits.

Looking at it negatively, you become concerned, not with needs like hunger and thirst, but with your fears and
anxieties. In the ordinary American adult, this set of needs manifest themselves in the form of our urges to have a
home in a safe neighborhood, a little job security and a nest egg, a good retirement plan and a bit of insurance, and
so on.

3. The love and belonging needs. When physiological needs and safety needs are, by and large, taken care of, a
third layer starts to show up. You begin to feel the need for friends, a sweetheart, children, affectionate relationships
in general, even a sense of community. Looked at negatively, you become increasing susceptible to loneliness and
social anxieties.

In our day-to-day life, we exhibit these needs in our desires to marry, have a family, be a part of a community, a
member of a church, a brother in the fraternity, a part of a gang or a bowling club. It is also a part of what we look
for in a career.

4. The esteem needs. Next, we begin to look for a little self-esteem. Maslow noted two versions of esteem needs, a
lower one and a higher one. The lower one is the need for the respect of others, the need for status, fame, glory,
recognition, attention, reputation, appreciation, dignity, even dominance. The higher form involves the need for
self-respect, including such feelings as confidence, competence, achievement, mastery, independence, and freedom.
Note that this is the “higher” form because, unlike the respect of others, once you have self-respect, it’s a lot harder
to lose!

The negative version of these needs is low self-esteem and inferiority complexes. Maslow felt that Adler was really
onto something when he proposed that these were at the roots of many, if not most, of our psychological problems.
In modern countries, most of us have what we need in regard to our physiological and safety needs. We, more often
than not, have quite a bit of love and belonging, too. It’s a little respect that often seems so very hard to get!

All of the preceding four levels he calls deficit needs, or D-needs. If you don’t have enough of something -- i.e. you
have a deficit -- you feel the need. But if you get all you need, you feel nothing at all! In other words, they cease to
be motivating. As the old blues song goes, “you don’t miss your water till your well runs dry!”
He also talks about these levels in terms of homeostasis. Homeostasis is the principle by which your furnace
thermostat operates: When it gets too cold, it switches the heat on; When it gets too hot, it switches the heat off. In
the same way, your body, when it lacks a certain substance, develops a hunger for it; When it gets enough of it, then
the hunger stops. Maslow simply extends the homeostatic principle to needs, such as safety, belonging, and esteem,
that we don’t ordinarily think of in these terms.

Maslow sees all these needs as essentially survival needs. Even love and esteem are needed for the maintenance of
health. He says we all have these needs built in to us genetically, like instincts. In fact, he calls them instinctoid --
instinct-like -- needs.

In terms of overall development, we move through these levels a bit like stages. As newborns, our focus (if not our
entire set of needs) is on the physiological. Soon, we begin to recognize that we need to be safe. Soon after that, we
crave attention and affection. A bit later, we look for self-esteem. Mind you, this is in the first couple of years!

Under stressful conditions, or when survival is threatened, we can “regress” to a lower need level. When you great
career falls flat, you might seek out a little attention. When your family ups and leaves you, it seems that love is
again all you ever wanted. When you face chapter eleven after a long and happy life, you suddenly can’t think of
anything except money.

These things can occur on a society-wide basis as well: When society suddenly flounders, people start clamoring for
a strong leader to take over and make things right. When the bombs start falling, they look for safety. When the
food stops coming into the stores, their needs become even more basic.

Maslow suggested that we can ask people for their “philosophy of the future” -- what would their ideal life or world
be like -- and get significant information as to what needs they do or do not have covered.

If you have significant problems along your development -- a period of extreme insecurity or hunger as a child, or
the loss of a family member through death or divorce, or significant neglect or abuse -- you may “fixate” on that set
of needs for the rest of your life.

This is Maslow’s understanding of neurosis. Perhaps you went through a war as a kid. Now you have everything
your heart needs -- yet you still find yourself obsessing over having enough money and keeping the pantry well-
stocked. Or perhaps your parents divorced when you were young. Now you have a wonderful spouse -- yet you get
insanely jealous or worry constantly that they are going to leave you because you are not “good enough” for them.
You get the picture.

Self-actualization

The last level is a bit different. Maslow has used a variety of terms to refer to this level: He has called it growth
motivation (in contrast to deficit motivation), being needs (or B-needs, in contrast to D-needs), and self-
actualization.

These are needs that do not involve balance or homeostasis. Once engaged, they continue to be felt. In fact, they
are likely to become stronger as we “feed” them! They involve the continuous desire to fulfill potentials, to “be all
that you can be.” They are a matter of becoming the most complete, the fullest, “you” -- hence the term, self-
actualization.

Now, in keeping with his theory up to this point, if you want to be truly self-actualizing, you need to have your
lower needs taken care of, at least to a considerable extent. This makes sense: If you are hungry, you are
scrambling to get food; If you are unsafe, you have to be continuously on guard; If you are isolated and unloved,
you have to satisfy that need; If you have a low sense of self-esteem, you have to be defensive or compensate.
When lower needs are unmet, you can’t fully devote yourself to fulfilling your potentials.
It isn’t surprising, then, the world being as difficult as it is, that only a small percentage of the world’s population is
truly, predominantly, self-actualizing. Maslow at one point suggested only about two percent!

The question becomes, of course, what exactly does Maslow mean by self-actualization. To answer that, we need to
look at the kind of people he called self-actualizers. Fortunately, he did this for us, using a qualitative method called
biographical analysis.

He began by picking out a group of people, some historical figures, some people he knew, whom he felt clearly met
the standard of self-actualization. Included in this august group were Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Albert
Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Adams, William James, Albert Schweitzer, Benedict Spinoza, and Alduous
Huxley, plus 12 unnamed people who were alive at the time Maslow did his research. He then looked at their
biographies, writings, the acts and words of those he knew personally, and so on. From these sources, he developed
a list of qualities that seemed characteristic of these people, as opposed to the great mass of us.

These people were reality-centered, which means they could differentiate what is fake and dishonest from what is
real and genuine. They were problem-centered, meaning they treated life’s difficulties as problems demanding
solutions, not as personal troubles to be railed at or surrendered to. And they had a different perception of means
and ends. They felt that the ends don’t necessarily justify the means, that the means could be ends themselves, and
that the means -- the journey -- was often more important than the ends.

The self-actualizers also had a different way of relating to others. First, they enjoyed solitude, and were comfortable
being alone. And they enjoyed deeper personal relations with a few close friends and family members, rather than
more shallow relationships with many people.

They enjoyed autonomy, a relative independence from physical and social needs. And they resisted enculturation,
that is, they were not susceptible to social pressure to be "well adjusted" or to "fit in" -- they were, in fact,
nonconformists in the best sense.

They had an unhostile sense of humor -- preferring to joke at their own expense, or at the human condition, and
never directing their humor at others. They had a quality he called acceptance of self and others, by which he meant
that these people would be more likely to take you as you are than try to change you into what they thought you
should be. This same acceptance applied to their attitudes towards themselves: If some quality of theirs wasn’t
harmful, they let it be, even enjoying it as a personal quirk. On the other hand, they were often strongly motivated
to change negative qualities in themselves that could be changed. Along with this comes spontaneity and simplicity:
They preferred being themselves rather than being pretentious or artificial. In fact, for all their nonconformity, he
found that they tended to be conventional on the surface, just where less self-actualizing nonconformists tend to be
the most dramatic.

Further, they had a sense of humility and respect towards others -- something Maslow also called democratic values
-- meaning that they were open to ethnic and individual variety, even treasuring it. They had a quality Maslow
called human kinship or Gemeinschaftsgefühl -- social interest, compassion, humanity. And this was accompanied
by a strong ethics, which was spiritual but seldom conventionally religious in nature.

And these people had a certain freshness of appreciation, an ability to see things, even ordinary things, with wonder.
Along with this comes their ability to be creative, inventive, and original. And, finally, these people tended to have
more peak experiences than the average person. A peak experience is one that takes you out of yourself, that makes
you feel very tiny, or very large, to some extent one with life or nature or God. It gives you a feeling of being a part
of the infinite and the eternal. These experiences tend to leave their mark on a person, change them for the better,
and many people actively seek them out. They are also called mystical experiences, and are an important part of
many religious and philosophical traditions.

Maslow doesn’t think that self-actualizers are perfect, of course. There were several flaws or imperfections he
discovered along the way as well: First, they often suffered considerable anxiety and guilt -- but realistic anxiety
and guilt, rather than misplaced or neurotic versions. Some of them were absentminded and overly kind. And
finally, some of them had unexpected moments of ruthlessness, surgical coldness, and loss of humor.
Two other points he makes about these self-actualizers: Their values were "natural" and seemed to flow effortlessly
from their personalities. And they appeared to transcend many of the dichotomies others accept as being
undeniable, such as the differences between the spiritual and the physical, the selfish and the unselfish, and the
masculine and the feminine.

Metaneeds and metapathologies

Another way in which Maslow approach the problem of what is self-actualization is to talk about the special, driving
needs (B-needs, of course) of the self-actualizers. They need the following in their lives in order to be happy:

Truth, rather than dishonesty. Goodness, rather than evil. Beauty, not ugliness or vulgarity. Unity, wholeness, and
transcendence of opposites, not arbitrariness or forced choices. Aliveness, not deadness or the mechanization of life.
Uniqueness, not bland uniformity. Perfection and necessity, not sloppiness, inconsistency, or accident. Completion,
rather than incompleteness. Justice and order, not injustice and lawlessness. Simplicity, not unnecessary
complexity. Richness, not environmental impoverishment. Effortlessness, not strain. Playfulness, not grim,
humorless, drudgery. Self-sufficiency, not dependency. Meaningfulness, rather than senselessness.

At first glance, you might think that everyone obviously needs these. But think: If you are living through an
economic depression or a war, or are living in a ghetto or in rural poverty, do you worry about these issues, or do
you worry about getting enough to eat and a roof over your head? In fact, Maslow believes that much of the what is
wrong with the world comes down to the fact that very few people really are interested in these values -- not because
they are bad people, but because they haven’t even had their basic needs taken care of!

When a self-actualizer doesn’t get these needs fulfilled, they respond with metapathologies - a list of problems as
long as the list of metaneeds! Let me summarize it by saying that, when forced to live without these values, the self-
actualizer develops depression, despair, disgust,alienation, and a degree of cynicism.

Maslow hoped that his efforts at describing the self-actualizing person would eventually lead to a “periodic table” of
the kinds of qualities, problems, pathologies, and even solutions characteristic of higher levels of human potential.
Over time, he devoted increasing attention, not to his own theory, but to humanistic psychology and the human
potentials movement.

Toward the end of his life, he inaugurated what he called the fourth force in psychology: Freudian and other
“depth” psychologies constituted the first force; Behaviorism was the second force; His own humanism, including
the European existentialists, were the third force. The fourth force was the transpersonal psychologies which, taking
their cue from Eastern philosophies, investigated such things as meditation, higher levels of consciousness, and even
parapsychological phenomena. Perhaps the best known transpersonalist today is Ken Wilber, author of such books
as The Atman Project and The History of Everything.

