Main theoretical groups:

 Psychoanalytic/neo-analytic
 Trait/dispositional
 Biological
 Learning
 Cognitive
 Phenomenological (based on subjective and unique experience)

Theory and Personality

• Constructs are principles that are adopted by a theorist, and relate in a logical way.
• Theories are unproved speculations about reality that help us to understand, explain, predict and control that
reality.
• Different theories focus on different aspects of reality: Humanists on understanding, Freudians on control and
prediction, etc.

Personality Theory
• Characteristic patterns of thinking, behaving, and feeling
• Coming from inside the person (generally)
• Dynamic, interrelated, active
• Individual difference and commonalities
• Multifaceted and whole: Personality should be apparent from a range of perspectives
• What is the basic nature of human beings?
• What is the structure of personality?
• How does personality develop?
• What are the applications of the theory?
• How can we evaluate the theory?

Evaluating Theories/Research
• Good theories make intuitive sense, are supported by research, are parsimonious (simple), and stimulate
thinking
• Pitfalls: Egocentrism (your own way of thinking colors your understanding), dogmatism (“I know everything and I
am right!”), and basic misunderstanding
• Methods of studying personality: observe the self, case study, study varied groups
• Establishing relationships among selected variables: Correlation (r = -1 to +1)
• Statistical and clinical significance
• Causality and experimentation
• IV, DV, random assignment, experimental control, generalization

Issues of Personality Assessment

• Observer vs. self-reports
• Reliability: Internal (split-half), inter-rater, and test-retest
• Validity: construct, external criterion, predictive, convergent, discriminant, face
• Empirically derived: The MMPI
Psychoanalytic Approaches:
 Freud and his followers
 “First Force”
 Psychodynamic/Analytic/Freudian

General Organization
• Freud and his daughter Anna are “Freud proper”, and then there are Neo-Freudians:
• Transpersonal or analytical psychology: Carl Jung
• Ego/psychosocial psychology: Erik Erikson
• Object-relations psychology: Margaret Mahler and many others

Life before Sigmund Freud

• Others had considered the unconscious and the importance of dreams
– Charcot, Mesmer: Hypnotism to access the mind in the late 1700s
– Von Shubert’s tripartite theory looked much like Freud’s id, ego, and superego model
– Pierre Janet theorized that trauma can become fixed in the subconscious and cause neuroses

Sigmund Freud,1856-1939
• A bit of history
• Around 1880, when Wundt was establishing his experimental lab in Germany, Freud was studying physical
problems that did not have any obvious physical cause
• Anna O. (not to be confused with Anna Freud; one is a patient, the other a daughter)

Freud’s Theory
• Activated instincts (or needs) produce a state of tension or Drive, and all behavior is motivated to reduce this
tension due to the pleasure principle
• Drive reduction restores homeostasis, and the two major instincts are:
– the sexual instinct (Eros)
– and the destructive or aggressive instinct (Thanatos)
• Mental activities require the use of psychic energy, and sexual psychic energy was termed “libido”
• “Sexual” meant more than reproduction, and included all survival and pleasure
• Personality is dynamic, mainly unconscious, and the “crucible” of early experience creates the fundamentals
• Model of the mind is conscious, preconscious, and unconscious (majority)
• Begin as id (or “it”) at birth, a “chaos or cauldron full of seething excitations”
• The id is amoral, illogical, and has no concept of self-preservation or reality
• Id functions completely on the pleasure principle, and can only form images of what it wants (immediately)
• The id’s impulsive, image-producing mode is called “primary process”, and production of the need is called
“wish-fulfillment”
• Next, around 6 months, the “Ego” (latin for “I”) begins to form from the energies of the id, out of experiences of
what is self and non-self
• Ego spans conscious, preconscious, and unconscious, and is the only part of personality that interacts with
environment
• Ego is logical, rational, and uses the “reality principle” to delay gratification: this process is called “secondary
process”
• Ego has 3 masters that create anxiety: reality anxiety from the environment, neurotic anxiety from the id, and
moral anxiety from the …..
• Superego (“over-I”): incorporated parental and societal values and expectations
• Superego also spans consciousness levels, and pressures the ego to act morally instead of simply rationally
Freud’s Theory: Terminologies
• Cathexis: psychic energy invested in an image
• Object: whatever will satisfy activated instinct
• Parapraxis: “accidents” of the unconscious or what are known as ‘Freudian slips’
• Defense mechanisms: ego makes use of a variety of these to ward of anxiety and threats
• Catharsis: positive release of emotional tension