Discussion

Maslow has been a very inspirational figure in personality theories. In the 1960’s in particular, people were tired of
the reductionistic, mechanistic messages of the behaviorists and physiological psychologists. They were looking for
meaning and purpose in their lives, even a higher, more mystical meaning. Maslow was one of the pioneers in that
movement to bring the human being back into psychology, and the person back into personality!

At approximately the same time, another movement was getting underway, one inspired by some of the very things
that turned Maslow off: computers and information processing, as well as very rationalistic theories such as Piaget’s
cognitive development theory and Noam Chomsky’s linguistics. This, of course, became the cognitive movement in
psychology. As the heyday of humanism appeared to lead to little more than drug abuse, astrology, and self
indulgence, cognitivism provided the scientific ground students of psychology were yearning for.

But the message should not be lost: Psychology is, first and foremost, about people, real people in real lives, and not
about computer models, statistical analyses, rat behavior, test scores, and laboratories.

Some criticism
The “big picture” aside, there are a few criticisms we might direct at Maslow’s theory itself. The most common
criticism concerns his methodology: Picking a small number of people that he himself declared self-actualizing,
then reading about them or talking with them, and coming to conclusions about what self-actualization is in the first
place does not sound like good science to many people.

In his defense, I should point out that he understood this, and thought of his work as simply pointing the way. He
hoped that others would take up the cause and complete what he had begun in a more rigorous fashion. It is a
curiosity that Maslow, the “father” of American humanism, began his career as a behaviorist with a strong
physiological bent. He did indeed believe in science, and often grounded his ideas in biology. He only meant to
broaden psychology to include the best in us, as well as the pathological!

Another criticism, a little harder to respond to, is that Maslow placed such constraints on selfactualization. First,
Kurt Goldstein and Carl Rogers used the phrase to refer to what every living creature does: To try to grow, to
become more, to fulfill its biological destiny. Maslow limits it to something only two percent of the human species
achieves. And while Rogers felt that babies were the best examples of human self-actualization, Maslow saw it as
something achieved only rarely by the young.

Another point is that he asks that we pretty much take care of our lower needs before selfactualization comes to the
forefront. And yet we can find many examples of people who exhibited at very least aspects of self-actualization
who were far from having their lower needs taken care of. Many of our best artists and authors, for example,
suffered from poverty, bad upbringing, neuroses, and depression. Some could even be called psychotic! If you
think about Galileo, who prayed for ideas that would sell, or Rembrandt, who could barely keep food on the table, or
Toulouse Lautrec, whose body tormented him, or van Gogh, who, besides poor, wasn’t quite right in the head, if you
know what I mean... Weren’t these people engaged in some form of self-actualization? The idea of artists and poets
and philosophers (and psychologists!) being strange is so common because it has so much truth to it!

We also have the example of a number of people who were creative in some fashion even while in concentration
camps. Trachtenberg, for example, developed a new way of doing arithmetic in a camp. Viktor Frankl developed
his approach to therapy while in a camp. There are many more examples.

And there are examples of people who were creative when unknown, became successful only to stop being creative.
Ernest Hemingway, if I’m not mistaken, is an example. Perhaps all these examples are exceptions, and the
hierarchy of needs stands up well to the general trend. But the exceptions certainly do put some doubt into our
minds.

I would like to suggest a variation on Maslow's theory that might help. If we take the idea of actualization as
Goldstein and Rogers use it, i.e. as the "life force" that drives all creatures, we can also acknowledge that there are
various things that interfere with the full effectiveness of that life force. If we are deprived of our basic physical
needs, if we are living under threatening circumstances, if we are isolated from others, or if we have no confidence
in our abilities, we may continue to survive, but it will not be as fulfilling a live as it could be. We will not be fully
actualizing our potentials! We could even understand that there might be people that actualize despite deprivation!
If we take the deficit needs as subtracting from actualization, and if we talk about full self-actualization rather than
self-actualization as a separate category of need, Maslow's theory comes into line with other theories, and the
exceptional people who succeed in the face of adversity can be seen as heroic rather than freakish abberations.

I received the following email from Gareth Costello of Dublin, Ireland, which balances my somewhat negative
review of Maslow:

One mild criticism I would have is of your concluding assessment, where you appeal for a broader view of self-
actualisation that could include subjects such as van Gogh and other hard-at-heel intellectual/creative giants. This
appears to be based on a view that people like van Gogh, etc. were, by virtue of their enormous creativity, 'at least
partly' self-actualised.
I favour Maslow's more narrow definition of self-actualisation and would not agree that selfactualisation equates
with supreme self-expression. I suspect that self-actualisation is, often, a demotivating factor where artistic creativity
is concerned, and that artists such as van Gogh thrived (artistically, if not in other respects) specifically in the
absence of circumstances conducive to self-actualisation. Even financially successful artists (e.g. Stravinsky, who
was famously good at looking after his financial affairs, as well as affairs of other kinds) do exhibit some of the non-
self-actualised 'motivators' that you describe so well.

Self-actualisation implies an outwardness and openness that contrasts with the introspection that can be a pre-
requisite for great artistic self-expression. Where scientists can look out at the world around them to find something
of profound or universal significance, great artists usually look inside themselves to find something of personal
significance - the universality of their work is important but secondary. It's interesting that Maslow seems to have
concentrated on people concerned with the big-picture when defining self-actualisation. In Einstein, he selected a
scientist who was striving for a theory of the entire physical universe. The philosophers and politicians he analysed
were concerned with issues of great relevance to humanity.

This is not to belittle the value or importance of the 'small-picture' - society needs splitters as well as lumpers. But
while self-actualisation may be synonymous with psychological balance and health, it does not necessarily lead to
professional or creative brilliance in all fields. In some instances, it may remove the driving force that leads people
to excel -- art being the classic example. So I don't agree that the scope of self-actualisation should be extended to
include people who may well have been brilliant, but who were also quite possibly damaged, unrounded or unhappy
human beings.

If I had the opportunity to chose between brilliance (alone) or self-actualisation (alone) for my children, I would go
for the latter!

Gareth makes some very good points!

Bibliography

Maslow’s books are easy to read and full of interesting ideas. The best known are Toward a Psychology of Being
(1968), Motivation and Personality (first edition, 1954, and second edition, 1970), and The Further Reaches of
Human Nature (1971). Finally, there are many articles by Maslow, especially in the Journal of Humanistic
Psychology, which he cofounded. For more information on-line, go to http://www.nidusnet.org.

CARL ROGERS

1902 - 1987

Dr. C. George Boeree

Biography

Carl Rogers was born January 8, 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, the fourth of six children. His
father was a successful civil engineer and his mother was a housewife and devout Christian. His education started
in the second grade, because he could already read before kindergarten.

When Carl was 12, his family moved to a farm about 30 miles west of Chicago, and it was here that he was to spend
his adolescence. With a strict upbringing and many chores, Carl was to become rather isolated, independent, and
self-disciplined.
He went on to the University of Wisconsin as an agriculture major. Later, he switched to religion to study for the
ministry. During this time, he was selected as one of ten students to go to Beijing for the “World Student Christian
Federation Conference” for six months. He tells us that his new experiences so broadened his thinking that he began
to doubt some of his basic religious views.

After graduation, he married Helen Elliot (against his parents’ wishes), moved to New York City, and began
attending the Union Theological Seminary, a famous liberal religious institution. While there, he took a student
organized seminar called “Why am I entering the ministry?” I might as well tell you that, unless you want to change
your career, never take a class with such a title! He tells us that most of the participants “thought their way right out
of religious work.”

Religion’s loss was, of course, psychology’s gain: Rogers switched to the clinical psychology program of Columbia
University, and received his Ph.D. in 1931. He had already begun his clinical work at the Rochester Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children. At this clinic, he learned about Otto Rank’s theory and therapy techniques, which
started him on the road to developing his own approach.

He was offered a full professorship at Ohio State in 1940. In 1942, he wrote his first book, Counseling and
Psychotherapy. Then, in 1945, he was invited to set up a counseling center at the University of Chicago. It was
while working there that in 1951 he published his major work, Client-Centered Therapy, wherein he outlines his
basic theory.

In 1957, he returned to teach at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsisn. Unfortunately, it was a time of
conflict within their psychology department, and Rogers became very disillusioned with higher education. In 1964,
he was happy to accept a research position in La Jolla, California. He provided therapy, gave speeches, and wrote,
until his death in 1987.

Theory

Roger’s theory is a clinical one, based on years of experience dealing with his clients. He has this in common with
Freud, for example. Also in common with Freud is that his is a particularly rich and mature theory -- well thought-
out and logically tight, with broad application.

Not in common with Freud, however, is the fact that Rogers sees people as basically good or healthy -- or at very
least, not bad or ill. In other words, he sees mental health as the normal progression of life, and he sees mental
illness, criminality, and other human problems, as distortions of that natural tendency. Also not in common with
Freud is the fact that Rogers’ theory is a relatively simple one.

Also not in common with Freud is that Rogers’ theory is particularly simple -- elegant even! The entire theory is
built on a single “force of life” he calls the actualizing tendency. It can be defined as the built-in motivation present
in every life-form to develop its potentials to the fullest extent possible. We’re not just talking about survival:
Rogers believes that all creatures strive to make the very best of their existence. If they fail to do so, it is not for a
lack of desire.

Rogers captures with this single great need or motive all the other motives that other theorists talk about. He asks
us, why do we want air and water and food? Why do we seek safety, love, and a sense of competence? Why,
indeed, do we seek to discover new medicines, invent new power sources, or create new works of art? Because, he
answers, it is in our nature as living things to do the very best we can!

Keep in mind that, unlike Maslow’s use of the term, Rogers applies it to all living creatures. Some of his earliest
examples, in fact, include seaweed and mushrooms! Think about it: Doesn’t it sometimes amaze you the way
weeds will grow through the sidewalk, or saplings crack boulders, or animals survive desert conditions or the frozen
north?
He also applied the idea to ecosystems, saying that an ecosystem such as a forest, with all its complexity, has a much
greater actualization potential than a simple ecosystem such as a corn field. If one bug were to become extinct in a
forest, there are likely to be other creatures that will adapt to fill the gap; On the other hand, one bout of “corn
blight” or some such disaster, and you have a dust bowl. The same for us as individuals: If we live as we should,
we will become increasingly complex, like the forest, and thereby remain flexible in the face of life’s little -- and big
-- disasters.

People, however, in the course of actualizing their potentials, created society and culture. In and of itself, that’s not
a problem: We are a social creature, it is our nature. But when we created culture, it developed a life of its own.
Rather than remaining close to other aspects of our natures, culture can become a force in its own right. And even
if, in the long run, a culture that interferes with our actualization dies out, we, in all likelihood, will die with it.

Don’t misunderstand: Culture and society are not intrinsically evil! It’s more along the lines of the birds of paradise
found in Papua-New Guinea. The colorful and dramatic plumage of the males apparently distract predators from
females and the young. Natural selection has led these birds towards more and more elaborate tail feathers, until in
some species the male can no longer get off the ground. At that point, being colorful doesn’t do the male -- or the
species -- much good! In the same way, our elaborate societies, complex cultures, incredible technologies, for all
that they have helped us to survive and prosper, may at the same time serve to harm us, and possibly even destroy
us.

Details

Rogers tells us that organisms know what is good for them. Evolution has provided us with the senses, the tastes,
the discriminations we need: When we hunger, we find food -- not just any food, but food that tastes good. Food
that tastes bad is likely to be spoiled, rotten, unhealthy. That what good and bad tastes are -- our evolutionary lessons
made clear! This is called organismic valuing.

Among the many things that we instinctively value is positive regard, Rogers umbrella term for things like love,
affection, attention, nurturance, and so on. It is clear that babies need love and attention. In fact, it may well be that
they die without it. They certainly fail to thrive -- i.e. become all they can be.

Another thing -- perhaps peculiarly human -- that we value is positive self-regard, that is, self-esteem, self-worth, a
positive self-image. We achieve this positive self-regard by experiencing the positive regard others show us over
our years of growing up. Without this self-regard, we feel small and helpless, and again we fail to become all that
we can be!

Like Maslow, Rogers believes that, if left to their own devices, animals will tend to eat and drink things that are
good for them, and consume them in balanced proportions. Babies, too, seem to want and like what they need.
Somewhere along the line, however, we have created an environment for ourselves that is significantly different
from the one in which we evolved. In this new environment are such things as refined sugar, flour, butter,
chocolate, and so on, that our ancestors in Africa never knew. These things have flavors that appeal to our
organismic valuing -- yet do not serve our actualization well. Over millions of years, we may evolve to find brocolli
more satisfying than cheesecake -- but by then, it’ll be way too late for you and me.

Our society also leads us astray with conditions of worth. As we grow up, our parents, teachers, peers, the media,
and others, only give us what we need when we show we are “worthy,” rather than just because we need it. We get a
drink when we finish our class, we get something sweet when we finish our vegetables, and most importantly, we
get love and affection if and only if we “behave!”

Getting positive regard on “on condition” Rogers calls conditional positive regard. Because we do indeed need
positive regard, these conditions are very powerful, and we bend ourselves into a shape determined, not by our
organismic valuing or our actualizing tendency, but by a society that may or may not truly have our best interests at
heart. A “good little boy or girl” may not be a healthy or happy boy or girl!
Over time, this “conditioning” leads us to have conditional positive self-regard as well. We begin to like ourselves
only if we meet up with the standards others have applied to us, rather than if we are truly actualizing our potentials.
And since these standards were created without keeping each individual in mind, more often than not we find
ourselves unable to meet them, and therefore unable to maintain any sense of self-esteem.

Incongruity

The aspect of your being that is founded in the actualizing tendency, follows organismic valuing, needs and receives
positive regard and self-regard, Rogers calls the real self. It is the “you” that, if all goes well, you will become.

On the other hand, to the extent that our society is out of synch with the actualizing tendency, and we are forced to
live with conditions of worth that are out of step with organismic valuing, and receive only conditional positive
regard and self-regard, we develop instead an ideal self. By ideal, Rogers is suggesting something not real,
something that is always out of our reach, the standard we can’t meet.

This gap between the real self and the ideal self, the “I am” and the “I should” is called incongruity. The greater the
gap, the more incongruity. The more incongruity, the more suffering. In fact, incongruity is essentially what Rogers
means by neurosis: Being out of synch with your own self. If this all sounds familiar to you, it is precisely the same
point made by Karen Horney!

Defenses

When you are in a situation where there is an incongruity between your image of yourself and your immediate
experience of yourself (i.e. between the ideal and the real self), you are in a threatening situation. For example, if
you have been taught to feel unworthy if you do not get A's on all your tests, and yet you aren't really all that great a
student, then situations such as tests are going to bring that incongruity to light -- tests will be very threatening.

When you are expecting a threatening situation, you will feel anxiety. Anxiety is a signal indicating that there is
trouble ahead, that you should avoid the situation! One way to avoid the situation, of course, is to pick yourself up
and run for the hills. Since that is not usually an option in life, instead of running physically, we run
psychologically, by using defenses.

Rogers' idea of defenses is very similar to Freud's, except that Rogers considers everything from a perceptual point-
of-view, so that even memories and impulses are thought of as perceptions. Fortunately for us, he has only two
defenses: denial and perceptual distortion.

Denial means very much what it does in Freud's system: You block out the threatening situation altogether. An
example might be the person who never picks up his test or asks about test results, so he doesn't have to face poor
grades (at least for now!). Denial for Rogers does also include what Freud called repression: If keeping a memory
or an impulse out of your awareness -- refuse to perceive it -- you may be able to avoid (again, for now!) a
threatening situation.

Perceptual distortion is a matter of reinterpreting the situation so that it appears less threatening. It is very similar to
Freud's rationalization. A student that is threatened by tests and grades may, for example, blame the professor for
poor teaching, trick questions, bad attitude, or whatever. The fact that sometimes professors are poor teachers, write
trick questions, and have bad attitudes only makes the distortion work better: If it could be true, then maybe it really
was true! It can also be much more obviously perceptual, such as when the person misreads his grade as better than
it is.

Unfortunately for the poor neurotic (and, in fact, most of us), every time he or she uses a defense, they put a greater
distance between the real and the ideal. They become ever more incongruous, and find themselves in more and
more threatening situations, develop greater and greater levels of anxiety, and use more and more defenses.... It
becomes a vicious cycle that the person eventually is unable to get out of, at least on their own.

Rogers also has a partial explanation for psychosis: Psychosis occurs when a person's defense are overwhelmed,
and their sense of self becomes "shattered" into little disconnected pieces. His behavior likewise has little
consistency to it. We see him as having "psychotic breaks" -- episodes of bizarre behavior. His words may make
little sense. His emotions may be inappropriate. He may lose the ability to differentiate self and non-self, and
become disoriented and passive.

The fully-functioning person

Rogers, like Maslow, is just as interested in describing the healthy person. His term is "fullyfunctioning," and
involves the following qualities:

1. Openness to experience. This is the opposite of defensiveness. It is the accurate perception of one's experiences
in the world, including one's feelings. It also means being able to accept reality, again including one's feelings.
Feelings are such an important part of openness because they convey organismic valuing. If you cannot be open to
your feelings, you cannot be open to acualization. The hard part, of course, is distinguishing real feelings from the
anxieties brought on by conditions of worth.

2. Existential living. This is living in the here-and-now. Rogers, as a part of getting in touch with reality, insists
that we not live in the past or the future -- the one is gone, and the other isn't anything at all, yet! The present is the
only reality we have. Mind you, that doesn't mean we shouldn't remember and learn from our past. Neither does it
mean we shouldn't plan or even day-dream about the future. Just recognize these things for what they are:
memories and dreams, which we are experiencing here in the present.

3. Organismic trusting. We should allow ourselves to be guided by the organismic valuing process. We should
trust ourselves, do what feels right, what comes natural. This, as I'm sure you realize, has become a major sticking
point in Rogers' theory. People say, sure, do what comes natural -- if you are a sadist, hurt people; if you are a
masochist, hurt yourself; if the drugs or alcohol make you happy, go for it; if you are depressed, kill yourself.... This
certainly doesn't sound like great advice. In fact, many of the excesses of the sixties and seventies were blamed on
this attitude. But keep in mind that Rogers meant trust your real self, and you can only know what your real self has
to say if you are open to experience and living existentially! In other words, organismic trusting assumes you are in
contact with the acutalizing tendency.

4. Experiential freedom. Rogers felt that it was irrelevant whether or not people really had free will. We feel very
much as if we do. This is not to say, of course, that we are free to do anything at all: We are surrounded by a
deterministic universe, so that, flap my arms as much as I like, I will not fly like Superman. It means that we feel
free when choices are available to us. Rogers says that the fully-functioning person acknowledges that feeling of
freedom, and takes responsibility for his choices.

5. Creativity. If you feel free and responsible, you will act accordingly, and participate in the world. A fully-
functioning person, in touch with acualization, will feel obliged by their nature to contribute to the actualization of
others, even life itself. This can be through creativity in the arts or sciences, through social concern and parental
love, or simply by doing one's best at one's job. Creativity as Rogers uses it is very close to Erikson's generativity.

Therapy

Carl Rogers is best known for his contributions to therapy. His therapy has gone through a couple of name changes
along the way: He originally called it non-directive, because he felt that the therapist should not lead the client, but
rather be there for the client while the client directs the progress of the therapy. As he became more experienced, he
realized that, as "non-directive" as he was, he still influenced his client by his very "non-directiveness!" In other
words, clients look to therapists for guidance, and will find it even when the therapist is trying not to guide.

So he changed the name to client-centered. He still felt that the client was the one who should say what is wrong,
find ways of improving, and determine the conclusion of therapy -- his therapy was still very "client-centered" even
while he acknowledged the impact of the therapist. Unfortunately, other therapists felt that this name for his therapy
was a bit of a slap in the face for them: Aren't most therapies "client-centered?"

Nowadays, though the terms non-directive and client-centered are still used, most people just call it Rogerian
therapy. One of the phrases that Rogers used to describe his therapy is "supportive, not reconstructive," and he uses
the analogy of learning to ride a bicycle to explain: When you help a child to learn to ride a bike, you can't just tell
them how. They have to try it for themselves. And you can't hold them up the whole time either. There comes a
point when you have to let them go. If they fall, they fall, but if you hang on, they never learn.

It's the same in therapy. If independence (autonomy, freedom with responsibility) is what you are helping a client to
achieve, then they will not achieve it if they remain dependent on you, the therapist. They need to try their insights
on their own, in real life beyond the therapist's office! An authoritarian approach to therapy may seem to work
marvelously at first, but ultimately it only creates a dependent person.

There is only one technique that Rogerians are known for: reflection. Reflection is the mirroring of emotional
communication: If the client says "I feel like shit!" the therapist may reflect this back to the client by saying
something like "So, life's getting you down, hey?" By doing this, the therapist is communicating to the client that he
is indeed listening and cares enough to understand.

The therapist is also letting the client know what it is the client is communicating. Often, people in distress say
things that they don't mean because it feels good to say them. For example, a woman once came to me and said "I
hate men!" I reflected by saying "You hate all men?" Well, she said, maybe not all -- she didn't hate her father or
her brother or, for that matter, me. Even with those men she "hated," she discovered that the great majority of them
she didn't feel as strongly as the word hate implies. In fact, ultimately, she realized that she didn't trust many men,
and that she was afraid of being hurt by them the way she had been by one particular man.