Freud’s Theory: Defense Mechanisms

• Denial
• Displacement
• Intellectualization
• Projection
• Reaction formation
• Regression, repression, and sublimation

Freud’s Theory: Psychosexual Stages of Development

• Note that this is foundational personality development, firmly established by age 5
• Oral stage: birth to 18 mos.: the mouth with primary focus on biting and sucking
• Anal stage: 18 mos. to 3.5 years: pleasure focus shifts to the anus, and related control of excretion and the
environment; anal retentive and expulsive personality links
• Phallic: About 3 years; focus of pleasure shifts to genitalia and masturbation
• Oedipal complex emerges: desires to possess the mother conflict with affection for the father; fears he will be
castrated (like the mother) if feelings are not resolved (“castration anxiety”), so boy identifies with the father
• The Electra complex for females does not work out so nicely: “penis envy” leads to identification with the
mother in order to possess the father
• Latency stage: ages 5 - 6; period of calm and settling of infantile sexuality
• Genital stage: sexual gratification moves from self to others, mutual satisfaction, warmth, caring, and mature
love

Freud’s Theory Conclusion

• “Fixations” are poorly or unresolved stages where the person gets ‘stuck’
• Stages are linked to personality traits later in life: oral - sarcasm, phallic - macho, etc.
• Dreams: manifest and latent content
• Dreams are a major part of understanding the unconscious; the “royal road” to areas hidden from conscious
thought

Freud’s Theory: Therapy and Assessment

• Dreams are the “days residues”, expressed in symbolic form, and processed in “dreamwork” wherein they are
analyzed
• In therapy, examine “resistance” to “free association”; transference and counter-transference; goal is long-term
insight
• Rorschach technique
Neo-analytic Approaches:
Freudian origins that are somehow altered, often re-focused on Ego and Social influences
 Transpersonal or Analytical Psychology: Carl Jung
 Ego Psychology: Erik Erikson
 Object-relations Psychology: Mahler, Kohut, Mitchell, and others
 Others: Heinz Hartmann, Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm

Transpersonal or Analytical Psychology: Carl Jung

• Jung met Freud in 1907, and soon became the “crown prince” of psychoanalysis
• Personal and professional differences drove a wedge between the two after 6 years
• Jung down-played sexuality, and focus on spirituality; he had a life-long interest in the occult, travel, ESP, visions,
and even flying saucers….mythology and religion.

Jung’s Theory
• Jung’s complex approach was called “analytic psychology”, which developed over a span of years
• He recorded his dreams, and focused on the dead; he suggested there was a “collective unconscious” of
humanity itself
• It is a ‘psychic inheritance’ present from birth and a reservoir of experiences of a species, which influences us all
• The contents of the collective unconscious include ‘archetypes’ (or ‘dominants’ or ‘imagos’): unlearned tendency
to experience things in a certain way
• They include: mother, shadow, wise old man, God, energy, heros, the trickster, the prophet…“Anima” and
“Animus”
• Focus on symbols in dreams (not sexuality)

Jung’s Theory: Dynamic of the Psyche

• Principle of opposites: human experience is one of opposites and pairs (think/feel)
• Principle of equivalence: psychic energy withdrawn from one part of the personality tends to reappear
somewhere else
• Principle of entropy: the tendency for these opposites to come together, and ultimately to achieve
“transcendence”

Jung’s Theory: Typology

• Introversion and extroversion
• Sensing, Thinking, Intuiting, and Feeling
• The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was developed from this system, and is one of the most widely used tests in the
area
• The test adds Judging and Perceiving to the original mix