Reflection must be used carefully, however. Many beginning therapists use it without thinking (or feeling), and just
repeat every other phrase that comes out of the client's mouth. They sound like parrots with psychology degrees!
Then they think that the client doesn't notice, when in fact it has become a stereotype of Rogerian therapy the same
way as sex and mom have become stereotypes of Freudian therapy. Reflection must come from the heart -- it must
be genuine, congruent.

Which brings us to Rogers' famous requirements of the therapist. Rogers felt that a therapist, in order to be
effective, must have three very special qualities:

1. Congruence -- genuineness, honesty with the client. 2. Empathy -- the ability to feel what the client feels. 3.
Respect -- acceptance, unconditional positive regard towards the client.

He says these qualities are "necessary and sufficient:" If the therapist shows these three qualities, the client will
improve, even if no other special "techniques" are used. If the therapist does not show these three qualities, the
client's improvement will be minimal, no matter how many "techniques" are used. Now this is a lot to ask of a
therapist! They're just human, and often enough a bit more "human" (let's say unusual) than most. Rogers does give
in a little, and he adds that the therapist must show these things in the therapy relationship. In other words, when the
therapist leaves the office, he can be as "human" as anybody.

I happen to agree with Rogers, even though these qualities are quite demanding. Some of the research does suggest
that techniques don't matter nearly as much as the therapist's personality, and that, to some extent at least, therapists
are "born" not "made."

References

Rogers was a great writer, a real pleasure to read. The most complete statement of his theory is in Client-centered
Therapy (1951). Two collections of essays are very interesting: On Becoming a Person (1961) and A Way of Being
(1980). Finally, there's a nice collection of his work in The Carl Rogers Reader, edited by Kirschenbaum and
Henderson (1989)

VIKTOR FRANKL

1905 - 1997

Dr. C. George Boeree

In September of 1942, a young doctor, his new bride, his mother, father, and brother, were arrested in Vienna and
taken to a concentration camp in Bohemia. It was events that occurred there and at three other camps that led the
young doctor - prisoner 119,104 - to realize the significance of meaningfulness in life.

One of the earliest events to drive home the point was the loss of a manuscript - his life's work - during his transfer
to Auschwitz. He had sewn it into the lining of his coat, but was forced to discard it at the last minute. He spent
many later nights trying to reconstruct it, first in his mind, then on slips of stolen paper.

Another significant moment came while on a predawn march to work on laying railroad tracks: Another prisoner
wondered outloud about the fate of their wives. The young doctor began to think about his own wife, and realized
that she was present within him:

The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still
may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. (1963, p. 59) And throughout his
ordeal, he could not help but see that, among those given a chance for survival, it was those who held on to a vision
of the future -- whether it be a significant task before them, or a return to their loved ones -- that were most likely to
survive their suffering.

It would be, in fact, the meaningfulness that could be found in suffering itself that would most impress him:

(T)here is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but
one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, and existence restricted by
external forces.... Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. (1963, p. 106) That young doctor
was, of course, Viktor Emil Frankl.

Biography

Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna on March 26, 1905. His father, Gabriel Frankl, was a strong, disciplined man
from Moravia who worked his way from government stenographer to become the director of the Ministry of Social
Service. His mother, Elsa Frankl (née Lion), was more tenderhearted, a pious woman from Prague.

The middle of three children, young Viktor was precocious and intensely curious. Even at the tender age of four, he
already knew that he wanted to be a physician.

In high school, Viktor was actively involved in the local Young Socialist Workers organization. His interest in
people turned him towards the study of psychology. He finished his high school years with a psychoanalytic essay
on the philosopher Schopenhauer, a publication in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and the beginning of
a rather intense correspondence with the great Sigmund Freud.

In 1925, a year after graduating and on his way towards his medical degree, he met Freud in person. Alfred Adler’s
theory was more to Frankl’s liking, though, and that year he published an article - “Psychotherapy and
Weltanschauung” - in Adler’s International Journal of Individual Psychology. The next year, Frankl used the term
logotherapy in a public lecture for the first time, and began to refine his particular brand of Viennese psychology.
In 1928 and 1929, Frankl organized cost-free counseling centers for teenagers in Vienna and six other cities, and
began working at the Psychiatric University Clinic. In 1930, he earned his doctorate in medicine, and was promoted
to assistant. In the next few years, Frankl continued his training in neurology.

In 1933, He was put in charge of the ward for suicidal women at the Psychiatric Hospital, with many thousands of
patients each year. In 1937, Frankl opened his own practice in neurology and psychiatry. One year later, Hitler’s
troops invade Austria. He obtained a visa to the U.S. in 1939, but, concerned for his elderly parents, he let it expire.

In 1940, Frankl was made head of the neurological department of Rothschild Hospital, the only hospital for Jews in
Vienna during the Nazi regime. He made many false diagnoses of his patients in order to circumvent the new
policies requiring euthanasia of the mentally ill. It was during this period that he began his manuscript, Ärztliche
Seelsorge - in English, The Doctor and the Soul.

Frankl married in 1942, but in September of that year, he, his wife, his father, mother, and brother, were all arrested
and brought to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt in Bohemia. His father died there of starvation. His mother
and brother were killed at Auschwitz in 1944. His wife died at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Only his sister Stella would
survive, having managed to emigrate to Australia a short while earlier.

When he was moved to Auschwitz, his manuscript for The Doctor and the Soul was discovered and destroyed. His
desire to complete his work, and his hopes that he would be reunited with his wife and family someday, kept him
from losing hope in what seemed otherwise a hopeless situation.

After two more moves to two more camps, Frankl finally succumbed to typhoid fever. He kept himself awake by
reconstructing his manuscript on stolen slips of paper. In April of 1945, Frankl’s camp was liberated, and he
returned to Vienna, only to discover the deaths of his loved ones. Although nearly broken and very much alone in
the world, he was given the position of director of the Vienna Neurological Policlinic -- a position he would hold for
25 years.

He finally reconstructed his book and published it, earning him a teaching appointment at the University of Vienna
Medical School. In only 9 days, he dictated another book, which would become Man’s Search for Meaning. Before
he died, it sold over nine million copies, five million in the U.S. alone!

During this period, he met a young operating room assistant named Eleonore Schwindt - “Elly” - and fell in love at
first sight. Although half his age, he credited her with giving him the courage to reestablish himself in the world.
They married in 1947, and had a daughter, Gabriele, in December of that year.

In 1948, Frankl received his Ph.D. in philosophy. His dissertation - The Unconscious God - was an examination of
the relation of psychology and religion. That same year, he was made associate professor of neurology and
psychiatry at the University of Vienna. In 1950, he founded and became president of the Austrian Medical Society
for Psychotherapy.

After being promoted to full professor, he became increasingly well known in circles outside Vienna. His guest
professorships, honorary doctorates, and awards are too many to list here but include the Oskar Pfister Prize by the
American Society of Psychiatry and a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Frankl continued to teach at the University of Vienna until 1990, when he was 85. It should be noted that he was a
vigorous mountain climber and earned his airplane pilot’s license when he was 67!

In 1992, friends and family members established the Viktor Frankl Institute in his honor. In 1995, he finished his
autobiography, and in 1997, he published his final work, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, based on his doctoral
dissertation. He has 32 books to his name, and they have been translated into 27 languages.

Viktor Emil Frankl died on September 2, 1997, of heart failure. He is survived by his wife Eleonore, his daughter
Dr. Gabriele Frankl-Vesely, his grandchildren Katharina and Alexander, and his great-granddaughter Anna Viktoria.
His impact on psychology and psychiatry will be felt for centuries to come.
Theory

Viktor Frankl’s theory and therapy grew out of his experiences in Nazi death camps. Watching who did and did not
survive (given an opportunity to survive!), he concluded that the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had it right: “He
who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how. " (Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in 1963, p. 121) He saw that
people who had hopes of being reunited with loved ones, or who had projects they felt a need to complete, or who
had great faith, tended to have better chances than those who had lost all hope.

He called his form of therapy logotherapy, from the Greek word logos, which can mean study, word, spirit, God, or
meaning. It is this last sense Frankl focusses on, although the other meanings are never far off. Comparing himself
with those other great Viennese psychiatrists, Freud and Adler, he suggested that Freud essentially postulated a will
to pleasure as the root of all human motivation, and Adler a will to power. Logotherapy postulates a will to
meaning.

Frankl also uses the Greek word noös, which means mind or spirit. In traditional psychology, he suggests, we focus
on “psychodynamics,” which sees people as trying to reduce psychological tension. Instead, or in addition, Frankl
says we should pay attention to noödynamics, wherein tension is necessary for health, at least when it comes to
meaning. People desire the tension involved in striving for some worthy goal!

Perhaps the original issue with which Frankl was concerned, early in his career as a physician, was the danger of
reductionism. Then, as now, medical schools emphasized the idea that all things come down to physiology.
Psychology, too, promoted reductionism: Mind could be best understood as a "side effect" of brain mechanisms.
The spiritual aspect of human life was (and is) hardly considered worth mentioning at all! Frankl believed that
entire generations of doctors and scientists were being indoctrinated into what could only lead to a certain cynicism
in the study of human existence.

He set it as his goal to balance the physiological view with a spiritual perspective, and saw this as a significant step
towards developing more effective treatment. As he said, "...the deneuroticization of humanity requires a re-
humanization of psychotherapy." (1975, p. 104)

Conscience

One of Viktor Frankl's major concepts is conscience. He sees conscience as a sort of unconscious spirituality,
different from the instinctual unconscious that Freud and others emphasize. The conscience is not just one factor
among many; it is the core of our being and the source of our personal integrity.

He puts it in no uncertain terms: "... (B)eing human is being responsible -- existentially responsible, responsible for
one's own existence." (1975, p. 26) Conscience is intuitive and highly personalized. It refers to a real person in a
real situation, and cannot be reduced to simple "universal laws." It must be lived.

He refers to conscience as a "pre-reflective ontological self-understanding" or "the wisdom of the heart," "more
sensitive than reason can ever be sensible." (1975, p. 39) It is conscience that "sniffs out" that which gives our lives
meaning.

Like Erich Fromm, Frankl notes that animals have instincts to guide them. In traditional societies, we have done
well-enough replacing instincts with our social traditions. Today, we hardly even have that. Most attempt to find
guidance in conformity and conventionality, but it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid facing the fact that we
now have the freedom and the responsibility to make our own choices in life, to find our own meaning.

But "...meaning must be found and cannot be given." (1975, p. 112) Meaning is like laughter, he says: You cannot
force someone to laugh, you must tell him a joke! The same applies to faith, hope, and love -- they cannot be be
brought forth by an act of will, our own or someone else's.
"...(M)eaning is something to discover rather than to invent." (1975, p. 113) It has a reality of its own, independent
of our minds. Like an embedded figure or a "magic eye" picture, it is there to be seen, not something created by our
imagination. We may not always be able to bring the image -- or the meaning -- forth, but it is there. It is, he says,
"...primarily a perceptual phenomenon. " (1975, p. 115)

Tradition and traditional values are quickly disappearing from many people's lives. But, while that is difficult for
us, it need not lead us into despair: Meaning is not tied to society's values. Certainly, each society attempts to
summarize meaningfulness in its codes of conduct, but ultimately, meanings are unique to each individual.

"...(M)an must be equipped with the capacity to listen to and obey the ten thousand demands and commandments
hidden in the ten thousand situations with which life is confronting him." (1975, p. 120) And it is our job as
physicians, therapists, and educators to assist people in developing their individual consciences and finding and
fulfilling their unique meanings.

The existential vacuum

This striving after meaning can, of course, be frustrated, and this frustration can lead to noögenic neurosis, what
others might call spiritual or existential neurosis. People today seem more than ever to be experiencing their lives as
empty, meaningless, purposeless, aimless, adrift, and so on, and seem to be responding to these experiences with
unusual behaviors that hurt themselves, others, society, or all three.

One of his favorite metaphors is the existential vacuum. If meaning is what we desire, then meaninglessness is a
hole, an emptiness, in our lives. Whenever you have a vacuum, of course, things rush in to fill it. Frankl suggests
that one of the most conspicuous signs of existential vacuum in our society is boredom. He points out how often
people, when they finally have the time to do what they want, don’t seem to want to do anything! People go into a
tailspin when they retire; students get drunk every weekend; we submerge ourselves in passive entertainment every
evening. The "Sunday neurosis," he calls it.

So we attempt to fill our existential vacuums with “stuff” that, because it provides some satisfaction, we hope will
provide ultimate satisfaction as well: We might try to fill our lives with pleasure, eating beyond all necessity,
having promiscuous sex, living “the high life;” or we might seek power, especially the power represented by
monetary success; or we might fill our lives with “busy-ness,” conformity, conventionality; or we might fill the
vacuum with anger and hatred and spend our days attempting to destroy what we think is hurting us. We might also
fill our lives with certain neurotic “vicious cycles,” such as obsession with germs and cleanliness, or fear-driven
obsession with a phobic object. The defining quality of these vicious cycles is that, whatever we do, it is never
enough.

These neurotic vicious cycles are founded on something Frankl refers to as anticipatory anxiety: Someone may be
so afraid of getting certain anxiety-related symptoms that getting those symptoms becomes inevitable. The
anticipatory anxiety causes the very thing that is feared! Test anxiety is an obvious example: If you are afraid of
doing poorly on tests, the anxiety will prevent you from doing well on the test, leading you to be afraid of tests, and
so on.

A similar idea is hyperintention. This is a matter of trying too hard, which itself prevents you from succeeding at
something. One of the most common examples is insomnia: Many people, when they can’t sleep, continue to try to
fall asleep, using every method in the book. Of course, trying to sleep itself prevents sleep, so the cycle continues.
Another example is the way so many of us today feel we must be exceptional lovers: Men feel they must “last” as
long as possible, and women feel obliged to not only have orgasms, but to have multiple orgasms, and so on. Too
much concern in this regard, of course, leads to an inability to relax and enjoy oneself!

A third variation is hyperreflection. In this case it is a matter of “thinking too hard.” Sometimes we expect
something to happen, so it does, simply because its occurrence is strongly tied to one’s beliefs or attitudes - the self-
fulfilling prophecy. Frankl mentions a woman who had had bad sexual experiences in childhood but who had
nevertheless developed a strong and healthy personality. When she became familiar with psychological literature
suggesting that such experiences should leave one with an inability to enjoy sexual relations, she began having such
problems!

His understanding of the existential vacuum goes back to his experiences in the Nazi death camps. As the day-to-
day things that offer people a sense of meaning - work, family, the small pleasures of life - were taken from a
prisoner, his future would seem to disappear. Man, says Frankl, "can only live by looking to the future." (1963 , p.
115) "The prisoner who had lost faith in the future -- his future -- was doomed." (1963, p. 117)

While few people seeking psychological help today are suffering the extremes of the concentration camp, Frankl
feels that the problems caused by the existential vacuum are not only common, but rapidly spreading throughout
society. He points out the ubiquitous complaint of a "feeling of futility," which he also refers to as the abyss
experience.

Even the political and economic extremes of today's world can be seen as the reverberations of futility: We seem to
be caught between the automaton conformity of western consumer culture and totalitarianism in its communist,
fascist, and theocratic flavors. Hiding in mass society, or hiding in authoritarianism - either direction caters to the
person who wishes to deny the emptiness of his or her life.

Frankl calls depression, addiction, and aggression the mass neurotic triad. He refers to research that shows a strong
relationship between meaninglessness (as measured by "purpose in life" tests) and such behaviors as criminality and
involvement with drugs. He warns us that violence, drug use, and other negative behaviors, demonstrated daily on
television, in movies, even in music, only convinces the meaning-hungry that their lives can improve by imitation of
their "heroes." Even sports, he suggests, only encourage aggression.

Psychopathology

Frankl gives us details as to the origin of a variety of psychopathologies. For example, various anxiety neuroses are
seen as founded on existential anxiety - "the sting of conscience." (1973, p. 179) The individual, not understanding
that his anxiety is due to his sense of unfulfilled responsibility and a lack of meaning, takes that anxiety and focuses
it upon some problematic detail of life. The hypochondriac, for example, focuses his anxiety on some horrible
disease; the phobic focuses on some object that has caused him concern in the past; the agoraphobic sees her anxiety
as coming from the world outside her door; the patient with stage fright or speech anxiety focuses on the stage or the
podium. The anxiety neurotic thus makes sense of his or her discomfort with life.

He notes, that "Sometimes, but not always, it (the neurosis) serves to tyrannize a member of the family or is used to
justify oneself to others or to the self..." (1973, p. 181) but warns that this is, as others have noted as well, secondary
to the deeper issues.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder works in a similar fashion. The obsessive-compulsive person is lacking the sense of
completion that most people have. Most of us are satisfied with near certainty about, for example, a simple task like
locking one's door at night; the obsessive-compulsive requires a perfect certainty that is, ultimately, unattainable.
Because perfection in all things is, even for the obsessive-compusive, an impossibility, he or she focusses attention
on some domain in life that has caused difficulties in the past.

The therapist should attempt to help the patient to relax and not fight the tendencies to repeat thoughts and actions.
Further, the patient needs to come to recognize his temperamental inclinations towards perfection as fate and learn
to accept at least a small degree of uncertainty. But ultimately, the obsessive-compulsive, and the anxiety neurotic
as well, must find meaning. "As soon as life's fullness of meaning is rediscovered, the neurotic anxiety... no longer
has anything to fasten on." (1973, p. 182)

Like most existential psychologists, Frankl acknowledges the importance of genetic and physiological factors on
psychopathology. He sees depression, for example, as founded in a "vital low," i.e. a diminishment of physical
energy. On the psychological level, he relates depression to the feelings of inadequacy we feel when we are
confronted by tasks that are beyond our capacities, physical or mental.
On the spiritual level, Frankl views depression as "tension between what the person is and what he ought to be."
(1973, p. 202) The person's goals seem unreachable to him, and he loses a sense of his own future. Over time, he
becomes disgusted at himself and projects that disgust onto others or even humanity in general. The ever-present
gap between what is and what should be becomes a "gaping abyss." (1973, p. 202)

Schizophrenia is also understood by Frankl as rooted in a physiological dysfunction, in this case one which leads to
the person experiencing himself as an object rather than a subject.

Most of us, when we have thoughts, recognize them as coming from within our own minds. We "own" them, as
modern jargon puts it. The schizophrenic, for reasons still not understood, is forced to take a passive perspective on
those thoughts, and perceives them as voices. And he may watch himself and distrust himself -- which he
experiences passively, as being watched and persecuted.

Frankl believes that this passivity is rooted in an exaggerated tendency to self-observation. It is as if there were a
separation of the self as viewer and the self as viewed. The viewing self, devoid of content, seems barely real, while
the viewed self seems alien.

Although logotherapy was not designed to deal with severe psychoses, Frankl nevertheless feels that it can help: By
teaching the schizophrenic to ignore the voices and stop the constant self-observation, while simultaneously leading
him or her towards meaningful activity, the therapist may be able to short-circuit the vicious cycle.

Finding meaning

So how do we find meaning? Frankl discusses three broad approaches. The first is through experiential values, that
is, by experiencing something - or someone - we value. This can include Maslow’s peak experiences and esthetic
experiences such as viewing great art or natural wonders.

The most important example of experiential values is the love we feel towards another. Through our love, we can
enable our beloved to develop meaning, and by doing so, we develop meaning ourselves! Love, he says, "is the
ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire." (1963, pp. 58-59)

Frankl points out that, in modern society, many confuse sex with love. Without love, he says, sex is nothing more
than masturbation, and the other is nothing more than a tool to be used, a means to an end. Sex can only be fully
enjoyed as the physical expression of love.

Love is the recognition of the uniqueness of the other as an individual, with an intuitive understanding of their full
potential as human beings. Frankl believes this is only possible within monogamous relationships. As long as
partners are interchangeable, they remain objects.

A second means of discovering meaning is through creative values, by “doing a deed,” as he puts it. This is the
traditional existential idea of providing oneself with meaning by becoming involved in one’s projects, or, better, in
the project of one’s own life. It includes the creativity involved in art, music, writing, invention, and so on.

Frankl views creativity (as well as love) as a function of the spiritual unconscious, that is, the conscience. The
irrationality of artistic production is the same as the intuition that allows us to recognize the good. He provides us
with an interesting example:

We know a case in which a violinist always tried to play as consciously as possible. From putting his violin in place
on his shoulder to the most trifling technical detail, he wanted to do everything consciously, to perform in full self-
reflection. This led to a complete artistic breakdown.... Treatment had to give back to the patient his trust in the
unconscious, by having him realize how much more musical his unconscious was than his conscious. (1975, p. 38)
The third means of finding meaning is one few people besides Frankl talk about: attitudinal values. Attitudinal
values include such virtues as compassion, bravery, a good sense of humor, and so on. But Frankl's most famous
example is achieving meaning by way of suffering.
He gives an example concerning one of his clients: A doctor whose wife had died mourned her terribly. Frankl
asked him, “if you had died first, what would it have been like for her?” The doctor answered that it would have
been incredibly difficult for her. Frankl then pointed out that, by her dying first, she had been spared that suffering,
but that now he had to pay the price by surviving and mourning her. In other words, grief is the price we pay for
love. For the doctor, this thought gave his wife's death and his own pain meaning, which in turn allowed him to deal
with it. His suffering becomes something more: With meaning, suffering can be endured with dignity.

Frankl also notes that seriously ill people are not often given an opportunity to suffer bravely, and thereby retain
some dignity. Cheer up! we say. Be optimistic! Often, they are made to feel ashamed of their pain and
unhappiness.