Ego/Psychosocial Psychology: Erik Erikson

• Neoanalytic or neo-Freudian theorists became interested in expanding the role of the ego, and exploring social
influences
• Erikson was a wandering artist who was analyzed by Anna Freud and became a prominent child psychoanalyst
• Came to Boston in 1933 and joined the staff at Harvard
• Biological father was an unnamed Danish man who abandoned his Jewish mother
• The mother later married his pediatrician, and Erik became Erik Homberger
• He was teased for being a tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed Jewish boy, and upon becoming a US citizen, changed his
name to “Erikson”
• Erikson accepted Freud’s basic ideas, as well as Hartmann’s ideas about the ego, and then focused on social
issues
• Developed “epigenic” psychosocial stages, suggesting that we develop through pre-determined stages that
present special crises or tasks that must be resolved
•
Erikson’s Theory: Eight Psychosocial Stages of Development
• Stage 1 (age 0-1, oral or sensory): Trust vs. mistrust, where the significant relation focuses on the mother, and
the ego success is “hope” and “faith”
• Stage 2 (age 2-3, muscular/anal): Autonomy vs. shame and doubt, where significant relations are with the
parents and goal is ability to exercise free will and self-control
• Stage 3 (age 3-6): Initiative vs. guilt, where the preschooler learns to initiate without too much guilt, to develop
courage and purpose
• Stage 4 (age 7-12): Latency stage of Industry vs. inferiority, where the neighborhood, home, and school come
together to have the outcome of competence and the belief that tasks can be completed
• Stage 5 (age 12-18) adolescence: Ego-identity vs. role confusion, where significant relationships are peers and
the goal is a unified, meaningful self-image
• Stage 6 (the 20’s): Intimacy vs. isolation where partners become the focus and “love” can be formed through the
“mutuality of devotion” (many kinds of intimacies)
• Stage 7 (20’s - 50’s): Middle adulthood and Generativity vs. stagnation; the goal is generating children, teaching,
art, or anything that creates a “need to be needed”, vs. the stagnation of self-absorption
• Stage 8 (around 60?): Ego integrity vs. despair; coming to terms with life and the end of life and accepting the
mistakes

Object-relations Psychology: Mahler, Kohut, Mitchell, and others

• Shift away from sexual drives and toward issues pertaining to interpersonal relations
• Focus is on early relations of the child and mother and how these shape the inner world and later adult
relationships; “residues’
• The ‘object’ is typically the other person, and the relation to that object is central

Object Relations: Common Terms

• Representations: How the person psychically represents an object, including the “self”
• Part objects and whole objects: Part objects see only one aspect (all good for example), while whole objects
account for all aspects (good and bad for example)
• Splitting: Inability to synthesize a part object into a whole object; synthesis comes with maturity

Object-relations: A very different developmental stage model

• Mahler suggested that we begin in a state of ‘normal autism’, then to symbiosis where there is fusion with the
mother, then to hatching and separation/individuation
• We then have a practicing period of back and forth testing of the waters of independence, and then:
• Rapprochement: where the object relation of the mother becomes internalized and a normal self structure is
created

Object Relations: Conclusion

• The internalized object and the relation to the object creates a template that we use for later relationships
• Goal of therapy is to understand the significance of these relationships and how they affect what we do and feel
• Other famous object-relations theorists include Kernberg, Klein, Winnicott, and others

Alfred Adler
• Adler is with the neo-analysts, but this is controversial because he stressed consciously chosen life goals over the
unconscious or instincts
• Proposed a single drive theory of “striving for self-perfection” within a social context, and fulfilling one’s unique
potential or superiority
• “Teleology” is the drawing towards our future goals, purposes, and ideals, rather than being driven by the past
• Pathogenesis due to pampering, neglect, or “organ inferiorities” creates a basic inferiority (complex)
• Birth order affects personality: second-born creates an automatic inferiority, and the “dethronement” of the
first child leads to likely neurosis
Heinz Hartmann, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm
• Hartmann: Ego autonomy is directed toward the tendency to adapt
• Horney: Basic anxiety can impede a healthy drive toward personal growth; womb envy
• Fromm: Freedom and independence are desirable but threatening; humans are alone and isolated, suggesting a
kind of humanistic or existential psychoanalysis?

Dimensions of Personality for Psychoanalytic

• Basic nature of man: Innate sexual instincts create psychological tensions and we act to reduce these tensions
(for neo-analytic, basic nature varies widely by theorist)
• Structure of personality: Id/Ego/Superego (this also varies widely for neo-analysts, with Jung for example
keeping Ego and adding Persona)
• Development of personality: Sequence of psychosexual stages (Yet for Fromm, there were no identified
psychological stages)
• Psychotherapy: Make the unconscious conscious so the ego can correct it
• Evaluation: Very difficult to subject these theories to empirical research