In Man's Search for Meaning, he says this: "...everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the
human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." (1963, p.
104)

Transcendence

Ultimately, however, experiential, creative, and attitudinal values are merely surface manifestations of something
much more fundamental, which he calls suprameaning or transcendence. Here we see Frankl’s religious bent:
Suprameaning is the idea that there is, in fact, ultimate meaning in life, meaning that is not dependent on others, on
our projects, or even on our dignity. It is a reference to God and spiritual meaning.

This sets Frankl’s existentialism apart from the existentialism of someone like Jean Paul Sartre. Sartre and other
atheistic existentialists suggest that life is ultimately meaningless, and we must find the courage to face that
meaninglessness. Sartre says we must learn to endure ultimate meaninglessness; Frankl instead says that we need to
learn to endure our inability to fully comprehend ultimate meaningfulness, for “Logos is deeper than logic.”

Again, it was his experiences in the death camps that led him to these conclusions: "In spite of all the enforced
physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen....
They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom." (1963, p.
56) This certainly does contrast with Sigmund Freud's perspective, as expressed in The Future of an Illusion:
"Religion is the universal compulsive neurosis of mankind...." (quoted in 1975, p. 69)

It should be understood that Frankl's ideas about religion and spirituality are considerably broader than most. His
God is not the God of the narrow mind, not the God of one denomination or another. It is not even the God of
institutional religion. God is very much a God of the inner human being, a God of the heart. Even the atheist or the
agnostic, he points out, may accept the idea of transcendence without making use of the word "God." Allow me to
let Frankl speak for himself:

This unconscious religiousness, revealed by our phenomenological analysis, is to be understood as a latent relation
to transcendence inherent in man. If one prefers, he might conceive of this relation in terms of a relationship
between the immanent self and a transcendent thou. However one wishes to formulate it, we are confronted with
what I should like to term "the transcendent unconscious. This concept means no more or less than that man has
always stood in an intentional relation to transcendence, even if only on an unconscious level. If one calls the
intentional referent of such an unconscious relation "God," it is apt to speak of an "unconscious God." (1975, pp.
61-62) It must also be understood that this "unconscious God" is not anything like the archetypes Jung talks about.
This God is clearly transcendent, and yet profoundly personal. He is there, according to Frankl, within each of us,
and it is merely a matter of our acknowledging that presence that will bring us to suprameaning. On the other hand,
turning away from God is the ultimate source of all the ills we have already discussed.: "...(O)nce the angel in us is
repressed, he turns into a demon." (1975, p. 70)

Therapy
Viktor Frankl is nearly as well known for certain clinical details of his approach as for his overall theory. The first
of these details is a technique known as paradoxical intention, which is useful in breaking down the neurotic vicious
cycles brought on by anticipatory anxiety and hyperintention.

Paradoxical intention is a matter of wishing the very thing you are afraid of. A young man who sweated profusely
whenever he was in social situations was told by Frankl to wish to sweat. “I only sweated out a quart before, but
now I’m going to pour at least ten quarts!” (1973, p. 223) was among his instructions. Of course, when it came
down to it, the young man couldn’t do it. The absurdity of the task broke the vicious cycle.

The capacity human beings have of taking an objective stance towards their own life, or stepping outside
themselves, is the basis, Frankl tells us, for humor. And, as he noted in the camps, "Humor was another of the soul's
weapons in the fight for self-preservation." (1963, p. 68)

Another example concerns sleep problems: If you suffer from insomnia, according to Frankl, don’t spend the night
tossing and turning and trying to sleep. Get up! Try to stay up as long as you can! Over time, you’ll find yourself
gratefully crawling back into bed.

A second technique is called dereflection. Frankl believes that many problems stem from an overemphasis on
oneself. By shifting attention away from oneself and onto others, problems often disappear. If, for example, you
have difficulties with sex, try to satisfy your partner without seeking your own gratification. Concerns over
erections and orgasms disappear -- and satisfaction reappears! Or don’t try to satisfy anyone at all. Many sex
therapists suggest that a couple do nothing but “pet,” avoiding orgasms "at all costs." These couples often find they
can barely last the evening before what they had previously had difficulties with simply happens!

Frankl insists that, in today's world, there is far too much emphasis on self reflection. Since Freud, we have been
encouraged to look into ourselves, to dig out our deepest motivations. Frankl even refers to this tendency as our
"collective obsessive neurosis." (1975, p. 95) Focusing on ourselves this way actually serves to turn us away from
meaning!

For all the interest these techniques have aroused, Frankl insists that, ultimately, the problems these people face are a
matter of their need for meaning. So, although these and other techniques are a fine beginning to therapy, they are
not by any means the goal.

Perhaps the most significant task for the therapist is to assist the client in rediscovering the latent religiousness that
Frankl believes exists in each of us. This cannot be pushed, however: "Genuine religiousness must unfold in its own
time. Never can anyone be forced to it." (1975, p. 72) The therapist must allow the patient to discover his or her
own meanings.

"(H)uman existence -- at least as long as it has not been neurotically distorted -- is always directed to something, or
someone, other than itself - be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter lovingly." (1975, p. 78)
Frankl calls this self-transcendence, and contrasts it with self-actualization as Maslow uses the term. Self-
actualization, even pleasure and happiness, are side-effects of self-transcendence and the discovery of meaning. He
quotes Albert Schweitzer: "The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found
how to serve." (Quoted in 1975, p. 85)

In conclusion

Even if you (like me) are not of a religious inclination, it is difficult to ignore Frankl's message: There exists,
beyond instincts and "selfish genes," beyond classical and operant conditioning, beyond the imperatives of biology
and culture, a special something, uniquely human, uniquely personal. For much of psychology's history, we have, in
the name of science, tried to eliminate the "soul" from our professional vocabularies. But perhaps it is time to
follow Frankl's lead and reverse the years of reductionism.
Discussion

For all my admiration of Frankl and his theory, I also have some strong reservations. Frankl attempts to re-insert
religion into psychology, and does so in a particularly subtle and seductive manner. It is difficult to argue with
someone who has been through what Frankl has been through, and seen what he has seen. And yet, suffering is no
automatic guarantee of truth! By couching religion in the most tolerant and liberal language, he nevertheless is
asking us to base our understanding of human existence on faith, on a blind acceptance of the existence of ultimate
truth, without evidence other than the "feelings" and intuitions and anecdotes of those who already believe. This is,
in fact, a dangerous precedent, and there is much "pop psychology" based on these ideas. The same tendency
applies to the quasireligious theories of Carl Jung and Abraham Maslow.

Frankl, like May and others, refers to himself as an existentialist. Many others with religious tendencies do
likewise. They have even elevated Kierkegaard to the honorary position of founder of existentialism - a word
Kierkegaard had never heard. And yet faith, which asks one to surrender one's skepticism to a God or other
universal principle, is intrinsically at odds with the most basic concepts of existentialism. Religion - even liberal
religion - always posits essences at the root of human existence. Existentialism does not.

References

Frankl, V. E. (1963). (I. Lasch, Trans.) Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. New York:
Washington Square Press. (Earlier title, 1959: From DeathCamp to Existentialism. Originally published in 1946
as Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager)

Frankl, V. E. (1967). Psychotherapy and Existentialism : Selected Papers on Logotherapy. New York : Simon and
Schuster.

Frankl, V. E. (1973). (R. and C. Winston, Trans.) The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy.
New York: Vintage Books. (Originally published in 1946 as Ärztliche Seelsorge.)

Frankl, V. E. (1975). The Unconscious God: Psychotherapy and Theology. New York: Simon and Schuster.
(Originally published in 1948 as Der unbewusste Gott. Republished in 1997 as Man's Search for Ultimate
Meaning.)

Frankl, V. E. (1996). Viktor Frankl -- Recollections: An Autobiography. (J. and J. Fabray, Trans.) New York:
Plenum Publishing. (Originally published in 1995 as Was nicht in meinen Büchern steht.)

ROLLO MAY

1909 - 1994

Dr. C. George Boeree

Biography

Rollo May was born April 21, 1909, in Ada, Ohio. His childhood was not particularly pleasant: His parents didn’t
get along and eventually divorced, and his sister had a psychotic breakdown.

After a brief stint at Michigan State (he was asked to leave because of his involvement with a radical student
magazine), he attended Oberlin College in Ohio, where he received his bachelors degree.

After graduation, he went to Greece, where he taught English at Anatolia College for three years. During this
period, he also spent time as an itinerant artist and even studied briefly with Alfred Adler.
When he returned to the US, he entered Union Theological Seminary and became friends with one of his teachers,
Paul Tillich, the existentialist theologian, who would have a profound effect on his thinking. May received his BD
in 1938.

May suffered from tuberculosis, and had to spend three years in a sanatorium. This was probably the turning point
of his life. While he faced the possibility of death, he also filled his empty hours with reading. Among the literature
he read were the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish religious writer who inspired much of the existential
movement, and provided the inspiration for May’s theory.

He went on to study psychoanalysis at White Institute, where he met people such as Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich
Fromm. And finally, he went to Columbia University in New York, where in 1949 he received the first PhD in
clinical psychology that institution ever awarded.

After receiving his PhD, he went on to teach at a variety of top schools. In 1958, he edited, with Ernest Angel and
Henri Ellenberger, the book Existence, which introduced existential psychology to the US. He spent the last years
of his life in Tiburon, California, until he died in October of 1994.

Theory

Rollo May is the best known American existential psychologist. Much of his thinking can be understood by reading
about existentialism in general, and the overlap between his ideas and the ideas of Ludwig Binswanger is great.
Nevertheless, he is a little off of the mainstream in that he was more influenced by American humanism than the
Europeans, and more interested in reconciling existential psychology with other approaches, especially Freud’s.

May uses some traditional existential terms slightly differently than others, and invents new words for some of
existentialism’s old ideas. Destiny, for example, is roughly the same as thrownness combined with fallenness. It is
that part of our lives that is determined for us, our raw materials, if you like, for the project of creating our lives.
Another example is the word courage, which he uses more often than the traditional term "authenticity" to mean
facing one’s anxiety and rising above it.

He is also the only existential psychologist I’m aware of who discusses certain “stages” (not in the strict Freudian
sense, of course) of development:

Innocence -- the pre-egoic, pre-self-conscious stage of the infant. The innocent is premoral, i.e. is neither bad nor
good. Like a wild animal who kills to eat, the innocent is only doing what he or she must do. But an innocent does
have a degree of will in the sense of a drive to fulfil their needs!

Rebellion -- the childhood and adolescent stage of developing one’s ego or selfconsciousness by means of contrast
with adults, from the “no” of the two year old to the “no way” of the teenager. The rebellious person wants
freedom, but has as yet no full understanding of the responsibility that goes with it. The teenager may want to spend
their allowance in any way they choose -- yet they still expect the parent to provide the money, and will complain
about unfairness if they don't get it!

Ordinary -- the normal adult ego, conventional and a little boring, perhaps. They have learned responsibility, but
find it too demanding, and so seek refuge in conformity and traditional values.

Creative -- the authentic adult, the existential stage, beyond ego and self-actualizing. This is the person who,
accepting destiny, faces anxiety with courage!

These are not stages in the traditional sense. A child may certainly be innocent, ordinary or creative at times; An
adult may be rebellious. The only attachments to certain ages is in terms of salience: Rebelliousness stands out in
the two year old and the teenager!

On the other hand, he is every bit as interested in anxiety as any existentialist. His first book, The Meaning of
Anxiety, was based on his doctoral dissertation, which in turn was based on his reading of Kierkegaard. His
definition of anxiety is “the apprehension cued off by a threat to some value which the individual holds essential to
his existence as a self” (1967, p. 72). While not “pure” existentialism, it does obviously include fear of death or
“nothingness.” Later, he quotes Kierkegaard: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."

Love and Will

Many of May’s unique ideas can be found in the book I consider his best, Love and Will. In his efforts at
reconciling Freud and the existentialists, he turns his attention to motivation. His basic motivational construct is the
daimonic. The daimonic is the entire system of motives, different for each individual. It is composed of a collection
of specific motives called daimons.

The word daimon is from the Greek, and means little god. It comes to us as demon, with a very negative
connotation. But originally, a daimon could be bad or good. Daimons include lower needs, such as food and sex, as
well as higher needs, such as love. Basically, he says, a daimon is anything that can take over the person, a situation
he refers to as daimonic possession. It is then, when the balance among daimons is disrupted, that they should be
considered “evil” -- as the phrase implies! This idea is similar to Binswanger's idea of themes, or Horney's idea of
coping strategies.

For May, one of the most important daimons is eros. Eros is love (not sex), and in Greek mythology was a minor
god pictured as a young man. (See the story of Eros and Psyche by clicking here!) Later, Eros would be
transformed into that annoying little pest, Cupid. May understood love as the need we have to “become one” with
another person, and refers to an ancient Greek story by Aristophanes: People were originally four-legged,
fourarmed, two-headed creatures. When we became a little too prideful, the gods split us in two, male and female,
and cursed us with the never-ending desire to recover our missing half!

Anyway, like any daimon, eros is a good thing until it takes over the personality, until we become obsessed with it.

Another important concept for May is will: The ability to organize oneself in order to achieve one’s goals. This
makes will roughly synonymous with ego and reality-testing, but with its own store of energy, as in ego psychology.
I suspect he got the notion from Otto Rank, who uses will in the same way. May hints that will, too, is a daimon that
can potentially take over the person.

Another definition of will is “the ability to make wishes come true.” Wishes are “playful imaginings of
possibilities,” and are manifestations of our daimons. Many wishes, of course, come from eros. But they require
will to make them happen! Hence, we can see three “personality types” coming out of our relative supply, you
might say, of our wishes for love and the will to realize them. Note that he doesn't actually come out and name them
-- that would be too categorical for an existentialist -- and they are not either-or pigeon holes by any means. But he
does use various terms to refer to them, and I have picked representative ones.

There is the type he refers to as “neo-Puritan,” who is all will, but no love. They have amazing self-discipline, and
can “make things happen”... but they have no wishes to act upon. So they become “anal” and perfectionistic, but
empty and “dried-up.” The archetypal example is Ebenezer Scrooge.

The second type he refers to as “infantile.” They are all wishes but no will. Filled with dreams and desires, they
don’t have the self-discipline to make anything of their dreams and desires, and so become dependent and
conformist. They love, but their love means little. Perhaps Homer Simpson is the clearest example!

The last type is the "creative" type. May recommends, wisely, that we should cultivate a balance of these two
aspects of our personalities. He said “Man’s task is to unite love and will.” This idea is, in fact, an old one that we
find among quite a few theorists. Otto Rank, for example, makes the same contrast with death (which includes both
our need for others and our fear of life) and life (which includes both our need for autonomy and our fear of
loneliness). Other theorists have talked about communion and agency, homonymy and autonomy, nurturance and
assertiveness, affiliation and achievement, and so on.

Myths
May’s last book was The Cry for Myth. He pointed out that a big problem in the twentieth century was our loss of
values. All the different values around us lead us to doubt all values. As Nietzsche pointed out, if God is dead (i.e.
absolutes are gone), then anything is permitted!

May says we have to create our own values, each of us individually. This, of course, is difficult to say the least. So
we need help, not forced on us, but “offered up” for us to use as we will.

Enter myths, stories that help us to “make sense” out of out lives, “guiding narratives.” They resemble to some
extent Jung’s archetypes, but they can be conscious and unconscious, collective and personal. A good example is
how many people live their lives based on stories from the Bible.

Other examples you may be familiar with include Horatio Alger, Oedipus Rex, Sisyphus, Romeo and Juliet,
Casablanca, Leave it to Beaver, Star Wars, Little House on the Prairie, The Simpsons, South Park, and the fables of
Aesop. As I intentionally suggest with this list, a lot of stories make lousy myths. Many stories emphasize the
magical granting of one's wishes (infantile). Others promise success in exchange for hard work and self-sacrifice
(neoPuritan). Many of our stories today say that valuelessness is itself the best value! Instead, says May, we should
be actively working to create new myths that support people’s efforts at making the best of life, instead of
undermining them!

The idea sounds good -- but it isn’t terribly existential! Most existentialists feel that it is necessary to face reality
much more directly than “myths” imply. In fact, they sound a little too much like what the great mass of people
succumb to as a part of fallenness, conventionality, and inauthenticity! A controversy for the future....

Readings

May writes very well and all his books are quite readable. His first was The Meaning of Anxiety (1950). General
overviews include Man’s Search for Himself (1953), Psychology and the Human Dilemma (1967), and The
Discovery of Being (1983). Strongly recommended are Love and Will (1969) and The Cry for Myth (1991). There
are quite a few others!

JEAN PIAGET

1896 - 1980

Dr. C. George Boeree

Biography

Jean Piaget was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, on August 9, 1896. His father, Arthur Piaget, was a professor of
medieval literature with an interest in local history. His mother, Rebecca Jackson, was intelligent and energetic, but
Jean found her a bit neurotic -- an impression that he said led to his interest in psychology, but away from
pathology! The oldest child, he was quite independent and took an early interest in nature, especially the collecting
of shells. He published his first “paper” when he was ten -- a one page account of his sighting of an albino sparrow.

He began publishing in earnest in high school on his favorite subject, mollusks. He was particularly pleased to get a
part time job with the director of Nuechâtel’s Museum of Natural History, Mr. Godel. His work became well known
among European students of mollusks, who assumed he was an adult! All this early experience with science kept
him away, he says, from “the demon of philosophy.”
Later in adolescence, he faced a bit a crisis of faith: Encouraged by his mother to attend religious instruction, he
found religious argument childish. Studying various philosophers and the application of logic, he dedicated himself
to finding a “biological explanation of knowledge.” Ultimately, philosophy failed to assist him in his search, so he
turned to psychology.

After high school, he went on to the University of Neuchâtel. Constantly studying and writing, he became sickly,
and had to retire to the mountains for a year to recuperate. When he returned to Neuchâtel, he decided he would
write down his philosophy. A fundamental point became a centerpiece for his entire life’s work: “In all fields of
life (organic, mental, social) there exist ‘totalities’ qualitatively distinct from their parts and imposing on them an
organization.” This principle forms the basis of his structuralist philosophy, as it would for the Gestaltists, Systems
Theorists, and many others.

In 1918, Piaget received his Doctorate in Science from the University of Neuchâtel. He worked for a year at
psychology labs in Zurich and at Bleuler’s famous psychiatric clinic. During this period, he was introduced to the
works of Freud, Jung, and others. In 1919, he taught psychology and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. Here he
met Simon (of Simon-Binet fame) and did research on intelligence testing. He didn’t care for the “right-orwrong”
style of the intelligent tests and started interviewing his subjects at a boys school instead, using the psychiatric
interviewing techniques he had learned the year before. In other words, he began asking how children reasoned.

In 1921, his first article on the psychology of intelligence was published in the Journal de Psychologie. In the same
year, he accepted a position at the Institut J. J. Rousseau in Geneva. Here he began with his students to research the
reasoning of elementary school children. This research became his first five books on child psychology. Although
he considered this work highly preliminary, he was surprised by the strong positive public reaction to his work.

In 1923, he married one of his student coworkers, Valentine Châtenay. In 1925, their first daughter was born; in
1927, their second daughter was born; and in 1931, their only son was born. They immediately became the focus of
intense observation by Piaget and his wife. This research became three more books!

In 1929, Piaget began work as the director of the International Bureau of Education, a post he would hold until 1967.
He also began large scale research with A. Szeminska, E. Meyer, and especially Bärbel Inhelder, who would
become his major collaborator. Piaget, it should be noted, was particularly influential in bringing women into
experimental psychology. Some of this work, however, wouldn’t reach the world outside of Switzerland until
World War II was over.

In 1940, He became chair of Experimental Psychology, the Director of the psychology laboratory, and the president
of the Swiss Society of Psychology. In 1942, he gave a series of lectures at the Collège de France, during the Nazi
occupation of France. These lectures became The Psychology of Intelligence. At the end of the war, he was named
President of the Swiss Commission of UNESCO.

Also during this period, he received a number of honorary degrees. He received one from the Sorbonne in 1946,
the University of Brussels and the University of Brazil in 1949, on top of an earlier one from Harvard in 1936. And,
in 1949 and 1950, he published his synthesis, Introduction to Genetic Epistemology.

In 1952, he became a professor at the Sorbonne. In 1955, he created the International Center for Genetic
Epistemology, of which he served as director the rest of his life. And, in 1956, he created the School of Sciences at
the University of Geneva.

He continued working on a general theory of structures and tying his psychological work to biology for many more
years. Likewise, he continued his public service through UNESCO as a Swiss delegate. By the end of his career, he
had written over 60 books and many hundreds of articles. He died in Geneva, September 16, 1980, one of the most
significant psychologists of the twentieth century.

Theory
Jean Piaget began his career as a biologist -- specifically, a malacologist! But his interest in science and the history
of science soon overtook his interest in snails and clams. As he delved deeper into the thought-processes of doing
science, he became interested in the nature of thought itself, especially in the development of thinking. Finding
relatively little work done in the area, he had the opportunity to give it a label. He called it genetic epistemology,
meaning the study of the development of knowledge.

He noticed, for example, that even infants have certain skills in regard to objects in their environment. These skills
were certainly simple ones, sensori-motor skills, but they directed the way in which the infant explored his or her
environment and so how they gained more knowledge of the world and more sophisticated exploratory skills. These
skills he called schemas.

For example, an infant knows how to grab his favorite rattle and thrust it into his mouth. He’s got that schema down
pat. When he comes across some other object -- say daddy’s expensive watch, he easily learns to transfer his “grab
and thrust” schema to the new object. This Piaget called assimilation, specifically assimilating a new object into an
old schema.

When our infant comes across another object again -- say a beach ball -- he will try his old schema of grab and
thrust. This of course works poorly with the new object. So the schema will adapt to the new object: Perhaps, in
this example, “squeeze and drool” would be an appropriate title for the new schema. This is called accommodation,
specifically accomodating an old schema to a new object.

Assimilation and accommodation are the two sides of adaptation, Piaget’s term for what most of us would call
learning. Piaget saw adaptation, however, as a good deal broader than the kind of learning that Behaviorists in the
US were talking about. He saw it as a fundamentally biological process. Even one’s grip has to accommodate to a
stone, while clay is assimilated into our grip. All living things adapt, even without a nervous system or brain.

Assimilation and accommodation work like pendulum swings at advancing our understanding of the world and our
competency in it. According to Piaget, they are directed at a balance between the structure of the mind and the
environment, at a certain congruency between the two, that would indicate that you have a good (or at least good-
enough) model of the universe. This ideal state he calls equilibrium.

As he continued his investigation of children, he noted that there were periods where assimilation dominated,
periods where accommodation dominated, and periods of relative equilibrium, and that these periods were similar
among all the children he looked at in their nature and their timing. And so he developed the idea of stages of
cognitive development. These constitute a lasting contribution to psychology.

The sensorimotor stage

The first stage, to which we have already referred, is the sensorimotor stage. It lasts from birth to about two years
old. As the name implies, the infant uses senses and motor abilities to understand the world, beginning with reflexes
and ending with complex combinations of sensorimotor skills.

Between one and four months, the child works on primary circular reactions -- just an action of his own which
serves as a stimulus to which it responds with the same action, and around and around we go. For example, the baby
may suck her thumb. That feels good, so she sucks some more... Or she may blow a bubble. That’s interesting so
I’ll do it again....

Between four and 12 months, the infant turns to secondary circular reactions, which involve an act that extends out
to the environment: She may squeeze a rubber duckie. It goes “quack.” That’s great, so do it again, and again, and
again. She is learning “procedures that make interesting things last.”

At this point, other things begin to show up as well. For example, babies become ticklish, although they must be
aware that someone else is tickling them or it won’t work. And they begin to develop object permanence. This is
the ability to recognize that, just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s gone! Younger infants seem to
function by an “out of sight, out of mind” schema. Older infants remember, and may even try to find things they can
no longer see.

Between 12 months and 24 months, the child works on tertiary circular reactions. They consist of the same “making
interesting things last” cycle, except with constant variation. I hit the drum with the stick -- rat-tat-tat-tat. I hit the
block with the stick -- thump-thump. I hit the table with the stick -- clunk-clunk. I hit daddy with the stick -- ouch-
ouch. This kind of active experimentation is best seen during feeding time, when discovering new and interesting
ways of throwing your spoon, dish, and food.

Around one and a half, the child is clearly developing mental representation, that is, the ability to hold an image in
their mind for a period beyond the immediate experience. For example, they can engage in deferred imitation, such
as throwing a tantrum after seeing one an hour ago. They can use mental combinations to solve simple problems,
such as putting down a toy in order to open a door. And they get good at pretending. Instead of using dollies
essentially as something to sit at, suck on, or throw, now the child will sing to it, tuck it into bed, and so on.

Preoperational stage

The preoperational stage lasts from about two to about seven years old. Now that the child has mental
representations and is able to pretend, it is a short step to the use of symbols.

A symbol is a thing that represents something else. A drawing, a written word, or a spoken word comes to be
understood as representing a real dog. The use of language is, of course, the prime example, but another good
example of symbol use is creative play, wherein checkers are cookies, papers are dishes, a box is the table, and so
on. By manipulating symbols, we are essentially thinking, in a way the infant could not: in the absence of the actual
objects involved!

Along with symbolization, there is a clear understanding of past and future. for example, if a child is crying for its
mother, and you say “Mommy will be home soon,” it will now tend to stop crying. Or if you ask him, “Remember
when you fell down?” he will respond by making a sad face.

On the other hand, the child is quite egocentric during this stage, that is, he sees things pretty much from one point
of view: his own! She may hold up a picture so only she can see it and expect you to see it too. Or she may explain
that grass grows so she won’t get hurt when she falls.

Piaget did a study to investigate this phenomenon called the mountains study. He would put children in front of a
simple plaster mountain range and seat himself to the side, then ask them to pick from four pictures the view that he,
Piaget, would see. Younger children would pick the picture of the view they themselves saw; older kids picked
correctly.

Similarly, younger children center on one aspect of any problem or communication at a time. for example, they may
not understand you when you tell them “Your father is my husband.” Or they may say things like “I don’t live in
the USA; I live in Pennsylvania!” Or, if you show them five black and three white marbles and ask them “Are there
more marbles or more black marbles?” they will respond “More black ones!”

Perhaps the most famous example of the preoperational child’s centrism is what Piaget refers to as their inability to
conserve liquid volume. If I give a three year old some chocolate milk in a tall skinny glass, and I give myself a
whole lot more in a short fat glass, she will tend to focus on only one of the dimensions of the glass. Since the milk
in the tall skinny glass goes up much higher, she is likely to assume that there is more milk in that one than in the
short fat glass, even though there is far more in the latter. It is the development of the child's ability to decenter that
marks him as havingmoved to the next stage.

Concrete operations stage

The stage begins with progressive decentering. By six or seven, most children develop the ability to conserve
number, length, and liquid volume. Conservation refers to the idea that a quantity remains the same despite changes
in appearance. If you show a child four marbles in a row, then spread them out, the preoperational child will focus
on the spread, and tend to believe that there are now more marbles than before.

Or if you have two five inch sticks laid parallel to each other, then move one of them a little, she may believe that
the moved stick is now longer than the other.

The concrete operations child, on the other hand, will know that there are still four marbles, and that the stick
doesn’t change length even though it now extends beyond the other. And he will know that you have to look at
more than just the height of the milk in the glass: If you pour the mild from the short, fat glass into the tall, skinny
glass, he will tell you that there is the same amount of milk as before, despite the dramatic increase in mild-level!

By seven or eight years old, children develop conservation of substance: If I take a ball of clay and roll it into a long
thin rod, or even split it into ten little pieces, the child knows that there is still the same amount of clay. And he will
know that, if you rolled it all back into a single ball, it would look quite the same as it did -- a feature known as
reversibility.

By nine or ten, the last of the conservation tests is mastered: conservation of area. If you take four one-inch square
pieces of felt, and lay them on a six-by-six cloth together in the center, the child who conserves will know that they
take up just as much room as the same squares spread out in the corners, or, for that matter, anywhere at all.

If all this sounds too easy to be such a big deal, test your friends on conservation of mass: Which is heavier: a
million tons of lead, or a million tons of feathers?

In addition, a child learns classification and seriation during this stage. Classification refers back to the question of
whether there are more marbles or more black marbles? Now the child begins to get the idea that one set can
include another. Seriation is putting things in order. The younger child may start putting things in order by, say
size, but will quickly lose track. Now the child has no problem with such a task. Since arithmetic is essentially
nothing more than classification and seriation, the child is now ready for some formal education!

Formal operations stage

But the concrete operations child has a hard time applying his new-found logical abilities to non-concrete -- i.e.
abstract -- events. If mom says to junior “You shouldn’t make fun of that boy’s nose. How would you feel if
someone did that to you?” he is likely to respond “I don’t have a big nose!” Even this simple lesson may well be too
abstract, too hypothetical, for his kind of thinking.

Don’t judge the concrete operations child too harshly, though. Even adults are often takenaback when we present
them with something hypothetical: “If Edith has a lighter complexion than Susan, and Edith is darker than Lily,
who is the darkest?” Most people need a moment or two.
From around 12 on, we enter the formal operations stage. Here we become increasingly competent at adult-style
thinking. This involves using logical operations, and using them in the abstract, rather than the concrete. We often
call this hypothetical thinking.

Here’s a simple example of a task that a concrete operations child couldn’t do, but which a formal operations
teenager or adult could -- with a little time and effort. Consider this rule about a set of cards that have letters on one
side and numbers on the other: “If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side.”
Take a look at the cards below and tell me, which cards do I need to turn over to tell if this rule is actually true?
You’ll find the answer at the end of this chapter.

It is the formal operations stage that allows one to investigate a problem in a careful and systematic fashion. Ask a
16 year old to tell you the rules for making pendulums swing quickly or slowly, and he may proceed like this:

A long string with a light weight -- let’s see how fast that swings. A long string with a heavy weight -- let’s try that.
Now, a short string with a light weight. And finally, a short string with a heavy weight. His experiment -- and it is
an experiment -- would tell him that a short string leads to a fast swing, and a long string to a slow swing, and that
the weight of the pendulum means nothing at all!

The teenager has learned to group possibilities in four different ways:

By conjunction: “Both A and B make a difference” (e.g. both the string’s length and the pendulum’s weight).

By disjunction: “It’s either this or that” (e.g. it’s either the length or the weight).

By implication: “If it’s this, then that will happen” (the formation of a hypothesis).

By incompatibility: “When this happens, that doesn’t” (the elimination of a hypothesis).

On top of that, he can operate on the operations -- a higher level of grouping. If you have a proposition, such as “it
could be the string or the weight,” you can do four things with it: Identity: Leave it alone. “It could be the string or
the weight.”

Negation: Negate the components and replace or’s with and’s (and vice versa). “It might not be the string and not
the weight, either.”

Reciprocity: Negate the components but keep the and’s and or’s as they are. “Either it is not the weight or it is not
the string.”

Correlativity: Keep the components as they are, but replace or’s with and’s, etc. “It’s the weight and the string.”

Someone who has developed his or her formal operations will understand that the correlate of a reciprocal is a
negation, that a reciprocal of a negation is a correlate, that the negation of a correlate is a reciprocal, and that the
negation of a reciprocal of a correlate is an identity (phew!!!).

Maybe it has already occured to you: It doesn’t seem that the formal operations stage is something everyone
actually gets to. Even those of us who do don’t operate in it at all times. Even some cultures, it seems, don’t
develop it or value it like ours does. Abstract reasoning is simply not universal.

[Answer to the card question: The E and the 7. The E must have an even number on the back -- that much is
obvious. the 7 is odd, so it cannot have a vowel on the other side -- that would be against the rule! But the rule says
nothing about what has to be on the back of a consonant such as the K, nor does it say that the 4 musthave a vowel
on the other side!]

References
It is hard to say, of Piaget's many works, which are most significant or interesting, but here goes:

The Moral Judgement of the Child (1932 -- one of the first five books), The Psychology of Intelligence (1947, in
English 1950), The Construction of Reality in the Child (1937, in English 1954, based on observation of his own
children), The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence (with Inhelder, 1958), The Psychology of
the Child (with Inhelder, 1966, in English 1969), Insights and Illusions of Philosophy (1965, 1971 in English)